https://www.theguardian.com/environ...c-pollution-found-in-10km-deep-mariana-trench 'Extraordinary' levels of pollutants found in 10km deep Mariana trench As Dayton says, I'm "one of those", i.e. people who believe that overpopulation is at the root of most of our problems (besides our nature as a species, I mean). And with every passing day, I'm more convinced.
One thing the human race is very good at, is an inability to clean up its own mess. The more we consume the worse it gets. Maybe we should work on efficiency before increasing consumption more?
Someone needs to find every so called scientist who thought the trench was free of pollution and tattoo trump to their forehead so we know the stupid when we see them. Maybe they could screw a workpiece into their Irish empty skull so it is just that much more obvious. What educated person would think that toxins we dump into the ocean would avoid the trench? There is probably dumping going on in the trench because they think it is a great place to hide toxic shit.
We need some common sense and we need it in charge. How are we supposed to clean up when we have people who cannot figure out garbage and toxins sink into the trench? If you cannot figure that out with your own brain, you are part of the problem. It is a trench and when you toss stuff into it the magical garbage fairy does not come down and clean your shit up. She was crippled years ago and the corporations voted to kill her off in their hospice death panels. Or she never existed, and these scientists need a new theory.
Population size isn't the problem; consumerism is. Even if the world population was halved in a hundred years, if we kept on pillaging for resources at the same rate, we'd hardly be much better off.
I disagree. I'm not saying Cut population and Bob's your uncle. But what's putting an intolerable -- very immediate, very severe -- strain on the environment we depend on for our lives is our sheer numbers. Sure, we're technically clever and we've industrialized our civilization, and consumerism is a natural outgrowth of that. I think we're evolved to be consumeristic ---- we all like stuff. And our egos prompt us to want ever more. Which an industrialized society can provide for a certain number of us, but at a big cost to the environment. So I don't think you're ever going to have a non-consumerist homo sapiens -- if we can possibly get stuff, we'll get it. However, if we cut our population by, say, 90%, we could buy ourselves time to figure out how to live with the damage already done, and hopefully stop doing the worst stuff. I'm speaking in a purely hypothetical manner. I'd be gobsmacked if this were actually to occur. So I am not optimistic. All I'm saying is that our sheer numbers make us all the more destructive to the tune of every additional degree of population growth. Our population will be radically cut relatively soon (99.9% maybe?) by good old Gaia, aka Mother Nature.
But how much of the increase in population is from people living longer as opposed to just breeding like rabbits? According to Wikipedia, the population is set to his 9.5 billion by 2050, and in the Westernized world at least, that's gonna include a sizable number of people in their eighties and nineties who'll start keeling over. Even in less developed parts of the world, there's been a decline in birth rates as the population--and especially women--become more educated. Of course, Trump could get nukes flying once again and solve that problem soon enough.
Over time, we probably make more waste, but the waste we make is less harmful. As the article states, the most harmful pollutants--PCBs--are no longer manufactured. (We're also getting more efficient, so what we get for each unit of waste is greater and greater.) If you'd looked at air pollution in major American cities in the 1960s, you'd probably project that by the year 2000, everyone would be dead from toxic air. It didn't happen, and in most of our major cities today, the air is decent. I remember the smog in L.A. when I was a kid, now I live here and the air is pretty good. Yes, there are some days when the air quality is not so good, but everyday is better than it was a few decades ago. (Check out Beijing if you want to sample REALLY bad air, like, air you can taste.) Technological change, environmental awareness, and government regulation have led to immense improvements that still continue. In 20 years, when half the vehicles on the road will be electric, bad air days will be a thing of the past. I think our technology gets cleaner over time and, though it will take some time to filter down to all the developing parts of the world, it inevitably will. I'm pretty optimistic about the environment.
Isn't economic development and raising the standard of living just about the ONLY proven way of reducing birth rates?
Yes. You see? Trump said he had the solution to the world's problems and we just laughed. Well, he'll show us. Of course growing life expectancy definitely doesn't help. You, Anna, would have been well over the hill in caveman times. We can't know what life expectancy was in those days, but I doubt it even reached 40. My man Ötzi is thought to have been about 45, which would have been plenty old. But of course he lived four or five thousand years into the Agricultural Revolution. And even that was a departure from our evolutionary model. But we're too clever to remain within our evolutionary pigeonhole. Which is both delightful and catastrophic. I've recently been reading more and more that the spectacular leap in life expectancy in the Western world is now declining again, owing to the Diseases of Civilization (obesity, diabetes, but I repeat myself). But also to stuff like pesticides. I'm 61,* so I probably knew the last decade or two when people ate unpoisoned food. People under 50 were born into Pesticide World. All these amazing people walking around over 100 years old spent their formative years eating unbuggered food (provided it remained properly refrigerated). And that may be the explanation right there. (* When I was born, the world's human population was roughly a third of what it is now. That's the whole story right there: a geometric progression.) Really poor countries still have high infant mortality. And the newly industrialized countries like some in the Far East are starting to get high obesity rates just like us. Gosh I'm really starting to ramble here. So, women --- right. Everybody who's looked at this reports that when women get control of their own fertility, population growth plummets. Naturally, having a system in place that takes care of old folks helps, then neither women nor men will think they have to have lots of kids to take care of them when they get too old to work, the Victorian approach. I'll attach the trailer for Mother caring for 7 billion. The full film is ostensibly on youtube, but it doesn't work for me. This is a wonderful documentary (though the title is fast becoming obsolete ...). The last woman to speak on camera in the trailer is an American lady who shows quite clearly what happens when women get control of their fertility. The problem is that this ain't happenin' in places still in the grip of patriarchal societies.
if it was halved, it'd be at 1970 levels... we've almost hit 8 times the population we were at in 1900, a figure (1 bill) that took the entirety of human history to achieve.
Just wait until we realize how much fucking debris and garbage we've deliberately put in orbit. We're going to use up our planet and then not being able to leave it.
