I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

The current mass extinction event predated industrialization and the intense population that it sustains.

What are you talking about?

Meaning that pre-industrial humans wiped out most of the world's megafauna, and the animals that preyed on that megafauna. In Australia that would include giant terrestrial lizards, marsupial lions, rhinoceros-sized wombats, and so on. Similar in Europe and North America.

Post-industrialisation, of course, we are wiping out species on an industrial scale.

[Jack]

Meant specifically what he said; what is the current mass extinction event? Looked it up myself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction Words either have meaning or they don't. Mass extinctions are defined as global widespread and rapid declines in life greater than 75%. This wiki article says the 'current' extinction event has been occurring since the end of the first ice age. The article seems very one sided, except for the part where it at least mentions every single point is debated, and at least mentions some scientist have the same issue as I do with an extinction event taking so long to happen. Personally have always agreed with the main assertion of the article, humans have always been an invasive and destructive force against the planet. This article basically blames humans for every life form lost from the time migration began out of Africa; and I'm okay with that. It makes me think of a past conversation with zeg, when I asserted humans are so destructive it's easy to believe we aren't a natural evolutionary occurrence to the planet, but rather a foreign body, and he and I seemed to conclude the conversation with the only purpose humans serve to anything in nature is to a couple of parasites which only feed on humans. Though the solution to all of that is not minimizing the population, but instead the acceptance than humans simply don't belong here. The reality is, humans probably aren't going away any time soon and daydreaming or speculating about everyone dying isn't productive towards real change.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

It's a mass extinction occurring over a period of time, with humans as the primary cause. There may not be direct evidence that humans caused the vast majority of the extinctions.... but there's plenty of circumstantial evidence.

Do you call it a mass extinction event or something else? I don't care, that's semantics.

Even if we are a natural occurrence.... asteroids are a natural occurrence too.... as are supervolcanoes. We are probably the least "natural" out of all of the causes for previous mass extinctions.

Direct action to reduce population probably won't work. Improving quality of life in general will work, and has been shown to work in the past. Taking steps to reduce our impact on the environment might give us the time we need to reduce the population to a sustainable level. We don't really know how long we have until the damage caused by climate change really starts to bite and we start seeing large parts of the planet become unlivable. It might be 50 years or it might be 250 years, and how reckless we are now in how we reduce our impact might play a big role in terms of how long our species gets to hang around.

[mdagli1]

First thing that needs to stop is the building of houses on credit from farming human babies. Raise interest rates and evict the fuckers from their own country for life.


The planet will heal itself, life will start again but as long as we are consuming our own kind, there will be no peace.

[odeon]

Remember, pre-industrial human activity destroyed much of the med region and the Near East.

Sources?

Meh. You know me better than that. My knowledge is usually from crap I don't have access to.




But, here's an extreme take on it (which I don't agree with the title of - the Sahara is quite old): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4315796/How-humans-created-Sahara-desert-8-000-years-ago.html


If you don't know about the expansion of the Sahara and the deforestation of the Near East, I'm not being paid
to teach you.  It's pretty much the establishment view of the evidence.


Turns out that there are some arguments against though: https://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/how-earths-orbital-shift-shaped-the-sahara/

I do remember having read about this but thought that the humans creating it theory was just a theory, and not a particularly well-supported one either. Can't be bothered to look into it, though.

[Jack]

It's a mass extinction occurring over a period of time, with humans as the primary cause. There may not be direct evidence that humans caused the vast majority of the extinctions.... but there's plenty of circumstantial evidence.

Do you call it a mass extinction event or something else? I don't care, that's semantics.

Even if we are a natural occurrence.... asteroids are a natural occurrence too.... as are supervolcanoes. We are probably the least "natural" out of all of the causes for previous mass extinctions.

Direct action to reduce population probably won't work. Improving quality of life in general will work, and has been shown to work in the past. Taking steps to reduce our impact on the environment might give us the time we need to reduce the population to a sustainable level. We don't really know how long we have until the damage caused by climate change really starts to bite and we start seeing large parts of the planet become unlivable. It might be 50 years or it might be 250 years, and how reckless we are now in how we reduce our impact might play a big role in terms of how long our species gets to hang around.

It's annoying when people say something is semantics because like said, words either have meaning or they don't. When people assign their own meaning to words then it makes words meaningless, so I do care. There is no current mass extinction event, and the entire history of humans is not a mass extinction event. It's a theory, and a theory which doesn't fit the definition of the words. Improving quality of life is not what will work. Industrial advancements greatly improve quality of life, and also cause the majority of environmental problems faced today. It's only the laws which govern our industries, preventing them from overusing and poisoning the air, waterways, land and ground water, which will work. Environmental protection laws are still very new within the scope of large scale industry and there simply aren't enough of them, so today's generation not only faces current deficiencies in controlling industrial production, but also the effects of about 250 years of unregulated activity. Population rates are not the problem.

[Calandale]

I do remember having read about this but thought that the humans creating it theory was just a theory, and not a particularly well-supported one either. Can't be bothered to look into it, though.

Yep. Me either.


