How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?

[WoodDragon]

In other words, one of the solutions to overpopulation is greedy farmers?

Erm, dude, that's not what I said, nor is it what I meant.

This is a classic straw man fallacy.

Read again what I said, and think about it.

[synchromesh]

I kinda see your point, but at the same time, why should one person be put ahead of 10,000? If shit hit the fan, and 10,000 people were looking for a new home, do you really think that they'd take a "No" from a greedy farmer?

Edited November 6, 2010 by synchromesh

[lickapop]

missed it again...try again

Edited November 6, 2010 by lickapop

[WoodDragon]

Again, the issue isn't about one person being put in front of ten thousand, or whether the farm is the last place to put these ten thousand putative people, but about the footprint that the ten thousand people need.

There was a comment made about how much space people take up if they each have one square metre to stand on. Fine, let's start with that premise. Ten thousand people each with one square meter would require ten thousand square metres, or 1 hectare, to stand upon. Now, ten thousand acres is 4047 hectares, so there would be 4046 ha, or 99.98% of the farm left after ten thousand people were shipped out to stand on the farm.

Except they're not going to want to stand there for very long. Let's say that they each are happy to live in a small house, or together in families in slightly larger houses, with 50 square metres per person, which is close to the Australian average. That's another 50 ha, which still leaves just under 4000 ha for the farmer. But a lot of those people will want yards, or at the least parks, so you can probably write off another 100 square metres in recreational land per person. That's a hundred ha more, but hey, we're still at 3897 ha of farm.

Those ten thousand people are probably going to get hungry. To feed an average vegetarian with a suitably varied diet requires at least an acre, once seasonal productivity differences and global fertility differences and such are accounted for, so there goes ten thousand acres straight away. For convenience lets stop the conversion to hectares and go back to acres, and give away the living space that we calculated before - with just the land required to feed the ten thousand people we'd need the whole farm back, and that's not assuming that we are feeding the people any meat, and that it's actually a very productive farm. For meat, multiply the area by 2 - 5 depending on where it's grown...

Then we'd need space to grow fibre for clothing, space to grow timber for building and fuel, space for roads and other infrastructure, space for mining mineral resources, space for catching and storing water, and hey, don't we want a few square metres for the rest of the species on the planet to live on?

Add it all up and that's a whack of space required for each person. On that ten thousand acre farm you might get a 10-thousand-person rave going for a weekend, with not too much damage to the productivity of the land, but if those people were going to spend more than a few days there the productivity of the farm itself would disappear.

And it's not a matter of the farmer being selfish with his space. He's probably feeding those ten thousand people, or more, with his land and with his labours, because the basic premise of each person intensively cultivating their own food in their backyards is pie-in-the-sky.

All this is about the ecological footprint that humans have. For the current population of the planet the average biologically productive area being used per person worldwide is approximately 1.8 hectares, or 4.5 acres. At the rate that we use the planet's resources, we would currently need several Earths if all people were to live the Western lifestyle and have a functioning biosphere left over.

So, we have several options:

1) live more simply, in a way that will permit the number of people currently on the planet to not (further) destroy their home,

2) live at the current Western standard with fewer people, in a way that will permit a future number of people on the planet to not (further) destroy their home.

3) live with greater disparity between rich and poor, so that some of us can live the good life and the others can hang on by their fingernails, while we feel warm and fuzzy because we didn't go all Nazi and kill them off,

4) live as we are, ignoring the numbers, and wait for the shit to hit the fan,

5) live as we are, ignoring the numbers, and wait for some thus-far undiscovered magical solution to drop from the sky.

Note, option 5 will result in option 4 eventuating, as would option 3. There are no signs that humanity is opting for alternative 1; and if we ever get to option 2 in practice, at the rate we're taking to do it the shit will be spattering the walls first.

It's time for humanity to wake up, smell the methane, and make some hard decisions. And the window of time for doing so is rapidly closing if we don't want a messy end to the problem.

Edited November 6, 2010 by WoodDragon

[santiago]

there was a doco on abc last couple of tues nights..........about the biggest slum in the world, in india somewhere. anyway in 1 square mile 1 million people were residing.

[Distracted]

there was a doco on abc last couple of tues nights..........about the biggest slum in the world, in india somewhere. anyway in 1 square mile 1 million people were residing.

 

That would smell awesome.

[Mt.B]

Thanks WD for putting the time into your interesting posts.

