[32519]

On the 31st of October 2011 the world’s population passed the 7 billion mark. We are already faced with rising unemployment, rising pollution (both water and air), rising food prices, rising starvation, dwindling resources (minerals, rain forests, fish, etc) etc. Habitable land is decreasing as deserts enlarge. Since the year 2,000 natural disasters appear to be increasing in both number and intensity. Scientists blame this on climate change.
Countries such as the USA are doing their bit in food production. In my own country, South Africa, we have a government obsessed with land redistribution. We have close to a 100% failure rate on all farming land redistributed. Our neighbours, Zimbabwe, were once known as the bread basket of Africa. Now they have become a basket case. Continued civil war across the continent has seen food production drop to production for own consumption in many places.
Social unrest is often seen in places where rising food prices isn’t matched with a rise in income. Other forms of social unrest have seen the governments of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya toppled. The Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan remain on a knife edge.

How many years do we have left before Mother Earth implodes upon herself saying, “I can’t go on. I’ve given everything I have to give.”

[mike777]

 32519, on 2011-December-11, 01:14, said:

On the 31st of October 2011 the world’s population passed the 7 billion mark. We are already faced with rising unemployment, rising pollution (both water and air), rising food prices, rising starvation, dwindling resources (minerals, rain forests, fish, etc) etc. Habitable land is decreasing as deserts enlarge. Since the year 2,000 natural disasters appear to be increasing in both number and intensity. Scientists blame this on climate change.
Countries such as the USA are doing their bit in food production. In my own country, South Africa, we have a government obsessed with land redistribution. We have close to a 100% failure rate on all farming land redistributed. Our neighbours, Zimbabwe, were once known as the bread basket of Africa. Now they have become a basket case. Continued civil war across the continent has seen food production drop to production for own consumption in many places.
Social unrest is often seen in places where rising food prices isn’t matched with a rise in income. Other forms of social unrest have seen the governments of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya toppled. The Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan remain on a knife edge.

How many years do we have left before Mother Earth implodes upon herself saying, “I can’t go on. I’ve given everything I have to give.”

You answer your own question.

Bad policy leads to bad things not more people lead to bad things...follow your own logic.

btw in general mother earth is the biggest killer of all.....much more than war,,,,etc..

[benlessard]

We are using very little of earth habitable land and with future knowledge we might maximize earth & sun ressources in a way we cannot imagine today. So it would not surprised me that we might be 100 billion or more with mostly good standard of living in 100-150 years, im not saying its likely but imo its surely possible.

[Fluffy]

Natural disasters will balance population

[32519]

 mike777, on 2011-December-11, 01:19, said:

You answer your own question.

Bad policy leads to bad things not more people lead to bad things...follow your own logic.

btw in general mother earth is the biggest killer of all.....much more than war,,,,etc..

I merely posed a question to something which I am passionate about; the future of our planet (including nature). This is my first venture into The Water Cooler. It is here for the discussion of any non-bridge related topics. More people who are hungry and unemployed does lead to bad things.

Just like Mother Earth, Mother Nature is also crying out for help. Some Eastern cultures believe that the rhino horn contains medicinal properties leading to poaching. Just over two months ago the Sumatran rhino has been poached to extinction for its horn. The same thing happened in Western Africa. In South Africa the rise in rhino poaching over the past three years has been staggering. Zero progress has been made to stem the tide. If the current rate of poaching remains unchecked it’s only a matter of years before the rhino is poached into extinction here as well.

The unemployment rate in South Africa is disproportionately high. Additionally an unskilled labour force equates to low wages. One poached rhino horn sells for roughly USD 7,500 (R60 000 in South African rands). That is a huge amount of money for the unemployed and the unskilled. The Eastern countries in turn sell the horn for roughly USD 125,000. Poaching will only stop once the rhino is extinct here as well.

[mike777]

good point also at last count mother nature killed millions if not hundreds of millions last year and billions over the years.

lets focus on the big picture please and not worry about mother nature crying out for help on one hand while killing millions and millions every year. MOther nature is the worlds biggest killer.

Humans killing rhinos is terrible...mother nature killing many many more humans is worse let alone all the other things mother nature kills off each year.

