Ah, yes, technology. Wonderful stuff yet a double-edged sword, the resources for which are contributing in large measure to many of our environmental concerns.
The resource needs of the technology that drove the previous paradigm shift, the Industrial Revolution, had far more drastic environmental consequences than the resource needs of the Electronic Revolution. Look at how China gave everybody a telephone without cutting any trees down to turn them into telephone poles. Look at how telecommuting promises to reduce America's petroleum consumption by 25-35%. Look at how Estonia has become a player in the software market using almost entirely intellectual capital rather than physical--and how Russia launched an effective attack against it without damaging a single molecule of the earth's physical structure.
Still, it acts also as a contraceptive in my observation. No one is going to get pregnant while texting or playing video games.
As I noted earlier,
prosperity is widely hailed as the most effective contraceptive since it eliminates most of the traditional incentives to have large families, such as infant mortality, keeping a farm running, no social security, nothing else to do at night. All of these diminutions are the direct effects of industrial and/or electronic technology: modern medicine, the ascendence of non-agricultural work, huge economic surpluses, and a dizzying variety of hobbies and other entertainment.
Population densities are variable around the globe and wherever a region cannot support the population, I would consider the habitat to be overpopulated.
But that too is a function of technology. As we already know:
- Paleolithic nutrition technology (hunting and gathering) could only support a world population of a million or two.
- Neolithic technology (stone age farming and animal husbandry) could feed maybe ten times that many.
- Iron age technology (metal plows, traction animals towing wheeled carts, etc.) added another zero.
- Industrial technology (machines driven by the chemical energy in fossil fuels rather than human and animal musclepower) pushed that into the billions.
So depending on the level of technology penetration in any given region of the planet, there can be a phenomenal difference between the carrying capacity of two regions of equivalent size, climate and resource availability.
There are still quite a few places that are barely out of the Stone Age and can't quite feed their people. At the other extreme there are industrialized and largely-computerized regions like NAFTA that could feed something like half of the world's population without breaking a sweat, if only the food distribution network could reach them.
As I've pointed out before, the (by world standards) ridiculously underpopulated USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Argentina and Chile could probably feed twice as many people as there on earth. As the end of the current ice age (whether or not our own carbon contributions are accelerating global warming) turns Greenland and Siberia into farmland, we could probably feed the Klingons and Vulcans too.
To examine the population in a global aspect is a false paradigm, IMO. The math might work but demonstrably human nature does not follow such simple logic. Why don't we share the resources with those who have none? What is preventing us?
You're looking at the problem from the wrong side. The impediments are at
their end, not ours. Non-governmental charities in the United States alone ship a veritable mountain of food to the Third World. Unfortunately when it arrives it comes under the control of their despotic leaders. They sell it on the black market and use the money to buy champagne, armored SUV's, Swiss villas, and of course lots and lots of weapons to make war against the despot in the next country over, or against their own highly dissatisfied population.
Fortunately even this problem is yielding to technology. The main weapon of a despot against his own people is not guns but ignorance. The internet and cellular telephony have opened up the entire world to its most downtrodden people. They're learning to read, arguably their own most powerful weapon against repression. They're making contact with each other so they can organize, and with people outside the country who can provide at least encouragement and information, and sometimes even tangible help.
Twenty years ago village leaders in the world's benighted countries blessed Jim Henson and CTV for "Sesame Street" because it appeared so innocuous that their leaders didn't crack down when the village's one TV set was tuned to it for half an hour every afternoon. That one TV show taught their children that it was okay to strive for a better life than their parents had, and gave them the basic tool to begin striving: reading and writing.
Imagine how those village leaders feel about the internet.
With every passing decade, the number of people living under despotic governments drops precipitously. (Even though by our smug Western standards we still call China "despotic," the people who live there with their jobs, cars, TVs, computers
and Confucian philosophy of respect for their elders no longer think so.)
Simply using the ability to produce food as a parameter is also inadequate for our nutritional needs are but a small part of the total impacts of our species on this planet.
Sure, but don't forget Maslow's Hierarchy. We have to feed everybody (Step 1: Survival) before we can even begin to contemplate taking their hands and escorting them to the higher steps.
