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The inclusion of "land use" and "water use" immediately makes this suspect to me. What's wrong with using land for agriculture or using rainfall and water? Wit
by bhawks 3y ago
The inclusion of "land use" and "water use" immediately makes this suspect to me. What's wrong with using land for agriculture or using rainfall and water?
With the article calling out wheat farming as one of their top concerns, what do they want as an alternative? Starving people? Depopulation?
You can make strong environmental arguments without reaching to such extremes. It actually undercuts the position.
- sanxiyn 3y agoTheoretically speaking, not all water use is renewable like rainfall, you can in fact deplete aquifers, and ancient near east in fact desertified due to unsustainable water use. Ditto for land use, you can in fact erode and degrade topsoil, ancient near east etc. Skimming the report, it doesn't do reasonable job of taking land use and water use into account, but in principle, there's nothing wrong with taking unsustainable portion of land use and water use into account.
- endliner 3y agoFreshwater and fertile topsoil are easily exhaustible resources. There are rivers (e.g. Colorado River) that are drying up due to overuse, and much of human waste gets either polluted with chemicals or ends up flushed into the ocean, never to be reclaimed. Once you dry up one river too many, you'll have both starvation and depopulation, but also daily shellings.
- aeternum 3y agoNew rivers can also form, and volcanoes create new fertile land. How much does the Mississippi spill into the ocean and why don't you consider that a massive waste of freshwater?
- imtringued 3y agoAre humans patient enough to wait for the next volcanoe?
- jonahbenton 3y agoI like people, and eating meat, and lots of other things...but I and just about all of us are burning through the infrastructure that makes humans possible. And when humans aren't possible, there won't be any more humans. That's reality. The physical systems on which we depend for survival do not care about what we want. Our only hope for maintaining a human population is to recognize that.