Thus it’s easy to imagine, with the future collapse of global governance in a world scarred by ecosystem simplification, famine, and plague, that a few disparate “tribes” of people will be what will be left of the human race, with billions of others left to die. Charles suggested that such “tribes” would be susceptible to narrow, ideological “tribalism” — which, of course, would be quite beside the point in a world of massive human die-off. We wouldn’t by any stretch be left with the “same rotten world”; we’d probably just die, of starvation if not of suicide.

The one sentence from Sing C. Chew’s book which I quoted in the long blockquote (above) which suggests this sort of outcome for the present-day world society is worth repeating:

Market optimism, regionalization, and globalization policies and practices will be pursued until ecological and natural limits are reached…(130)

Give me a hint here, so that I don’t feel like I’m losing my reading audience. What set of frames do I need to add to make this sort of prediction look plausible? In the standard college course in population biology, the notion of the “exponential growth of populations” is held liable to the phenomenon of “population crash,” in which (according to the link just cited) “If there is a sudden change which affects the amount of available resources (for instance, a drought or a frost) a population which is growing exponentially may experience a dramatic decrease in size.” How is it that abrupt climate change DOESN’T count one such “sudden change”? Chew suggests, indeed, that civilization crash has been facilitated by climate changes in the past, coming as they have on top of the environmental depredations of the civilizations themselves.

Will human beings, whose population growth under industrial capitalism has certainly conformed to the standard exponential growth model given in population biology, experience “population crash”? Well, on the one hand, human beings are far too intelligent and far too versatile to be regarded as typical examples of population biology. However, it must be added to this observation that, in the aggregate, actual human societies tend to take predictable forms, forms which conform (when stable) to models of political economy. And the current form of political economy which we share, neoliberal capitalism, is likely to induce human population crash if pursued far enough. Much of the standard “Worldwatch” report can be read as supplying the hard data for such an observation, without, however, having the courage to finger capitalism as the culprit. Paul Prew’s article on this topic summarizes the matter more concisely:

The question to be asked, really, is whether we proceed with capitalism until we reach an ecological bifurcation point that leaves the habitability of the earth in question for the vast majority of the population, or we reach a social bifurcation point that leads us to a social system of production that is dissipative, nonetheless, but does not threaten the flowing balance of nature.

So the question at hand is one of whether human intelligence and human versatility can get to human systems of political economy before the human beings themselves are “done in” by catastrophic ecosystem simplification. Suggesting that die-off has to happen first before changes in political economy can happen is not the answer we want.

Fine. You first.

If there is one thing that makes me nervous about this site, it is the potential danger of misanthropy. (To be fair, Stan Goff fastidiously weeds his garden of this.) The point stands that you don’t explain exactly what you mean by “people.” It could mean billions of people living at or below subsistence levels, or it could mean white, middle class, progressives who think that recycling and carbon credits absolve them of their enormous privilege. Then again, it probably means white, middle class progressives whose privilege amounts to sitting in traffic two hours a day to work another ten at a soul crushing job in some ugly office park. The problem is when you say that America consumes too much, you’re telling Americans they now have to walk to their soul crushing job is some ugly office park to work ten hours a day under a fluorescent light that produces a sickly buzz. That is cruelty, the kind hawked by a phony like Al Gore, and a parody of socialism.

The world has changed, and now thatlambda is greater than 3 (or now that home prices are falling and the debt/dollar bubble is deflating), what used to be a stable equilibrium is now unstable. What will the new equilibrium be? Who knows, but whatever happens, the focus for any worthwhile social movement is striving for a better world, a focus on what the movement is for rather than against, and the one thing a social movement can’t be against is “people.” Put another way, ask yourself how less people makes people’s lives better.

“This is like the porn debate, where one can lay out the arguments again and again, but the dominant ways of knowing are so consistently and thoroughly entrenched in our culture that one finds oneself repeating the exact same arguments (albeit still with no adequate rebuttal) again and again and again.”

Sometimes, lambda is time. Other times, it is information. Bifurcations still happen.

“And just to get at Charles’ remark against isolationism: “More isolation may very well lead to new types of racism and ethnocentrism.” All of which would be true, but rather beside the point in a world which was experiencing endemic ecosystem and civilization-wide collapse.”

I disagree. “The problem is too many people” is not that far removed from “the problem is too many of those people.” It means we’re left with the same rotten world and the same rotten injustices.

Thus, the problem with abrupt climate change is not just abrupt climate change; it’s that our techno-mania has allowed us to weaken, quite significantly, the natural environment’s ability to bounce back from what we’ve been throwing at it, and that abrupt climate change will make this existing situation readily apparent.

