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>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated <looks at the world today> Seems to me like that prediction is pr

>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated <looks at the world today> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.

shubhamjain 1y ago
Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
- catmanjan 1y ago
  >food is largely a solved problem It really isn't...
  - samarthr1 1y ago
    *logistics of food is not solved?
    - jl6 1y ago
      Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer). The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.
      - rat87 1y ago
        The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now
  - adrianN 1y ago
    Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…
    - matheusmoreira 1y ago
      There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    Distribution is an issue, but the imminent capacity issue perceived in the late 1960s when The Population Bomb was written was already being solved when it was entering the popular consciousness (but the impact of the solutions had not been fully appreciated) by the Green Revolution through high-yield crop varieties and other advanced in agriculture.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    Yeah, spoken like someone who only understands food as something that magically and without fail appears on their local stores.
- darkmarmot 1y ago
  We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
  - dgfl 1y ago
    The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally. Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
- coldtea 1y ago
  >However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis. The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).
  - rat87 1y ago
    We are not on track for famines due to lack of food production. It's been solved. There is more trade then ever people are richer then ever and therefore less likely to have kids. 1 child per family law was a gross violation of human rights that likely did not significantly change the birth rate compared to other countries
- reeredfdfdf 1y ago
  "We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem." Solved problem for now. A large part of world's agriculture is dependent on stable rainfalls and temperatures. If climate change gets bad enough, a big collapse in world's food production capability might happen.
  - sdoering 1y ago
    "Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here. We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will. There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.
zdragnar 1y ago
The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production. Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.
- Unearned5161 1y ago
  I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model. People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.
  - throwup238 1y ago
    What were those variables?
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.
    - Paianni 1y ago
      The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.
throw0101c 1y ago
> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track. For an interest take on this debate (?) I recommend the book The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (who also wrote 1491 and 1493): > In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth. * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-and-the-prophet-by-charles-c-mann/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann

>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated <looks at the world today> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.

shubhamjain 1y ago

Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.

catmanjan 1y ago
>food is largely a solved problem It really isn't...
- samarthr1 1y ago
  *logistics of food is not solved?
  - jl6 1y ago
    Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer). The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.
    - rat87 1y ago
      The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now
- adrianN 1y ago
  Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  Distribution is an issue, but the imminent capacity issue perceived in the late 1960s when The Population Bomb was written was already being solved when it was entering the popular consciousness (but the impact of the solutions had not been fully appreciated) by the Green Revolution through high-yield crop varieties and other advanced in agriculture.
- coldtea 1y ago
  Yeah, spoken like someone who only understands food as something that magically and without fail appears on their local stores.
darkmarmot 1y ago
We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
- dgfl 1y ago
  The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally. Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
coldtea 1y ago
>However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis. The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).
- rat87 1y ago
  We are not on track for famines due to lack of food production. It's been solved. There is more trade then ever people are richer then ever and therefore less likely to have kids. 1 child per family law was a gross violation of human rights that likely did not significantly change the birth rate compared to other countries
reeredfdfdf 1y ago
"We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem." Solved problem for now. A large part of world's agriculture is dependent on stable rainfalls and temperatures. If climate change gets bad enough, a big collapse in world's food production capability might happen.
- sdoering 1y ago
  "Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here. We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will. There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.

zdragnar 1y ago

The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club of rome were undone within a few years with the "green revolution" which saw massive increases in food production. Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the 1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has come to pass.

Unearned5161 1y ago
I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model. People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.
- throwup238 1y ago
  What were those variables?
  - galangalalgol 1y ago
    I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.
  - Paianni 1y ago
    The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.

throw0101c 1y ago

> Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track. For an interest take on this debate (?) I recommend the book The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (who also wrote 1491 and 1493): > In forty years, Earth's population will reach ten billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth. * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-and-the-prophet-by-charles-c-mann/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Mann