[kenberg]

Here is the problem. Well, one aspect of it. I did not know about the rhino, although I am aware in general terms about poaching, endangered species, etc. Now that I do know about the rhino, I have zero plans to do anything about it. And I am in a comfortable position where I have the time to think about such things. It's not that I don't address any problems, but there are a lot of problems. There are quite a few people on this earth who really have no time to consider the fate of the rhino. Or to contemplate the needs of the planet.

I am fairly pessimistic about the long term. Knowledge about problems definitely does not always translate into action in solving the problems. If it did, I would weigh less. And that's a simple problem that does not require global cooperation.

[mwalimu02]

Didn't scientists discover a livable planet? mars or something

[benlessard]

If you look at history you will see that many things that make us panic or worry today, are things they already happen at one point or another in history and somewhat disappear or got solved only to come back a couple of century later. My main worry is that with technological advance no 2nd chance weapons will be so common. Im 50 times more worried about nuclear war or equivalent than anything else.

Quote

Natural disasters will balance population

Most likely the eat or die law of nutrition

[blackshoe]

One thing that bothered me recently was reading that some parents in the US are now preventing their children from getting vaccinated. This seems incredibly stupid. We've almost eradicated many diseases. Eliminating vaccinations may give some of those diseases a chance to come back - when doctors and nurses will have no experience diagnosing them, and these unvaccinated children will be easily susceptible to them. Who will these parents blame if their children should die from one of these diseases? Not themselves, I'm sure.

[barmar]

The reason is that many parents are the victims of misinformation. There was a study a while back that claimed that vaccinations were linked to autism. Although the study has since been debunked, and the journal it was pulished in has even printed a retraction, there's a bunch of prominent people promoting the idea (they apparently think the retraction was the result of a conspiracy among big pharma, the government, and the journals). Many of these parents say to themselves "I got chicken pox or whooping cough when I was a child, and I survived, but I sure don't want to risk turning my kid autistic."

It's really hard to squelch this meme. Autism apparently HAS been on the rise in recent decades, and scared parents will grasp onto any possible cause.

[kenberg]

Is this (non-)linkage really settled? I am not contradicting, really asking. The rise in autism seems to be dramatic and unexplained, and I have not followed it closely enough to know whether the claimed linkage is totally bogus, unproven, unlikely but maybe, or what. As far as I know, all the grandkids are getting all of their shots but I am not sure how the evidence falls here.

When I was of parenting age I knew one guy in another city whose kid was diagnosed as autistic. I knew nothing about autism and had to ask what that meant. Now it seems to be rampant.

[barmar]

From what I've heard, the general concensus of the medical community is that there's no linkage. They don't have a good explanation for the rise in autism (they're not even sure how much of it is a real rise versus improved diagnosis), but they seem pretty sure that the vaccination link is bogus.

http://cid.oxfordjou...t/48/4/456.full

[onoway]

Wow
The earth is NOT the enemy!! When we believe it to be such we are barely half a step away from the people who used to beat it with sticks in the spring to make it behave and give a good yield to the crops. The problem is that we have been conditioned into the weird belief that we are somehow superior to and apart from the earth and can force it to do what we want. That will only work for a very short time, relatively speaking.

Thus, you can drench the soil in chemicals and force it to produce a crop BUT..by doing so you slaughter the life in the soil which makes it healthy. How can you grow healthy crops in unhealthy soil? So you get stray insects and plants and viruses which come in to try to rebalance things and then those are slaughtered with poisonous pesticides and herbicides (some traces of which probably are residual in food crops..this is something which has also been mentioned as possibly culpable for the dramatic rise in autism. There is also some fairly compelling evidence that these things are involved in the bee colony collapse disorder.) The problem is that these things have time on their side; thus as an example we now have a growing problem with corn borers which were supposed to be foiled by the GMO corn. Instead of foiling them, we seem now to be developing superbugs in the fields, much as we have developed superbugs of a different sort in the hospitals. For which we have pretty much limited or no defense when they show up.