[Mt.B]

Some good viewing here on the topic.

http://www.tragedyandhope.com/page/wybm-what-youve-been-missing

[santiago]

That would smell awesome.

 

true......kids were shitting on the sidewalk.

still it was a vibrant place and there would be no such thing as a old person dying in a flat to be discovered 3 months later decomposed like many a lonely western society.

[San Rainbow]

Thanks WD for putting the time into your interesting posts.

 

Yes, thanks!

[Otorongo]

How many people can live on Earth sustainably? My guess is less than a billion.

How many people can live on Earth? I think a couple hundred billion could live for a while.

[The Dude]

So how about this whole Self sustainable living off the land and not needing to rely on farmers?

Isn't the whole market to blame anyway? With the vast resources needed to market and sell something and create convenience, at the cost of transportation and refrigeration and lighting and human resources to sell the stuff?

Isn't that why we go to jobs so we can have money to buy things conveniently cuz a self sustainable house is way more effort than working 9-5 for most of the year so you can enjoy your 'convenience'?

Why haven't I got my water powered car yet? Couldn't we clean our ecological footprint by having more clean energy for processes like desalination, or the use of fungi or other organisms that can clean up oil spills amongst other things.

What's the deal with the discoveries of Tesla that were all quickly suppressed because they could never be profitable (wireless electricity). Is that one of the magic solutions that fell out of the sky and was quickly covered up with bullshit?

Is the need to kill each other some primordial impulse? The occult law that life feeds off life, and through the shedding of blood there is a renewal of life. Must we always sacrifice each other to carry out the will of the highest authority promising us salvation through this very act? How 'primitive' the ancients were yet we carry out the same with even more ridiculous justifications (war, eugenics, depopulation are all justified for survival)

"We've spent the capital instead of living off the interest". I think it's time to stop living in debt and getting more credit. We need to create real capital through effort alone and stop buying time, there's no return, it's a bad investment.

[Teotzlcoatl]

I'd say 3-5 billion would be ideal and we could live comforably, but I think we could manage as many as 10 billions humans on Earth if we distributed resources properly and set up the means to care for these people (farms, water treatment, etc.).

[Guest svarg26]

when you bring terrace farming into the equation, then it's possible to feed millions of people forever. all this talk of "footprints, functioning biosphere and To feed an average vegetarian with a suitably varied diet requires at least an acre, once seasonal productivity differences and global fertility differences" goes out the window.

google terra preta and learn about soil fertility. farming upwards and not outwards is common sense in our imprisoned society.

although WoodDragon's comment were in depth, they lacked substance. "So, we have several options".

you missed the best option, mate.

funny how all the doom and gloom comes from people who don't have a clue on farming.

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? 20/30 billion. no problem.

[The Dude]

...Also, the market suggests we create and consume much more than we need. That's the whole idea of selling stuff. In the end it's a control game defined by the dictates of the almighty dollar, economies strangle self sustainability through putting a cost and market on everything and presenting everything in those terms, If it's not profitable it won't work. I know of a few conglomerates who would lose all their profit through suggesting self sustainable living.

We simply don't need as much food as we have, especially considering most of it is thrown away because the transport and distribution costs of giving away free food eats into the profit margin. It is a twisted fucking joke. Money, a tool for our convenience in trading is now the end all and be all of our whole fucking lives, even more important than our lives. A tool for convenience has us as its' tools for omnipotent control. We overproduce, and waste most of it to serve the dollar, that means we overwork and people still starve to death. Efficiency is key.

I'm wondering who's interests these schools of thought are serving. Especially when presented so 'academically' where I don't have any clue about these models so I can't even bother discussing them. Being a layman in such concepts and their terminology I'll withdraw from the discussion and I've basically 'lost' the debate. It just seems too complicated to pick apart and find a fault in the proposed theory; sort of like the functioning of the world economy or the functioning of our political and legal systems, or all the models that prove global warming is caused by untaxed co2. Sometimes it seems they're made more complicated on purpose, so that us laymen can't see through the layers of bullshit that essentially cover up a scam. Of course we're all doomed though! cuz doom is profitable!

In other words I can't discuss, I'll put it simply: de-centralisation of all power, DIY, and consume a fuckload less, or don't take from the planet what you're just going to waste. Problem solved.

Edited January 2, 2011 by The Dude

[synchromesh]

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? 20/30 billion. no problem.