Therefore abrupt climate change is not a mere “issue” to stand equally aside gun control, health care, tax policy, or gay marriage, as the liberals would imagine. (The dividing-up of politics into mere “issues,” in my opinion, is the mechanism by which the liberals can be married to the neoliberal policymakers of the Democratic Leadership Council, so avoiding this perspective is important.) The real issue about abrupt climate cuts to the core of our civilization’s environmental dysfunction; how are we to square our mechanisms for meeting economic need with our need for some degree of ecosystem resilience (ultimately leading to stable equilibrium). Our economic organizations, all the way down to the individual “person,” are at this point reduced to the pandering after effective demand, demand backed by money, under conditions of capitalist competition, with states functioning as mere chaperons of hyper-exploitation, and without anything but a cosmetic consideration of realities as defined and measured by ecologists. We are trashing ecosystems even more severely than did the civilizations of old, and climate change will deliver the coup de grace to world society and send us into the next Dark Age unless we can learn from all this at some point before the end.

Without a real attempt to square the technologies of economic life with goals of ecosystem resilience, then, all complaints of “too many people” and “overpopulation” miss the point. Even a smaller population would fall into the same trap, unless the civilization itself can have some sort of built-in eco-technics. In our case, this means creating a post-capitalist environmental design that would provide the grounds for an ecological disciplining of world society. Without this, all complaints about population are meaningless. There is no point in doing the population numbers if the populations themselves cannot make a real effort toward the preservation of ecosystem resilience.

…sigh… apologies for my frustration…

The Hanson die-off narrative of niche-maximization, overshoot, etc. is plausible only if one restricts oneself to broad numerical averages and tendencies. It is purely quantitative, and that bias closes the gates against any qualitative understanding of the system (attempting to reduce human history to just another bit of evolutionary biology). For the record, I like evolutionary biology. I also like the big numbers; and I believe absolutely that overshoot is possible and becoming more probable by the day. But to jump from this acknowledgement to the claim that The Problem is population is a dramatic and wrong-headed non sequitur. The conclusion that population is The Problem does not follow from the premises apparent in restatement of the numbers, unless you weed out all the other variables (each with another set of premises).

So long as the ecological footprint of the average American is 1000 times that of the average Haitian (or whatever it actually is), then consumption as well as spatial flows of capital, energy, etc, is at least as relevant — I would argue far more relevant than a simple global headcount. I’ve written a fair amount on this, so I’ll just ask you to read Spatial Patterns of Capital for a few other indices aside from birth and death rates. I would also suggest you look at Food and Finance, which historicizes the way we do “agriculture,” which is far more than a mere population problem, and which began not with accelerated birth rates, but with dispossession of small landholders that jammed them into high-entropy urban environments.

The dangers of this approach include one big danger that I will reiterate here. Once “population” is The Problem, then the question is already raised: What is to be done? It’s the answers that reveal not some scientific “objectivity,” but the prespectives of privilege. I hear plenty about wanting to reduce birth rates among the poor of the world (now, see, it’s THEIR problem); but I hear far less about reducing consumption or reproduction rates among those segments of the population that actually consume the most. My humble opinion is that anyone in the “first world” whose each child consumes hundreds of times more than a “third-world” child has a lot of gall to preach the virtues of population “control” (gotta love that word) among the latter.

We have vastly over-multiplied, aided and supported by millions of years of captured sunlight released to us in the form of fossil fuels. In doing so, we have altered the composition of the atmosphere. The big question we need to ask is: How will the majority of the world’s human population cease to eat (and subsequently, to be) over the next century?

There simply are not enough fossil fuel resources left to feed everyone, and the problem is compounded by the impact of climate change. Above all, climate change will force us to consume more fossil fuels to compensate for rapid ecological changes that outpace infrastructure that relies on stable ecosystems for efficiency and profitability.

Until we can figure a way to get the human population back into a stable and sustainable-with-limited-fossil-fuels level, we must contend with the specter of a catastrophic ecologically-mandated reduction in population. It happens to every other species that overshoots its carrying capacity – why shouldn’t it happen to us? If somebody can give me a good reason I will be much reassured. Thanks in advance.

^^^
This should be debated. More isolation may very well lead to new types of racism and ethnocentrism. Somehow we must preserve the rational kernel of capitalist “globalism” ( while overcoming its anti-humanism) which is our entire species being in “touch” and communication with each other. Holism is a critical concept for where humanity goes next. The winding down of burning _must_ not be done in such a way as to set the stage for some future racism, imperialism, colonialism, and ethnic supermacism. We must not repeat the error of our ancestors in scattering themselves away from each other. ” It’s a small world afterall”