🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3ka10p$k2k@onramp.arc.nasa.gov>,
John S. Watson - FSC <watson@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov> wrote:
>In article <3k7ron$9vg_001@simi.rain.org> noah@rain.org (Matt Noah) writes:

[snip]

>I don't know if they still publish any "real" scientific
>papers, or where their funding comes from (other than a pay check 
>from Stanford University) or been "drummed out of the scientific community",
>whatever that means.

	In the 70s, Paul Erlich made a $1000 bet with some other 
scientist (forgot his name) that the worldwide crop yields would drop in 
the 1980s because of overpopulation and overfarming.  He lost bigtime - 
crop yeilds more than doubled.  Erlich's doomsday predictions have fallen 
out of favor with a large and growing chunk of the scientific community 
in the last decade or so.

>I've somewhat divided feelings about their work ... on the one hand
>I'm very pro-environment (love the outdoors) and they've helped convinced me 
>that overpopulation is one of the biggest environmental problems we face  
>(yes there are others).  

	However, this problem will most likely solve itself in the next 50
years or so as the third world goes thru the "demographic shift", which 
is the transition from a primarily rural, agricultural, subsistence-based 
existence to an urban, non-agricultural one.  It has been shown time and 
again that wealth and education are the best methods of birth control - 
the US population would be *shrinking now (avg. of 1.7 kids per family) 
of not for immigration.  Eventually, this'll happen to the entire world.

>Adding about 100 million MORE people 
>onto the planet every year isn't good (even though I'm sure I'd 
>like each and every one of them).  

	It's not the people so much as it is the manner in which they are 
supported.  A large part of the overpopulated third world uses extremely 
low-tech and environment-damaging farming methods.  Here in the US, we 
can get many, many times as much yield from the same amount of land as 
they can.  If the entire world used the latest and most efficient farming 
methods, the world could support a population of 20 billion without any 
problems.  This is why it is so important to pull the third world into 
the 21st century, technologically speaking, as quickly as we possibly can.

>Just as I think the 5.6 billion 
>people already here (hi everybody!) are really wonderful folks (never met
>a human I didn't like), I think that is way to many for this planet to 
>handle over the long run.  

	The entire population of the world, if housed with the same
population density as New York City, would only take up a small fraction
of the eastern US.  Now, I personally wouldn't enjoy living in NYC because
it is a bit crowded for my taste, but I could definitely live with it if I
had to.  We are a long way from exhausting the theoretical population
carrying capacity of the Earth. 

>However, I find most of their solutions
>to the overpopulation problem (although I like them and vote in a minute
>to put them in place) aren't going to happen (for many reasons ... political,
>social, etc, etc).  Which makes me rather sad for the future generation(s).

	Like I said, the population growth curve will probably peak in 
about 50 years or so.  It has already peaked in most of the first world 
(Europe, the US and Canada, Japan) and is approaching that in much of the 
"emerging" third world and eastern Europe.  Most of Africa and Southeast 
Asia are the stragglers here.


-- 
************ Jon Taylor *************************************************
* "For something that has spread with all the forethought of kudzu, the *
* Internet isn't half bad." - Newsweek, 2/27/95 *************************
************************************ taylorj@gaia.ecs.csus.edu **********