 

Besides all of the added war of course...

I'm wondering who's interests these schools of thought are serving. Especially when presented so 'academically' where I don't have any clue about these models so I can't even bother discussing them. Being a layman in such concepts and their terminology I'll withdraw from the discussion and I've basically 'lost' the debate. It just seems too complicated to pick apart and find a fault in the proposed theory; sort of like the functioning of the world economy or the functioning of our political and legal systems, or all the models that prove global warming is caused by untaxed co2. Sometimes it seems they're made more complicated on purpose, so that us laymen can't see through the layers of bullshit that essentially cover up a scam. Of course we're all doomed though! cuz doom is profitable!

 

Yeah, and also don't forget that it's only the rich who have access to the highest education... Great post by the way.

[WoodDragon]

although WoodDragon's comment were in depth, they lacked substance. "So, we have several options".

you missed the best option, mate.

funny how all the doom and gloom comes from people who don't have a clue on farming.

Svarg26, I am breaking my back making myself as self-sufficient as I am able to in food grown on my own land, and I have many uncles and aunts who were/are farmers and on whose farms I've worked as a lad, so I actually have some clue about farming.

There are many very scientifically- and agriculturally-founded reasons for being concerned about future food (and other) productivity. And don't forget that we Westerners have the advantage of fossil-fuel powered machinery and transport; tools, materials, and fertilisers produced from, and/or transported using (finite) oil supplies. Once this limited resource starts to dwindle, the numbers of humans able to live on the planet change profoundly.

when you bring terrace farming into the equation, then it's possible to feed millions of people forever.

Millions are not billions. And a bit of triginometry will demonstrate that 'terracing' only extends arable land by a finite amount. It does nothing to address other issues related to agriculture, such as limits on other components of crop-growing (q.v. Western predilictions for industrial fertilisers as mentioned above) or for any number of other factors such as altered water availability that comes with climate change, or the fact that even terracable land itself is in finite supply.

My PhD work was in ecology, and more and more I am realising that many lay people are completely oblivious to what really are fundamental biological/ecological principles even when they themselves think otherwise. They have a cornucopian view of productivity and of economics, and don't recognise how growth limits and asymptotes fit into a dynamic system. Try doing some background reading on matters such as Leibig's Law of the Minimum, or of complex systems stability theory, or of trophic cascades/energy fluxes, or of biological thermodynamics: all issues that are fundamental to the subject of this thread but are far too involved to tease out here. Whilst you're at it, do some reading on edge effects, and extinction debt, and species diversity/richness in relation to patch size. Do a lot of reading on soil formation, and depletion, and on soil volume requirement for global food production.

I don't need to google terra preta as I have extensive references on it in my own libaray, and it was one reason why I started years ago using charcoal routinely in my own soils. Yes, charcoal's fantastic, but for many reasons it is not a soil panacæa - the aforementioned Leibig's Law of the Minimum is one reason, but a smart person should be able to come up with at least three or four others. I'll leave them as homework.

I'm all for spreading the word on self-reliance, self-sufficiency and improved farming techniques. However, the issue of population is much more profoundly complicated than building terraces and creating more terra preta. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of other critical factors that are tied in a global confluence of approaching challenges to supporting the number of people and the desired lifestyles that we currently have, and will have in the near future.

Take fisheries for example. At the beginning of the 20th century the planet had 1.6 billion people, and most fisheries were healthy, although a few species of whales, seals, marine birds, and turtles were already staggering or had been lost. Today, with slightly less than 7 billion people on the globe, 90% of fisheries are over-exploited, with a majority facing economic and even biological extinction if they are not immediately and carefully managed. Using median estimates, by 2050 there will be 9 billion people, and at that rate the oceans will basically be producing almost no seafood for humanity. Seaweed and sea jellies are probably the notable exceptions, and I'd be curious to know who thinks that these are a good substitute for our current seafood diets...

The Dude touches on an important issue, that of 'First World' food wastage. As he implies it's criminal, but human nature being what it is as long as people have it easy they will waste extravagant amount of food. It's the same with water. I myself, and my mum, my siblings and their families, and my kids' mum, are all on tank water, and we are continually amazed at how most Australians take for granted even this resource when we in my family can all get by with what falls on our roofs. I am agog when I see townies washing footpaths with hoses (use a fucking broom, for pity's sake) or who run their hoses for 15 minutes to wash a car... mum did hers yesterday with just two bucketsful. And then there are those who run their hoses for whole afternoons to just grow a bloody green lawn.

