Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of humanity’s evolutionary history, such expansionist tendencies have been countered by negative feedback. However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels reduced many forms of negative feedback, enabling us to realize our full potential for exponential growth. This natural capacity is being reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economics—nurture complements nature. Problem: the human enterprise is a ‘dissipative structure’ and sub-system of the ecosphere—it can grow and maintain itself only by consuming and dissipating available energy and resources extracted from its host system, the ecosphere, and discharging waste back into its host. The population increase from one to eight billion, and >100-fold expansion of real GWP in just two centuries on a finite planet, has thus propelled modern techno-industrial society into a state of advanced overshoot. We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is the best-known symptom of overshoot, but mainstream ‘solutions’ will actually accelerate climate disruption and worsen overshoot. Humanity is exhibiting the characteristic dynamics of a one-off population boom–bust cycle. The global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will suffer a major population ‘correction’ in this century.
  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    43·
    1 year ago

    Do Malthusians ever get tired of being proven wrong?

    The only reason these ideas are still around is because they appeal to bourgeois class interests. From a scientific standpoint, they have never been grounded in any sort of evidence or reason and their predictions consistently fail to manifest - while in the process, great amounts of harm have been carried out by it’s believers. In the many, many years since these ideas first arose, there have been many excellent refutations of them, but so long as the material conditions that caused them to arise in the first place persist, so too will the ideas, no matter how much evidence is mounted against them, no matter how irrational they are shown to be, and no matter how much harm they cause.

    Of course the natural conclusion to draw if it were taken seriously would be to start by “reducing the population” of those who consume the most, i.e. the richest people in society - at which point we might consider whether simply reducing consumption would be a better approach than whatever nonsense the Malthusians suggest - but it is well understood by everyone that this is the exact opposite of what the Malthusians want, which is to come after the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Because that is the whole point of this belief in “overpopulation:” to shift the blame for social problems away from the rich people who are actually causing them. Same as it ever was.

    And just like all the eugenicists of old, the author treats everything that is in service to capital as fixed and immutable, while treating all other aspects of human experience as flexible and waiting to be transformed towards that goal. For example, the author brings up the meat industry, and uses its environmental impact as evidence for why human populations must be reduced. Yet at no point (as far as I read) does he consider the possibility of altering the meat industry or human levels of meat consumption to be more environmentally compatible. Why not? Because not everyone would be on board with it? But of course, not everyone is going to be on board with whatever solution the author has in mind either. But the meat industry is fully subservient to capitalist profits in a way that human reproduction is not. To alter or abolish the meat industry would mean to disrupt the profits of certain capitalists, which would mean confronting power. But to exert control over reproductive rights would mean an expansion of power against the poor and vulnerable. Malthusians/eugenicists will always choose the solution that serves capitalism regardless of how much the idea infringes on the rights and dignity of the poor.

    These are not new ideas and carry all the same fallacies and BS that they always have.