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Or that it results in a more sustainable world? I support a multitude of solutions but it’s also clear to me that unless we change our lifestyle to match the ve

Or that it results in a more sustainable world? I support a multitude of solutions but it’s also clear to me that unless we change our lifestyle to match the very long term future sustainability every solution is going to breakdown - just a matter of when. For example, we can plant as many trees as we want but if population grows even at the current rate we are gonna need another planet. So what’s wrong in saying we need to slow down our own expansion. Same for industrial scale agriculture. What I always find puzzling in all these conversations is the attachment people have to their lifestyle which probably evolved to where it is only in the last five decades - at most. Meat was never this readily available in history. Neither was energy. These are incredibly recent in our evolutionary period and yet they wreak havoc like nothing else.

zaroth 7y ago
> For example, we can plant as many trees as we want but if population grows even at the current rate we are gonna need another planet. In fact, population growth is slowing. [1] Claiming that we need population control is false and IMO extremely damaging to building consensus. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...
kelnos 7y ago
> So what’s wrong in saying we need to slow down our own expansion. China's former one-child policy, while reasonably successful, had its own unintended consequences (for one thing, too many people aging out of the workforce with too few to replace them). And even with their relative success, there was still a decent amount of dissent and people secretly working around the rules. And China had an authoritarian government to enforce all this. Do you really expect Western democracies to be able to push through any kind of population controls? Do you really expect, for example, the American public to get behind some kind of limits (even if just socially-enforced limits) on the number of kids they can have? That's just not going to happen.

zaroth 7y ago

> For example, we can plant as many trees as we want but if population grows even at the current rate we are gonna need another planet. In fact, population growth is slowing. [1] Claiming that we need population control is false and IMO extremely damaging to building consensus. [1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...

kelnos 7y ago

> So what’s wrong in saying we need to slow down our own expansion. China's former one-child policy, while reasonably successful, had its own unintended consequences (for one thing, too many people aging out of the workforce with too few to replace them). And even with their relative success, there was still a decent amount of dissent and people secretly working around the rules. And China had an authoritarian government to enforce all this. Do you really expect Western democracies to be able to push through any kind of population controls? Do you really expect, for example, the American public to get behind some kind of limits (even if just socially-enforced limits) on the number of kids they can have? That's just not going to happen.