I don't see that such wastage will ever change in a well-off society though, without authoritarian interference, and as long as the poorest 80% of the planet aspires to a Western lifestyle such wastage will only increase, as will the trend for other desired Western habits like eating far more meat than is nutritionally necessary.

I spent the first 5 years of my working life doing cancer research. Cancer's a fiendishly complicated state of affairs, but the fundamental principles of growth and resource use in cancerous conditions are simple to grasp. It seems that many people are emotionally and/or intellectual averse to recognising it, but human use of planetary resources follows a typical cancerous trajectory, or a plague species one. That includes just about every one of us in Australia, whether we like to face the fact or not. We basically evolved as k-strategist apes that now behave exactly as r-strategists, simply because we had a few clever ideas and inventions ten thousand to one hundred thousand years ago, and the results for our species and for the biosphere will be close to what they are for individuals who come down with lung cancer or similar... that is, unless we rise above our instinctive behaviour and start using the brains that dropped us into this mess in the first place.

If you want "substance" you need to take your involvement beyond a thread for ethno-heads and do some serious reading.

For starters, work out how many people are projected to be living on the planet at projected maximum population size. Decide what level of disparity you want between the richest and the poorest, and at what level of resource use each of these two extremes will be living. Figure out what distribution (in the statistical sense) of resource use will be applied to all of the people in between. What are your sources for the numbers and analyses?

Once you've set up this background, work out how much energy, in kilojoules, each person will use for transport, for housing and materials contruction/manufacturing, for clothing, for heating/cooling, and for entertainment/communication (amongst other things). Where all of will this energy come from? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses?

Work out how much water each person will use, and how much water each of their reliances upon upstream manufacturing will use. Where will this water come from? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses?

Work out how much food (grain, vegetables, fruit, meat, seafood etc) each person will consume, and from where it will be obtained. What resources in terms of energy will be used in the production of this food? Where will this energy come from? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses?

After all of this is sorted and settled work out how much habitable ecosystem is left for the rest of the biosphere. Determine how fragmentation and size-reduction of these habitats will affect ecological processes within the ecosystems. How do the impacts on ecosystem size and function feed into species survival and into extinction debt? What are the effects of direct human exploitation of non-human species? What are the overall implications for humanity of global ecosystem degradation? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses behind each of these questions?

For all of the above human activities, what are the various pollution consequences? How do these consequences exacerbate or otherwise alter the numbers derived? What are your sources for these numbers and analyses?

Now take all of the above areas and investigate them in concert in order to determine what emergent phenomena and impacts (e.g. disease evolution/spread, social tensions/disintegrations/behavioural changes) are forseeable. For each of the predicable emergent phenomena, how many unpredictable ones might there be? Together with the foreseeable issues, how might the unforeseeable ones impact societies? What are your sources for the numbers and analyses?

That's a start. But just a start. A thorough understanding would take years of reading, and even working as a professional in ecology I have yet to really scrape below the surface myself. I have a grasp of the tail of the substance, but the actual whole substance itself is a thumping great beast that scares the heck out of all of the old-timers who have been immersed in this work for decades more than have I.

If you want a short, sweet and conclusive answer to the question of this thread, you'll need to choose the executive summary of any one of a number of reports that best coincides with your own ideology, or preferably with your own objective, scientifically-based understanding of the numbers. If you want to skip around singing about terraces and terra preta and expecting to leash the beast with a sparky diamante collar knitted together from one or two quick-fixes, don't expect your smug cure for the ills of the world to be greeted with anything other than frustration by those who have serious exposure to the underlying principles and facts.

[WoodDragon]

don't forget that it's only the rich who have access to the highest education...

Too right. And the bastards do their damnedest to ensure that in general it stays that way.

[Guest svarg26]

i suggest WoodDragon watches, Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. the cubans demonstrate how it is possible for communities to produce almost all of their own food from within the city itself. all without the help from "The advantage of fossil-fuel powered machinery and transport; tools, materials, and fertilisers produced from, and/or transported using (finite) oil supplies", thanks to the lovely embargo imposed on it by america.

doom and gloom is all great, but in the end, we adapt.

millions, billions or trillions. it doesn't matter, mate. we can all get fed. since my garden goes up 4 levels and my wife and i have only eaten our own food for 5 years my homework is done.