Such a method of farming is not sustainable over the long haul; already this is becoming more and more obvious; and it will become even more so as the price of fertilizers and the various "cides" rises as the price of oil rises. In the meantime; a 30 year study has shown that farming organically not only yields better but is more profitable than conventional farming.(after a 3 year adjustment period for the land to try to heal itself.)

Joel Salatin has determined that his operations yield up to 4 times as much food than the neighboring farms produce on a per acre basis and he brings in NO chemicals of any kind. Geoff Lawton has brought fertility back to saline barren land near the Dead Sea. again without chemicals. Greg Judy has taken "worn out" and waterless farms and brought creeks back to flow and fields back to fertility again without chemicals or even bought seed. Sepp Holtzer has brought dry LAKES back into sustainability in Spain. A man in India whose name I forget took a pile of rock and sand, with two dry wells and turned it over time into such a jungle of trees and vegetation that he could have sold it for a big resort to have been built there; the wells came back into flow as well. Dry wells have also been brought back into flow in Africa. Will Allen claims to be able to raise a million pounds of food on 3 acres of land and there is basis for the claim. All of these successes rested on having a sympathy to and a willingness to work within natural systems.

The point is that all these people pay attention to what they observe and they do NOT have the attitude that the earth=enemy but rather that the earth can provide everything we need. However, only if we use what is there wisely and as it is supposed to be used; otherwise we will face disaster. Who knows what we are losing when we lose species daily to extinction? Many if not most of our medicines are derived originally from plants and natural life, albeit now tweaked and artificially produced so as to provide a healthy profit to drug companies.

The Fertile Crescent could again become fertile instead of dry and arid. We've proven we know how to do it now, (or at least some of us do and they are spreading the information as far and fast as possible) and it isn't dependant on exotic chemicals or GMO seeds, it's dependant on a cooperative and open minded attitude.

Saying mother nature kills off people is just silly; of course people die, we are part of the cycle of things and that is the part of the heritage of existing; even mountains eventually will cease to be mountains. For that matter, even the sun will at some point cease to exist, if I understand it correctly. Our life span is somewhere between that of a fruit fly and a mountain so what's the point of fussing about it? Just be grateful you weren't born a fruit fly! Not to say that we shouldn't try to make things comfortable/better for ourselves but when things get too unbalanced nature tries to put things back into balance and then you get things which make us uncomfortable (or even dead) like droughts & pandemics.

In the larger scheme of things mother earth doesn't really seem to consider us as having much more importance than anything else in this big old world. Since we tend to think of ourselves as being the favorite or maybe even the only child, that's upsetting to many of us and we get resentful and angry and try to show that we won't be messed with, dammit. That ranges from someone soaking the lawn in weed-n-feed so as to kill the dandeliions (which probably are more nutritious than 2/3 of the carefully tended veggies in the back garden) to people trenching out rivers to make them easier for boats to navigate (and then blaming mother nature for the resultant flooding)to elaborate schemes for changing the weather.

Many of our problems , imo, come from the idea that we are somehow not really part of the whole scenario; we are somehow superior to it all and therefore in charge, and we really aren't. We are in charge just enough to be able to really screw things up. As a species. we need to grow up or we will be as the child with the matches; heading for disaster. we have way more power and knowlege than we have the understanding/maturity to use wisely.

If we could get to the point of everyone having enough food and sufficient shelter then many problems would disappear, but that isn't the sort of society that's been promoted for decades now. Years ago it was shown that there wasn't any need for anyone to starve; the food is there but the distribution is wonky. For a time farmers in the States were making more money from land they were paid NOT to put into crop than from the crops they actually grew. If there isn't a profit to be made then to hell with the people who are starving. Until this sort of value system changes we are in a sinking ship.

[mike777]

"Wow
The earth is NOT the enemy!! When we believe it to be such we are barely half a step away from the people who used to beat it with sticks in the spring to make it behave and give a good yield to the crops. The problem is that we have been conditioned into the weird belief that we are somehow superior to and apart from the earth and can force it to do what we want. That will only work for a very short time, relatively speaking."

Could not disagree more strongly.

In fact we are in a war to the death with mother nature.
Yes we are basically in a war trying to bend mother nature to mankind's will.

To not understand that mother nature is the greatest killer of all living things is to just not know the facts, and bury your head in the sand.

