From: KAMCHAR@ibm.cl.msu.edu
Newsgroups: alt.destroy.the.earth
Subject: Re: Main Impediment to Survival
Date: 13 Aug 92 22:44:31 GMT
Organization: Kamchatka Charlie

Found this in another group, and thought you folks would have fun with this
topic.  hope to see some activity with it.

later,  Kamchatka Charlie          KAMCHAR@ibm.cl.msu.edu

In an article found in alt.suburb, Jon Roland writes:
>There is a need to discuss population and its relationship to ecological and
>economic problems in somewhat different terms than is usually done. It is
>beyond the scope of this posting to try to cover the subject adequately. I am
>writing a book that will treat the subject at greater length. However, a few
>points should be considered:
>
>(1) We need to distinguish between the natural ecosystem, the geosystem, and
>the life-support system for humanity and its civilization. The first two
>overlap, but although the third now largely coincides with the first two, it
>can in principle be separated from them entirely.
>
>(2) As hunter-gatherers, the world population of humanity was probably between
>4 and 100 million, and the latter figure is probably also the carrying
capacity
>of the natural ecosystem for humanity. During most of that period, not much
>more exploitation of the geosystem (minerals) was done than that done by other
>lifeforms. With the advent of agriculture and mining, that changed rapidly.
The
>invention of herding alone was sufficient to eventually enable humanity to
>destroy the natural ecosystem, and given only a few thousand years, even a
>technology of stone axes would have destroyed all the world's forests after
>humanity discovered the rudiments of sanitation, nutrition, and disease
>control. The development of political organizations larger than the village
was
>the most important factor, however, because it led to the breakdown of
>traditional population control measures that had held populations well below
>carrying capacity.
>
>(3) The present world population of 5.5 billion is sustained only by the
>consumption of geosystem resources. If present trends continue, they will
>approach exhaustion, and we can expect world population to drop to below the
>then carrying-capacity of the natural ecosystem, which, because of the ways we
>have and will have degraded it, will be much less than 100 million -- perhaps
>less than 1 million -- worldwide. This will not happen overnight. It may take
>several hundred years. In the process, humanity will return to the stone age.
>Along the way, as civilization collapses in fits of upheaval, tragic events
>will occur. Almost all of the social and political turmoil of recent years are
>examples of this kind of thing. Earth will be reduced to a barren wasteland.
>Space resources are not a solution for Earth. If consumed as terrestrial
>resources are now, they will only result in toxic metal contamination on a
>scale that will render the surface unhabitable.
>
>(4) The real cost of geosystem and ecosystem resources are already beginning
to
>impair economic growth, despite new technology. We may have, in fact, already
>begun to peak out and may now be beginning a long decline, punctuated by
>several rapid collapses along the way. We may have already passed the point
>where it is politically possible to adopt the kinds of measures that would
>avoid catastrophe.
>
>(5) The main obstacle to avoiding economic and ecological catastrophe is our
>commitment to living in scattered cities, towns, suburbs and farms. Such an
>infrastructure is fundamentally unsustainable, no matter what conservation
>regime may be imposed. The only alternative is to begin to build cities
>designed and operated like multigeneration starships, intended to carry their
>inhabitants into a distant future using only the resources they carry with
them
>-- compact, sealed, recycling all resources, even air -- and moving everyone
>into them and off the surface of the planet, except perhaps for occasional
>visits under strictly controlled circumstances.
>
>(6) We could, in principle, build a million such cities, each holding a
million
>inhabitants, on Earth, with footprints totaling less than 1 percent of the
>Earth's land surface, and maintain humanity in civilized comfort for not only
>the 500 million years that the surface of Earth is expected to remain
habitable
>until increase solar radiation triggers a runaway greenhouse effect, but,
>underground, for the entire 5 billion years remaining until an expanding sun
>destroys the planet. The natural ecosystem could be restored to some semblance
>
>(7) There is no viable alternative between such starship cities and descent to
>a new stone age, except, perhaps, to build such starship cities in space and
>later return to Earth to restore it after the humans left behind destroy their
>civilization and the natural ecosystem.
>
>(8) Such starship cities can be build with near-term technology, but they will
>not be cheap. We can probably not afford to build more than one a year, for
>the next hundred years, by which time the political situation outside of them
>will become desperate and the cities will need to be self-sufficient and
>defensible. They are, therefore, a solution for only a few million people.
>There is no solution for most of the present 5.5 billion people on Earth or
for
>their descendants -- they won't have any.
>
>(9) Present discussions of measures to limit pollution and increase recycling
>efforts are exercises in futility, and miss the most important point.
>Development, along present lines, is not even an option, even if we totally
>dismiss the interests of future generations. The imperatives of our time are
>the survival of human civilization and the natural ecosystem. Social,
economic,
>and political justice are not options for our age. All we can hope to do is
lay
>the foundation for a distant future in which these values may become
>realizable.
>
>(10) It is left as an exercise for the reader to estimate the orders of
>magnitude of the numbers of people who may live under each of these
>alternatives over the time remaining to Earth, and to reflect on our moral
>responsibility to them given that the choice among those alternatives will be
>made by our generation.
>
>These points are discussed in more detail in an upcoming article in The
>Futurist, a publication of the World Future Society. They are based on
rigorous
>input-output analyses and computer modeling of the systems involved over
>geologic time spans.
>
>---
>
>jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
>Jon Roland
>Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
>Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141
>
Newsgroups: alt.exploding.kibo