[Rabaelthazar]

i suggest WoodDragon watches, Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. the cubans demonstrate how it is possible for communities to produce almost all of their own food from within the city itself. all without the help from "The advantage of fossil-fuel powered machinery and transport; tools, materials, and fertilisers produced from, and/or transported using (finite) oil supplies", thanks to the lovely embargo imposed on it by america.

doom and gloom is all great, but in the end, we adapt.

 

Man, what a twatty and ignorant response!!!! Sorry mate, but to totally flip off all the really good ideas/suggestions for thought that WoodDragon put forth in that last post of his is pure arrogance and an indication that you're not prepared to consider facets of reality you haven't come to think about yet.

millions, billions or trillions. it doesn't matter, mate. we can all get fed. since my garden goes up 4 levels and my wife and i have only eaten our own food for 5 years my homework is done.

 

I have a few questions for you, Svarg. If you can answer every single one with a truthful "yes" then I'll apologise for calling you a twat.

a- Do you consume only food grown from your own garden? (ie: no store bought meat, legumes, sauces, sugars, ever)

b- Have you rid yourself entirely of the need to use mains water?

c- Do you generate all your own electricity?

d- Have you stopped using all forms of powered transport?

e- Do you produce all your own soaps, oils, fertilisers etc...?

f- Have you built all your house furnishings from materials you have produced yourself?

I'm sure you can think of further questions along the same lines, but for the sake of this post, I'll leave it there.

Did you answer "yes" to every question? If so, good on you.... I'm enormously impressed.

If any of the questions were answered with a no, then you are not completely self sufficient and you are a twat for the way you dismissed WoodDragon's feedback.

Let me know.... I sincerely hope that I'm wrong in my assumption about you being a twat because that would mean that there is a member of this community who can potentially teach us all a thing or two about self-sustainability.

Edited January 3, 2011 by Rabaelthazar

[Guest svarg26]

isn't "higher education" an oxymoron?

anyhow, Rabaelthazar seems like a nice chap.

sorry if my being a realist offends you. i simply said i grew all that i eat and i sit here a 5 year healthy vegan.

the success of cuba proves me right. again, i am sorry if that offends you.

nice way to debate, mate. tell me, who is the real twat?

[WoodDragon]

Svarg26.

I'm glad that you chose Cuba as your example, as it's one of my favourite exemplars of the way that humans will have to live if they are to have any sustainability that it to be measured in terms of future centuries or millenia, rather than in future decades. It's the only country in the world that is actually living in an ecologically sustainable manner.

There are only around 11 million Cubans, and with the degree of resource-exploitation that they have, their average ecological footprint equates to less than 1.8 hectares per person. They manage to do this with 99.8% literacy, with an average age expectancy of 77.64 years and with a Human Development Index over 0.8. Even Wickedpedia says as much, and it adds that the country has a lower child mortality than some developed countries.

What is doesn't say however is that this state of affairs was the product of:

1) decades of US-led blockading of Cuba in retaliation of its support of Russian involvement in the region during the 1960s;

2) Castro's authoritarian control of the population;

3) the fact that the island is a geologically fertile one that sits in a tropical location, with a good rainfall.

Cuba's geoclimatic advantages are, however, not available to all countries around the globe, and I suspect its forced adaptation to a sustainable way of life is not going to fly in any other country - at least, not on a voluntary basis. It is telling that there is not a single country that has to date chosen to become as ecologically sustainable as is Cuba, and it it telling that many Cubans are seduced by the extravagant way of life in the US...

In spite of your declaration that your requirement for homework has been permanently met, I suggest that you do some reading. Here's one brief link, and here's another more detailed one. A couple of years ago New Scientist had a very revealing précis of global ecological footprints, and how we are failing to live within ecologically sustainable limits, but I'll leave it to you to track that one down if you can be bothered. There are many more.

Rabaelthazar beat me to making a very important point. Growing one's own food is only one aspect of having a small ecological footprint, and a few terraces in one's backyard aren't going to save the planet. The Netherlands and Japan are two countries that illustrate this: both countries jealously protect their remnant natural heritage, abd both actually produce quite a substantial proportion of their own food. But they do so because they suck prodigeous quantites of resources from other (mostly Third World) countries, and if their borders were closed to resource transport they would collapse almost instantaneously. It is not a permanently sustainable situation, and you growing your own food is likely not either, for the reasons that Rabaelthazar pointed out. Heck, I live like a hermit compared to most Australians, except for my internet usage, and I still struggle to keep my own footprint at under about 2.5 to 3 hectares. The fact that we are having this conversation at all assures me that you are not sustainable either, not matter how much you might kid yourself that you are.