Your whole point of view seems to stem from the fact you do not believe that mankind is more important.

[onoway]

 mike777, on 2011-December-12, 20:26, said:

"Wow
The earth is NOT the enemy!! When we believe it to be such we are barely half a step away from the people who used to beat it with sticks in the spring to make it behave and give a good yield to the crops. The problem is that we have been conditioned into the weird belief that we are somehow superior to and apart from the earth and can force it to do what we want. That will only work for a very short time, relatively speaking."

Could not disagree more strongly.

In fact we are in a war to the death with mother nature.
Yes we are basically in a war trying to bend mother nature to mankind's will.

To not understand that mother nature is the greatest killer of all living things is to just not know the facts, and bury your head in the sand.

Your whole point of view seems to stem from the fact you do not believe that mankind is more important.

more important than what? Air? water? How can it possibly be remotely sensible to be at war with something for which we depend on for our very existence? You cannot survive more than what - 6 minutes without air, a week at most without water, 60 or so days without food? So how does it make any sense at all to feel that what provides us with these things should be treated as an enemy? It seems to me to be the very height of ingratitude to say the least.

You seem to be totally missing the point that without "mother nature" nothing that we think of as life, including people, would exist in the first place TO die or be killed. Someone pointed out that if all the insects in the world disappeared permanently overnight somehow, within a very short period of time the land would become devoid of all plant and animal life. If on the other hand, man somehow disappeared permanently overnight, the earth would flourish. So how should I take that to mean that humans are more important even than insects? What gives us this importance except our own hubris?

[phil_20686]

There seem to be a large number of people who believe that poverty is caused by having too many children. This seems wrongheaded. The economy is not a zero sum game, if you have another worker you have another consumer. Most technologies, and particularly innovation, benefit from having larger markets.

The idea that the earth is close to to its food producing capacity is basically laughable. We are even now getting to the point where nuclear power + hydroponics can produce virtually unlimited food in high rise towers that take up very little land. Moreover, Europe is producing significantly less food than it used to, by deliberate choice. We literally pay our farmers not to produce.

If you divided the planets population into families of 4, and gave each one a two up two down house with a garden and a picket fence, you fit them all in texas. You could grow all their food in the cornbelt.

[BunnyGo]

 blackshoe, on 2011-December-11, 19:56, said:

One thing that bothered me recently was reading that some parents in the US are now preventing their children from getting vaccinated. This seems incredibly stupid. We've almost eradicated many diseases. Eliminating vaccinations may give some of those diseases a chance to come back - when doctors and nurses will have no experience diagnosing them, and these unvaccinated children will be easily susceptible to them. Who will these parents blame if their children should die from one of these diseases? Not themselves, I'm sure.

Worse, there've been many documented deaths of infants too young to get vaccinations who would normally be covered by "herd immunity" but are not when the vaccination rate drops too low.

[phil_20686]

The question of whether vaccinations are bad for you seems strange. Even if there is a statistically significant link with autism the risk is clearly much lower than the fifteen % of children who would die in childhood if there were no vaccinations for preventable diseases.

Its another example of the perverse human attitude to risk. We are much more likely to worry about risks that we feel we can control than risks that we cannot. In many cases choosing much more risky behaviour to avoid a perceived risk. My favourite example is parents who drive their children to school because it is "safer". In fact car accidents are the single biggest killer of school age children.

Similarly, since parents cannot control diseases they do not worry about them. They just accept that it might happen or it might not. But vaccination is within your control, so people are more worried about the vaccination harming their children than about the disease. However, explaining why people are basically idiots does not prevent them from being basically idiots.

[32519]

See my previous post above.

438 Rhinos were poached in South Africa alone for their horns during 2011. The tally for 2012 already stands at 11. It is only a matter of time before the rhino is poached to extinction here as well.

There are an estimated 20,000 rhinos left world wide of which 90% can be found in South Africa. In West Africa and Sumatra the rhino has already been poached to extinction.

In South Africa the very people who are supposed to be arresting the poachers are often involved themselves. The Kruger National Park is losing rhinos at a frightening rate.

(This post has been edited.)