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GregBussey
Guest
You go too far, man!
Alrighty then.
Amen, Brother.
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wynnejj
Guest
36.8 billion acres (total world land acreage) divided by 7 billion people is more like 5 acres per person.
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GregBussey
Guest
You’re right, somewhere along the line I conflated acres with percentages. The real numbers are:
1,048 square feet for every person on earth if we were all stuffed into Texas and all buildings were only single-story.
Texas is only about 1% of the earth’s habitable land so about 99% of the earth’s habitable land would then be unoccupied and available for food/energy production.
My questions stands - how much land do you need?
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TheWarriorMonk
Guest
Once again, it’s entirely dependent on the amount of available resources. That’s obvious; historically, just look at the number of people living in the middle of the desert (not near a body of water) or Arctic versus areas near rivers with fertile land.
If you have tons of relatively cheap resources, like we current have at this moment in time, you can temporary force nature to produce beyond its means.
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Monte_RCMS
Guest
Some people living “in the middle of the desert” have develop arid-land agriculture and have thrived. [The people of Israel stand out in this regard.] [Others? … not so much. AND the others refuse to adopt Israeli-developed “technology”, some of which is ancient and not modern at all.]
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Ridgerunner
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I don’t think we know what the “means” of nature are. But for humans to eat at all, they have to manipulate the environment, and always have. Burning off prairies to increase new grass for buffalo, after all, is a manipulation. So is sowing a few seeds of some primitive form of triticale.
I recall reading that back during the Roman Empire, the population of what is now France was about half what it is now. And that was before anybody had even invented the horse collar, and underutilized land tempted the Teutons to cross the Rhine into it. So is France overpopulated now? Since it exports food, one would doubt it.
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TheWarriorMonk
Guest
It is reasonable to assume that they are the ones that have existed for all time for all animals, barring the human species for the past 150 years or so. It is not reasonable to assume that in a few hundred or so we will be relying on fossil fuels.
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TheWarriorMonk
Guest
BTW, the calculations here regarding land available per person make some very large assumptions: No other animals exist on earth. Once you start including other animals, especially large ones that require a much greater area than humans for sustenance, the amount of available land area goes down dramatically. Eat the equivalent of one cow a year and the land required per person just went up a few acres. It’s no coincidence that countries like China eat a whole lot less meat than, say, the U.S.
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Ridgerunner
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You do know the “necessary” number of acres/cow is going down, don’t you?
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Ridgerunner
Guest
No one is saying we will be relying on fossil fuels a few hundred years or so from now.
But neither is the capacity of the land limited to what animals got from it in the absence of man.
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wynnejj
Guest
You can’t ask me that question. It’ll only start a Texas range war.
Some wheres earlier in the thread, 1/2 acre per person was mentioned … but I don’t think that was with the idea of sustainable farming techniques, but more with our current agricultural techniques.
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TheWarriorMonk
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Thanks to fossil fuels!
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TheWarriorMonk
Guest
No, but if population at that time is anywhere near today’s level or higher, it’s a given that some other stored energy source with positive EROEI MUST be found. That’s the constant through all of this.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
No. Thanks to new techniques which, if used properly, actually reduce the use of fossil fuels.
I’m starting some of those myself, and they do work. However, I will add that they take a lot more planning and more capital investment per acre than the old methods of just throwing a bunch of cows, willy-nilly out into as big a pasture as you can afford and pouring a lot of fertilizer around if your grass gets short on you, then feeding a bunch of grain if your cows start looking a bit peaked.
I’ll add that some of the methods are really very new. But one has to keep in mind that we’re talking about a great deal of land here. About 1/3 of the U.S. is grassland, and changing anything about it is laborious. But it isn’t all the same. You wouldn’t do the same thing in South Texas that you would do in southern Missouri, for example.
Ranching, if done at all well, requires very little in the way of fossil fuel use.
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Ridgerunner
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I do not purport to be an expert on any of this. But your statement requires three prior assumptions: First, that the population will be at or above what it is now, Second, that peak population and some kind of energy barrier will coincide, and Third, that only stored energy will then be economical.
That’s a lot of assumptions, any one or more of which might not be true, and depending on who you believe, probably won’t be true.
As to the last of the three, it is presently the case that solar, wind, tide, heat transfer, whatever, are not economical relatively speaking in the first world; that is, relative to the cost of fossil fuels. But in some parts of the world, first world fossil fuel usage is already unaffordable or nearly so, and always was. Prosperity itself has an effect on what is affordable. Since we don’t know what the remainder of the world’s economies will be like a hundred or more years from now, we can’t predict what will be an economically viable energy source and what will not be.
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GregBussey
Guest
What about manna from heaven, quail from the sky and water from rock? No energy investment required. See Matthew 6:26. Yes, mankind should work to solve the perceived problems of the world, but let’s not lose faith in Providence.
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simplequest
Guest
The assertion that overpopulation is a myth is ridiculous. Obviously at some point there would be too many people for the earth to sustain. I don’t really understand why so many conservative Catholics take this view.
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Crescentinus
Guest
Simple. Because the charge of “overpopulation” is used by the eugenicists who seek to remove groups of people out of existence. I used to agree to the idea of overpopulation, until I found out that this alarmism is not going to work.
It didn’t work with Malthus, it didn’t work with Erlich and it’s not going to work.
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SamH
Guest
Because very single prediction of “over population” has been not just wrong, but embarrassingly wrong.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
It’s very difficult to predict the future. I remember seeing old shows from the past in which it was predicted by now we would be flying around in cities in flying cars of uncertain power source, wearing funny suits like those in Star Trek and being waited on at table by talking robots.
I also recall reading that back in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a real “horse crisis” going on in the U.S. Cities had grown enormously after the Civil War. So had industry and transportation. There were steam trains, of course, but most intra-city traffic was by horse drawn conveyance. In the countryside, better plows and harvesting machines demanded ever more horses as well. Fully 1/3 of agricultural production in the U.S. was required just to support all of those horses. Cities had turned into miasmic horse-sewers, which was next to impossible to deal with. Not as pervasive, but a serious problem nevertheless, was horse death. Horses fell dead or dying on the streets and people often simply unhitched them, got another team and left the body where it lay. So many were the stables throughout cities that rats and other vermin teemed in them and outside them. Some, but not many, horse diseases could be transmitted to humans. Some predicted disaster just over the horizon, and they might have been right about that.
Except that the internal combustion engine and widespread use of electricity for trolleys came along shortly thereafter and changed everything.
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