I note that you conspicuously avoided addressing the questions I posed in my last post. How about we try a different tack, and poke a stick at your beloved terraces. A few points first...

If sloping land that can be cultivated unaltered is instead converted to terraces, the total cultivable area is reduced. It's simple trigonometry. Work it out. If steep, uncultivable land is converted to terraces one gains the horizontal footprint of the sloping land, and essentially nothing or little more. If one plants geotropic plants on sloping land, one only gains marginally more productivity than if it were planted on flat land. If creeping species such as curcurbits are planted, then its basically productively better to plant on sloping land than on terraces, again for simple trigonometric reasons.

So, pick your best example of the benefits of terraces, and let's pull the wings off that fly. Note: I will be including the loss of habitat for non-human species in any consideration, as a lot of remaining sloping land is the last refuge for many endangered plants and animals. Note too: in any consideration of land that might be converted to terraces, I will consider the added cultivable land as a proportion of the overall land already cultivated, and then compare this to what humanity requires in the future, and what the loss of this land for non-human use means for humans themselves.

isn't "higher education" an oxymoron?

Only a moron would ask this. Education never stops, and education occurs at many levels.

Svarg26, you claim that you need do no further homework... in reply, I would remind you of a comment by Joseph Lister:

You must always be students, learning and unlearning till your life's end, and if, gentlemen, you are not prepared to follow your profession in this spirit, I implore you to leave its ranks and betake yourself to some third-class trade.

[Rabaelthazar]

nice way to debate, mate. tell me, who is the real twat?

 

Mate, at this stage I haven't even entered into the debate. I've simply called you a twat and asked you to answer a few questions.

sorry if my being a realist offends you.

 

The reason I've called you a twat (and it could have been any other name, but I think "twat" has a nice ring to it) is because you are not only not being a realist, but you are actively ignoring those aspects of reality that are being shown to you and that do not happen to tie in with your personal view of the way the world works.

You basically wrote off WoodDragon's excellent and informative post as a waste of your time and you've failed to answer the questions I posed. Can I assume that by choosing to not answer my questions you confirm that you are not fully self-sufficient in ways other than growing your own food (which is an excellent start, might I add)?

What's twatty about your posts is that you refuse to acknowledge that there is a much bigger picture than the one you can see. By ignoring this bigger picture, you are deluding yourself and potentially deluding others about the seriousness of our increasing global population. I won't have a guess at a threshold figure, but the number of humans the earth can sustain is certainly finite. We are already destroying areas of land for farming that, had they not been destroyed, would be contributing to the essential role of maintaining the balance of nature. Perhaps the earth could sustain another billion people, perhaps another billion would be enough to tip the scales.... certainly if you kept increasing the number of humans on the earth you would at some point reach a stage where there are not enough natural resources to feed, clothe, and shelter everybody, regardless of whether you're growing your vegies horizontally or vertically.

i simply said i grew all that i eat and i sit here a 5 year healthy vegan.

 

No, you also said:

millions, billions or trillions. it doesn't matter, mate. we can all get fed.

 

You seem unable to look past your property line and see the impact you as an individual are having on other areas of the earth. You don't need to post it here, but answer the questions I asked in my previous post and then ask yourself if a trillion people, living the way you do, could really be supported by this planet.

I'm sorry to be having such a go... it takes a fair bit to get me off-side, but the ignorance and arrogance you've displayed in this thread, not to mention the off-handed way you've dismissed any constructive criticism, has really pissed me off.

Anyway... I just hope you can take something from this thread.... good on you (seriously) for being as self-sufficient as you seem to be, but don't fall in to the trap of thinking that your good efforts are enough to make up for the rest of the world's lack of understanding and excessive procreation.

