Its definitely calories. But if you project agricultural production from its inception 10,000 years ago without the fossil pulse, you get about 2 billion humans. Its the great acceleration that really took off after WW2 with the oil and gas inputs to farming that generated the calories. In effect we ate fossil fuels and made 6 billion extra people.
Totally. It's wild to see how population hinges upward around the takeoff of the Industrial Era. Fossil fuels in the form of fertilizer alone double our agricultural yields, and then we have the heavy machinery, processing/refrigeration tech to preserve it, and long distance transport...
Great stuff, Andrea and Co. We are descended from humans who lived ecologically balanced, self-sustaining lives of up to 60yrs. in migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands of up to 150 related members including 2 or 3 extended families, or so. Think the 500+ native tribes living in today's USA before the invasion of our European/African/Asian ancestors 600 yrs ago. The Upper Paleolithic H-Gs numbered from 2.6 to 10M worldwide according to the paleo demographers I've read. Populations remained stable due to the requirements of such a lifeway, including the migration necessary for acquiring resources when a local supply is no longer adequate, or seasonal changes demanded. Competition between clans/bands spaced competitors and prevented resource depletion. We made the leap to ever larger populations requiring ever greater energy sources when we learned to substitute symbols for real property/territories. Thus the importance of the 400+ painted caves with their celebration of symbolic realistic art, created during the last iceage, which lasted a good 4,000 yrs. and only allowed life outside at greater distances about 16,000 yrs. ago. The agricultural revolution with the discovery of sedentary grain farming required giving-up the H-G lifeway and our ancestors transitioned to symbolic territories when population growth demanded their playing out territorial rituals in symbols, rather than physical territories. Keep up the great creativity and inventiveness. I'll keep visiting from time to time, if allowed. Greeley Miklashek, MD
Thanks for this. I see so much nonsense in articles these days, and I always want to just comment "read Story of B"... I really thought I might feel that way again here, but I was delighted that you cited it up front. It's always so much simpler a reason than folks expect, but it's been reliably true throughout the last ~10k years.
Yeah, I think many comments about population (e.g. on NY Times articles) reveal a really shallow understanding of the situation. It's easy to sit comfortably at one's laptop and blame our problems on there being too many other humans, instead of appreciating that it's rooted in how we feed ourselves, and how we related to our environments and fellow creatures.
I haven't yet gotten to reading My Ishmael but it seems juicy!
It's quite good. It features a young lady, and so it discusses a number of subjects that interest her, among which is modern schooling. I'm not crazy about the final chapters, which are mostly just about the fate of Ishmael. I would have just enjoyed more discussions, much like B's sermons at the end of the second book.
I always refer to Paul Chefurka's work on sustainable human populations. Before we wrecked the planet it was about 35 million worldwide. Now that we've wrecked the planet, the sustainable carrying capacity is probably 1/10th of that, c3-4 million. Which is still a lot if more thought is given to it. We are a top predator, so just like lions, tigers and orcas, there shouldn't be a lot of us. Imagine if there were 8 billion lions.....
As you say though, regardless of the population number, it's the culture of growth that is the fundamental problem. Whether it's growth of money, monocultures, pet animals, believers, power, all will lead to ecological overshoot until that culture is not just halted, but eradicated.
There were individual tribes/communities that lived within their limits, eg had a 1-in-1-out policy, where after so many births the eldest villager got in his canoe and left across the ocean, but agreed, these just subsumed by the more aggressive neighbours with bigger spears.
I suspect we are an evolutionary dead end as far as the planet is concerned.
Coincidentally, I have engaged in a thought experiment about a city populated by tigers. For every human-dedicated building, there'd also be a tiger-dedicated one. We'd definitely recognize it as an odd, extreme arrangement for that species - yet we don't we see this about ourselves.
My alternative evolution-on- Earth idea I had late last year was - imagine if dolphins had evolved apposable thumbs, then the undersea world would be full of dolphin cities and seabed factories, trains being replicated by cross-ocean tunnels. Overpopulated with 30 billion dolphins, the seas would be overfished, with rich dolphins in city centres having an abundant supply of factory made "seafood", and vast tanks of sad imprisoned tuna, whilst the poorer dolphins swam around the colder and deeper oceans scavenging what they could get in the polluted waters.
And the rich dolphins would invent drones to go over land and hunt dumn (to them) hunter-gatherer humans for luxury fresh food. The human tribes would evolve a religious demon to explain the drones & chimneys of smoke from underwater factories that they could see in the distance seas; avoid the seas and never invent sailing ships, and throw sacrifices in every now and again to appease the drone gods.
Just to show how evolution could have gone, that any and all species will fill out their ecological niches and extract resources to the maximum of their ability under the Maximum Power Principle, given the chance.
There's probably a Dunction Wood type dolphin-world for would be fantasy authors out there, I claim my 10% of your first royalty cheque if you steal my idea :)
duuuude i currently have drafted a post about an alternate reality where instead of swimming freely in the ocean, fish build themselves an aquarium within the ocean, through which are mediated all their interactions with “the environment”. and they gradually start to perform extremely specialized roles within the aquarium so they forget how to seek prey/algae self-sufficiently, and become dependent on the aquarium’s system of tubes. and they destroy the world beyond the aquarium for materials to keep the aquarium functioning. (using substack’s AI generator to create images was amusing.) - I’ve I end up publishing it, I’ll add a screenshot of your comment :)
Its definitely calories. But if you project agricultural production from its inception 10,000 years ago without the fossil pulse, you get about 2 billion humans. Its the great acceleration that really took off after WW2 with the oil and gas inputs to farming that generated the calories. In effect we ate fossil fuels and made 6 billion extra people.
