@df

That piece on ethics of immigration was an interesting read. I was going to post some thoughts there, but they ended up long, so I'll post them here instead:

In a finite world, this gets inevitably tangled in the politics of reproduction and overpopulation. Some seek to tactically out-reproduce as a way of politically dominating, or to fear that others will, but even more basically, if we ignore such factions and stick to sheer numbers: We can be fruitful and multiply only to a point in a finite world. At some point, multiplying isn't fruitful but exhausts all fruit.

And so when people move around in a sparse world, there there may be more capacity to absorb them than in a dense one, regardless of how you define words like sparse and dense and capacity. And, of course, density is distributed unevenly. Certain standards of living or ways of living will not support more than a certain number of people. So questions arise as to whether it's the right of a people or a region to have any such standard or way of living.

Without a theory of why people would taper off reproduction as the world becomes crowded, the politics of immigration becomes tethered to the politics of reproduction. Birth itself is a kind of immigration, and sometimes people who want to taper immigration seem to nonetheless want to encourage birth, without seeing or acknowledging that each of these increases population density and strain on finite resources. In an "empty" world, the risk is of having too few people, and both birth and immigration seem obvious opportunities to mitigate risk. In a "full" world, the risk is of having too many people, and both birth and immigration seem points of concern and opportunities for risk to attach.

Of course, density is not distributed evenly in the world, so these concepts apply differently in different places, but it simplifies discussion to keep things simple. To have a coherent ethics on this, one must know where one is in the empty/full spectrum. And, of course, all gets even more complicated if one realizes that people will inevitably overlay race, religion, wealth, or nationality, but the essential problems are best seen if you hold those at bay long enough to understand it is not really possible to ignore overpopulation as a core driver of the stress. In some sense, those other factors just create ways of magnifying, partitioning, and sadly scapegoating that stress.

Discussions of both reproduction and immigration are intrinsically difficult because they get quickly into issues of how we may fairly distribute finite resources in an ever more crowded world as cultures with very different and deeply held practices and expectations come ever more inevitably into contact and, too often, conflict with one another. Achieving any sense of fairness can be a nontrivial task because each is starting from a different place and there is often no commonly agreed starting point for what can be expected to be fixed and what must be up for negotiation. It probably have to start with everyone agreeing there's a real problem and that we all need to be equitably involved in a solution, but I sense there's a lot of denial on both of these points.

#overpopulation #PopulationCollapse
Every #billionaire who has ever screamed about over or under population. WERE THEMSELVES THE CAUSE!
Want more babies? Pay people more.
Want less babies? Increase #education especially for women, make #healthcare free, make family planning free.

Worried there are not enough resources and #climatechange is going to kill us? The top 1% produce 29% of all #greenhousegasses , the bottom billion produce 1%. Invest in science to create a green revolution.

They are sounding the alarm about problems they created and blaming the average individual with no power as being selfish.

https://open.substack.com/pub/echoesofdystopia/p/the-systemic-drive-for-population?r=54w5rv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

There is no declining population crisis on a planet suffering an ecological collapse from human overpopulation.

There are racist immigration policies.

Good morning.

21 October 2024

What happens when a species has no natural predators? I've read a little, not a lot, about such events such as the introduction of rabbits in Australia, the rabbits became a big problem, though I don't know if they still are. They gobble up all of the resources, don't they? Is Homo Sapien so different? No natural predators, except for ourselves. Populations grow virtually unchecked. We're at what, eight billion? That is a growth of about two billion the last twenty years. The more of us there are, the more resources we require. How many of us can the earth sustain?

Hmmm ... it must be doom and gloom morning.

"Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today" - Jacques Yves Cousteau

@Otis_Scops @504DR

Thanks, but you don't need to lecture me about exponential growth...

And sorry if my intention to give the issue a less grim outlook wasn't of your taste.

Maybe better if I tell you that you don't have to worry "because with the currently likely scenarios, human population will likely crash at some not very distant point in the future.
famines, diseases, war, breakdown of healthcare, that stuff...

feel better now?

Anyway. You are right that the current growth of the human population would require a decrease of our average environmental impact per capita.

But what I say is just:
a) the overpopulation discourse usually averages over global populations, and does not take into account differences in impact by lifestyles. The world can't afford the rich people (of which the larges part is white).
b) the growth of consumption outpaced that that of population and is by far the bigger problem
c) there is a lot of margin to live more sustainably, even in low-income countries. So, I don't want to deny that too many poor people can have negative impacts on the environment, especially in industrialized capitalist societies. But as I said before: fight for education and against patriarchy, and this will yield the best results.
d) I prefer a lot to destroy large parts of the industry, cars, military and other shit with only marginal benefit (yes, there are always exceptions, e.g., disabled people deserve access to mobility). But when we talk about population, we are talking about human beings. And in the past this discussion never had good results.

So, again: if you want to talk about what you denominate "overpopulation", I request you thread your words very, very carefully, so that the discussion can't derive into racist and ableist thoughts. This is what I ask you.

A sentence, one of many fascinating utterances in the book I'm reading, on an ancient human behavior pattern: "Finding easy scapegoats for complicated problems has been a human pastime since the first mob of cavemen struck someone down with a rock."
The book is the second in a series by Neal Shusterman (first time reading this author): The Scythe Arc; 1 Scythe; 2 Thunderhead.

It's not the first series I've read that deals with immortal humans, but this one has an unusual "solution' to the problems of #overshoot, #overconsumption, & #overpopulation. Hard to put down. A life & death experience.
Here are some other titles with immortal characters: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/75447.Immortality_In_Science_Fiction
#books

How we interpret that lost civilization has changed over time. New information suggests resilience in the face of adversity. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/08/23/world/easter-island-collapse-history/ #commentary #worldnews #easterisland #europeans #climatechange #overpopulation #easterisland

This really puts things in perspective.

https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=vJ5p3pZlBi4

Apocalyptic fools.

Tom Murphy with a new thought-provoking post.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/05/watching-population-bomb/

Every time I go to Costco I see people leaving with *multiple* mega-packs of toilet paper. Y'all need to quit breeding!!

#Climate #ClimateCrisis #OverPopulation #Extinction #UrbanMyths #ExcuseToDoNothing
#BadFaithArguments