[Guest svarg26]

the question posed was How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?

from my perspective being a vegan, i said 20/30 billion no problem. since i eat only what i grow utilizing every spare inch of my property. i fail to see how if everyone copied me, this couldn't be achieved. please, with all your facts, figures, stats, theories and letters in front of your name, prove me wrong.

cuba, even with the weight of the entire world on them are doing quite well and they haven't even gone all the way to veganism. us vegans are a funny bunch, who love community and trade with other like minded people. in my perfect world, countries could easily adopt this approach.

i respect WoodDragon's opinion and that is why i attacked his theory and not him as a person. regurgitating a theory derived from indoctrinated "higher education" irritates me. as i have said before i much prefer to take the common sense approach and cuba proved that to be a overwhelming success, to which WoodDragon agreed. since i am living in a way that WoodDragon says is impossible. who is correct? i will always prefer taking direct action over debating waffling theories any day and i won't apologize for this.

Rabaelthazar, on the other hand has just claimed the title of douche bag of the year and that is all the response it deserves.

true knowledge is gained through taking control of your own life. indoctrinated education is sitting on your hands waiting to be told what to think.

i choose to live it. but feel free to sit here and continue thinking about it.

[WoodDragon]

from my perspective being a vegan, i said 20/30 billion no problem. since i eat only what i grow utilizing every spare inch of my property. i fail to see how if everyone copied me, this couldn't be achieved.

Again, Leibig's Law of the Minimum...

Eating meat is only a small part of the impact that humans have on the planet, and it certainly isn't responsible for all, or even most, of the environmental destruction that we wreak. It's one small component.

Seriously, as much as you disparage scientists' "facts, figures, stats, theories and letters in front of [their] name", do some investigating of ecological footprints, and of what scientific information/data is used to determine such. Use some of the calculators I linked to toward the beginning of this thread, and fiddle with the vegetarian option whilst keep everything else at typical Western parameters.

Or just sit quietly for a while and think about the land that we use for housing/cities, for mining, for roads, for non-food cropping and agriculture (wool, cotton, biofuels, for recreation (how many bloody golf courses does the planet need?!), and for any number of other human requisitions and pollutions of space.

So, you're a vegan? Perhaps we can persuade the whole world to not only eschew meat, but to give up seafood as well - that'd at least save the oceans, right? Wrong. Burning fossil carbon as we are, and with the eventual release of methane hydrates from the ocean floors and the permafrost as a result of global warming, we will end up with prodigious quantites of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (yes, methane turns into carbon dioxide when it is released into the atmosphere, so don't try to minimise its contribution). Now, even if you're a global warming sceptic (the stuff for other discussions, and one which I try to avoid on the Corroborree as I already spend hours each week trying to educate those who do not understand the science of climatology) it is indisputable that carbon dioxide is moving from the atmosphere to the oceans in a predictable equilibrium reaction, with the consequence that the waters are acidifying. At the rate that humans are releasing carbon, this acidification is threatening entire ecosystems in the planet's oceans, including some of those that produce much of our oxygen. And given that you have buckley's of ever stopping humans from voluntarily desisting from seafood consumption, there are going to be a lot of surprised folk when their fisheries disappear even faster than they are currently vanishing.

Even if you argue that humans will be forced into veganism when meat production becomes untenable, you are still faced with Leibig's law of the Minimum. And if you argue that we will be forced into veganism with a concurrent collapse of consumerist society such that we all become Cubas, you are still not able to impute that we can then support more humans than we have now - Leibig again, and the inconvenience of destroyed ecosystems and their services on top of it all.

And 20 to 30 billion people living at Cuban standards would not be a pretty site in many countries, in a social context. Heck, even now with a greater overall average standard of living, and with a quarter of that number, we are kicking seven colours of snot out of the poorest of our brethren. This also ignores the fact that without Western levels of science and medicine, disease would run through 20 to 30 billion humans with glee at the world's biggest ever monoculture, and with no natural medicine chest left with which to attempt to discover new cures. It'd be the pathogen party of the universe.

You're no different to the people who looked at the ground around themselves and concluded that the Earth was flat (and terraced...): the trouble is, the world is greater than the bit that you personally can see. You're pulling numbers out of your arse, dude, with no backing up other than your own uninformed opinion. This makes it nothing more than uninformed opinion: it is certainly not science. And in making decisions for the planet's future, we need to act on the best science, rather than the personal uninformed opinion of one vegan ideologue with a few terraces* in his backyard.

[*And by the way, my own vegie garden will end up being on at least three levels, because my land is too steep not to terrace. I am not ignorant of the benefits and the limitations of terraces...]

Edited January 4, 2011 by WoodDragon