It was more accepted previously, it seems.
But, like all science bs, it swings back and forth.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

The point is that you don’t need policies designed to reduce population growth. In fact that is the last thing you need.
You need policies designed to improve quality of life in several important ways. Improve medical care, bring down the infant mortality rate, improve education for girls and create a diverse range of opportunities for young women (this is one of the reasons feminism is such a force for good in the world – sorry, I just had to throw that one in for the broflakes).
All this is great in theory of course, it could never work in practice. So how about you try googling a few of the following:

South Korea fertility rate
Singapore fertility rate
Germany fertility rate
Italy fertility rate
Thailand fertility rate
India fertility rate
Philippines fertility rate

These are all countries where the above steps have been happening over the past couple of generations and you can see the results for yourself on the graphs returned by Google. 
In Germany you can see an uptick in the fertility rate. You can put that down to a temporary effect of mass immigration. It will tick back downwards when those immigrants are more integrated.

Then you can google fertility rate in some countries where the steps I outlined above have not been occurring. Nigeria would be a good place to start.

And so maybe we need to look at exactly how the governments of these countries have achieved this… but if you do that you will see that in most cases governments have been actively trying to reverse the drop in fertility rates, through tax incentives and maternity/paternity leave and even government-backed matchmaking programs such as in Singapore.

How dramatic has the fall in fertility rate been in just a couple of generations? South Korea is a particularly stark example. In 1960 the fertility rate was above 6. In 2017 the fertility rate in South Korea was 1.05!!!! The fertility rate required for a population to remain approximately the same is 2.1. If the whole world had the same fertility rate as South Korea the population would drop to 1/16 of its current level in 4 generations (although of course there would be significantly lag caused by an ageing population, as there is in Japan now).

I am in favour of reducing the population. I am dead against authoritarian policies to reduce the population (such as the one-child-policy in China). I think the data I have pointed you towards shows that you can reduce population while actively trying to not reduce the population if you follow the path of development in the countries I have highlighted.

I’m not much of a one for the “I’m right and you’re wrong” type of argument. I can’t make you think, I can’t force anyone to be more cleverer. I’m just dropping a few seeds of thought here.

The link between economic development (and associated improvements in quality of life such as I have previously mentioned) and fertility rate has been known and documented for quite some time. The surprising thing is that the fall in fertility rate in Asian countries has been far more dramatic than the standard models predict.

So we are stuck with a couple of schools of thought here. One is that human extinction is a worthwhile goal. The other is that sustainability is a worthwhile goal. Within the sustainability school of thought you’ve got “we’ve got to reduce the population” on one hand and “we need to focus on reducing our impact on the environment”. I think we’ve got to do both. The good news is, as I have shown, that we can reduce population without even directly trying. So the focus needs to be on economic development with a particular focus on sustainability.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

It was more accepted previously, it seems.
But, like all science bs, it swings back and forth.

It's still broadly accepted dude!

I have typed up one wall of text already today, I won't overload the bandwidth with another just yet. Maybe I'll get back to it in a few days and provide some facts and sh#t.

[Calandale]

The point is that you don’t need policies designed to reduce population growth. In fact that is the last thing you need.
You need policies designed to improve quality of life in several important ways.

Oh yes. Quality of life is so much higher when we pack people in like sardines.


But, the question isn't about the quality of human life, but the effect on the environment.
You're answering a different question. Still incorrectly, but different.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

The point is that you don’t need policies designed to reduce population growth. In fact that is the last thing you need.
You need policies designed to improve quality of life in several important ways.

Oh yes. Quality of life is so much higher when we pack people in like sardines.


But, the question isn't about the quality of human life, but the effect on the environment.
You're answering a different question. Still incorrectly, but different.

You didn't read my wall of text, did you?

Understandable.

You've taken the opposite meaning to what I intended.

[Calandale]

You didn't read my wall of text, did you?

Understandable.

You've taken the opposite meaning to what I intended.

lol - of course not. 


It's not MY problem if you write too much.


But...why would you lead with something you didn't mean? The only good excuse
is satire, and I don't see that.


In the end, I do agree with you that (paraphrasing here) we gotta do both human extinction and sustainability though.

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

You didn't read my wall of text, did you?

Understandable.

You've taken the opposite meaning to what I intended.

lol - of course not. 


It's not MY problem if you write too much.


But...why would you lead with something you didn't mean? The only good excuse
is satire, and I don't see that.


In the end, I do agree with you that (paraphrasing here) we gotta do both human extinction and sustainability though.

It's something I'm really, really interested in and I had no idea how many words I had typed until I hit "Post".

Then I thought "nobody's gonna ready that". And I was correct.

I'm gonna have to work hard to limit the words on the extinctions one.

Basically the TLDR version is that birth rate roughly tracks downward according to certain development milestones such as education for girls, employment opportunity for girls, lowering the infant mortality rate, etc.

There are no countries that could remotely be considered "First World" where the fertility rate is sufficient to even maintain their current population (that being 2.1). Fertility rate being the number of children that an average woman produces in her lifetime.

One example I gave was South Korea. Fertility rate in 1960 was 6+. Currently sitting at 1.05 - or about half the rate required to even maintain the population at its current level.

So yeah, development and improvement in quality of life, particularly for women, is by far the most effective population control measure yet devised.

[Calandale]

It's not enough though. Not on its own.


There has to be a technological breakthrough to greatly reduce the footprint per-capita.
Honestly though, I suspect we need a larger technological advancement than that anyhow -
because I'm convinced we're over the tipping point, with methane releases having begun.

[El]

about five billion people will have to cease to exist.

they will eventually