Totally. It's wild to see how population hinges upward around the takeoff of the Industrial Era. Fossil fuels in the form of fertilizer alone double our agricultural yields, and then we have the heavy machinery, processing/refrigeration tech to preserve it, and long distance transport...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and-without-fertilizer
Great stuff, Andrea and Co. We are descended from humans who lived ecologically balanced, self-sustaining lives of up to 60yrs. in migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands of up to 150 related members including 2 or 3 extended families, or so. Think the 500+ native tribes living in today's USA before the invasion of our European/African/Asian ancestors 600 yrs ago. The Upper Paleolithic H-Gs numbered from 2.6 to 10M worldwide according to the paleo demographers I've read. Populations remained stable due to the requirements of such a lifeway, including the migration necessary for acquiring resources when a local supply is no longer adequate, or seasonal changes demanded. Competition between clans/bands spaced competitors and prevented resource depletion. We made the leap to ever larger populations requiring ever greater energy sources when we learned to substitute symbols for real property/territories. Thus the importance of the 400+ painted caves with their celebration of symbolic realistic art, created during the last iceage, which lasted a good 4,000 yrs. and only allowed life outside at greater distances about 16,000 yrs. ago. The agricultural revolution with the discovery of sedentary grain farming required giving-up the H-G lifeway and our ancestors transitioned to symbolic territories when population growth demanded their playing out territorial rituals in symbols, rather than physical territories. Keep up the great creativity and inventiveness. I'll keep visiting from time to time, if allowed. Greeley Miklashek, MD
Thanks for this. I see so much nonsense in articles these days, and I always want to just comment "read Story of B"... I really thought I might feel that way again here, but I was delighted that you cited it up front. It's always so much simpler a reason than folks expect, but it's been reliably true throughout the last ~10k years.
Yeah, I think many comments about population (e.g. on NY Times articles) reveal a really shallow understanding of the situation. It's easy to sit comfortably at one's laptop and blame our problems on there being too many other humans, instead of appreciating that it's rooted in how we feed ourselves, and how we related to our environments and fellow creatures.
I haven't yet gotten to reading My Ishmael but it seems juicy!
It's quite good. It features a young lady, and so it discusses a number of subjects that interest her, among which is modern schooling. I'm not crazy about the final chapters, which are mostly just about the fate of Ishmael. I would have just enjoyed more discussions, much like B's sermons at the end of the second book.
I always refer to Paul Chefurka's work on sustainable human populations. Before we wrecked the planet it was about 35 million worldwide. Now that we've wrecked the planet, the sustainable carrying capacity is probably 1/10th of that, c3-4 million. Which is still a lot if more thought is given to it. We are a top predator, so just like lions, tigers and orcas, there shouldn't be a lot of us. Imagine if there were 8 billion lions.....
http://paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html
As you say though, regardless of the population number, it's the culture of growth that is the fundamental problem. Whether it's growth of money, monocultures, pet animals, believers, power, all will lead to ecological overshoot until that culture is not just halted, but eradicated.
There were individual tribes/communities that lived within their limits, eg had a 1-in-1-out policy, where after so many births the eldest villager got in his canoe and left across the ocean, but agreed, these just subsumed by the more aggressive neighbours with bigger spears.
I suspect we are an evolutionary dead end as far as the planet is concerned.
Agreed on all fronts!
Coincidentally, I have engaged in a thought experiment about a city populated by tigers. For every human-dedicated building, there'd also be a tiger-dedicated one. We'd definitely recognize it as an odd, extreme arrangement for that species - yet we don't we see this about ourselves.
My alternative evolution-on- Earth idea I had late last year was - imagine if dolphins had evolved apposable thumbs, then the undersea world would be full of dolphin cities and seabed factories, trains being replicated by cross-ocean tunnels. Overpopulated with 30 billion dolphins, the seas would be overfished, with rich dolphins in city centres having an abundant supply of factory made "seafood", and vast tanks of sad imprisoned tuna, whilst the poorer dolphins swam around the colder and deeper oceans scavenging what they could get in the polluted waters.
And the rich dolphins would invent drones to go over land and hunt dumn (to them) hunter-gatherer humans for luxury fresh food. The human tribes would evolve a religious demon to explain the drones & chimneys of smoke from underwater factories that they could see in the distance seas; avoid the seas and never invent sailing ships, and throw sacrifices in every now and again to appease the drone gods.
Just to show how evolution could have gone, that any and all species will fill out their ecological niches and extract resources to the maximum of their ability under the Maximum Power Principle, given the chance.
There's probably a Dunction Wood type dolphin-world for would be fantasy authors out there, I claim my 10% of your first royalty cheque if you steal my idea :)
duuuude i currently have drafted a post about an alternate reality where instead of swimming freely in the ocean, fish build themselves an aquarium within the ocean, through which are mediated all their interactions with “the environment”. and they gradually start to perform extremely specialized roles within the aquarium so they forget how to seek prey/algae self-sufficiently, and become dependent on the aquarium’s system of tubes. and they destroy the world beyond the aquarium for materials to keep the aquarium functioning. (using substack’s AI generator to create images was amusing.) - I’ve I end up publishing it, I’ll add a screenshot of your comment :)
Great minds think alike lol