Mind Over Matter
Registered Senior Member
Show your stat on the ground coverage. Stack people into a 100 story building and now you only need one one-hundredth of a "Texas" to give everyone 1100 feet. Over-population is a joke. Reminds me of the episode on the myth of landfills. What is is with ostensibly scientific minds forgetting all about scale?
There's no such thing as over-population. However, there is over-consumption and improper use of resources.
There is always a call to reduce poor populations. However, rich populations consume MUCH more than poor populations and poor populations have a MUCH greater need for family connections/support and a young workforce. The reality is rich populations don't want to "help" poor populations - they just want the poor populations to disappear to make more room for the so-called advanced societies of wealthier populations.
Is it a coincidence that calls for population control usually come from the wealthier people instead of from the poor people who endure the brunt of resource scarcity? With wealth comes greater resource consumption, including space, goods, and services. Since goods require labor to produce, and services are direct consumption of human labor, wealthier people are the ones creating more demand for human capital - and then complaining about over-population! If resource-utilization was reformed to a peak level of efficiency, I could begin to understand why over-population concerns would come up for discussion. However, the fact that people complain about population without doing enough to reform resource-utilization leads me to believe that the real political interest behind population-control is political-economic control over human capital so that wealthy people can guarantee their position of power vis-a-vis those they don't want to extend their way of life to include. Democracy has allowed prosperity to be expanded to a relatively large proportion of the global population and, as a result, there is sufficient political economic solidarity among the global middle-class to support widespread population and migration control that prevents poorer economies from expanding their human capital to achieve the same levels of prosperity that westerners have achieved by expanding that population. Then, the prosperous fortresses of the developed world can relegate auxiliary industries like the harvesting of various natural resources and agricultural goods to the global poor, who will never be permitted to expand their prosperity and power to a level where they get to decide for themselves how much to expand their populations and resource-utilization. What should happen is that developed economies should develop lifestyles that are sustainable enough that they are attainable for everyone globally, and then integrate the global population into that economic culture. At that point, everyone will be able to decide for themselves how much to reproduce because they will have achieved the maximum standard of living enjoyed anywhere, which will put them in the same position of conserving resources that developed economies are in. This is not just valid for the opposition between "the west and rest" but also for different income levels within developed economies. If poor people in the US and EU had attained a level of prosperity that they didn't want to lose, they would have the same concerns about having too many children as many middle- and upper- class people have developed.
As for water supply, try reverse osmosis. We have a lot of water in the oceans. Necessity is the mother of invention.
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