It's still rather indirect. If the population drops significantly then many types of mining simply becomes redundant because there is so much material no longer needed by the dead.

Well, lead deposition dropped about two orders of magnitude in ~1350. That's far more than a proportional decrease, unless the death rate was over 90%. Societal collapse seems more likely.

Not collapse: recycling. In a steady state population, you need to be mining enough new metal to replace items lost to use or rust. If the population drops, people just start using dead uncle Harald's knives when theirs break.

In such a situation, you'd actually expect expensive new production to drop all the way to zero until the recycling buffer was used up. The effect would be superlinear with the death rate, not proportional.

Maybe so. But maybe the recycling argument doesn't apply so much for lead as for iron.

It applies more so for things I've dealt with. Iron rusts while lead doesn't. Flashings and windows etc that use lead last a very long time, iron doesn't.

The contention in the linked article was that atmospheric lead was the result of metal smelting. They're measuring the mining industry as a whole, not lead production.

Whatever they say, they're measuring production of lead and other metals that occur with it. Silver, copper and zinc would be the main ones, I think. Not iron, however.

Perhaps centers of industrial production are more prone to damage from pandemics than rural areas meaning that mines and factories will be gutted out while farms and villages are maybe less damaged?

Farms and villages just get abandoned, decay, and are lost to time.

Central to the researchers' argument is that human livelihood causes pollution. I wonder what the "ideal" global limit is.

I never finished my bachelor's, but I was an environmental resource management major for a time. The reality is that we keep seeing improvements in average life expectancy and overall quality of life while the global population grows. Meanwhile, everyone declares it the end of the world and decries the fact that humans are the cause of our own demise.

While we certainly have the power to be the cause of our own demise, my opinion is that rumors of our death are exaggerated. I think there is still substantial room for improvement in how humans manage earth's resources such that we can adequately provide for our population.

One of my favorite cartoons from one of my college textbooks showed a bunch of single celled organisms giving off oxygen to create Earth's oxygen rich atmosphere and some of them organizing to complain of how they were poisoning the environment with all this oxygen.

It is no doubt true that humans impact the environment and some of the impacts are absolutely negative. But there is substantial reason to believe that it is far more complex than that, but humans have an incredible talent for taking positives for granted and dwelling overly much on the negatives.

One of my favorite examples is that Y2K was predicted to be the end of the world. When it got solved beforehand and turned out to be very anticlimactic, with a few VCRs that couldn't be programmed and silly things like that (instead of global financial meltdown as our banking systems failed), people then acted like those who had prepped for the worse were idiots. These days, people often frame the entire thing like "Those fools! Why did they ever think they were in danger?" No one gets up daily and thanks their lucky stars that they aren't living in the Y2K Post Apocalypse. Instead, they read the news and complain about all the reasons the world is going to hell currently.

If humans were not here, presumably crocodiles or something would be the top species on earth. I don't imagine they would husband earth's resources any better than we are.

Not intended as snark. These are just some basic points I like to talk about when I get the chance. Thank you for giving me a good excuse and I apologize if my framing is in any way aggravating.

Best.

Not read as snark at all. In fact your note came off as thoughtful and kind.

I didn't mean to imply that the world is coming to an end. I simply hadn't realized how coupled pollution (lead in this case) & economic progress have been. IIRC the rate of species extinction has been accelerating especially for sea life (too lazy to lookup citation). That's real, irreparable harm, at least to those species.

But that's backward looking. I'm optimistic that technology advancements will cap energy usage per person and still enable us to advance society.

And FWIW... my few hunter friends claim boars would dominate North America if humans weren't around. Surprisingly smart, powerful, and aggressive creatures.

A few years ago, I crossed the country on foot with my sons. They were both pretty meh about a lot of the dangers we faced. Wild boars heard at night in parts of Texas was the only thing that really got my oldest son concerned and I got regaled with how dangerous they can be.

So, that is entirely possible.

I'm optimistic that technology advancements will cap energy usage per person and still enable us to advance society.

I think we need to aggressively promote passive solar, basically. Just skip the energy use entirely, where we can. But I get dismissed as a loon. (shrug)