> Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture?
The thing about that is that the story isn't over yet. Yes, billions of people owe their lives to the Haber–Bosch process (et. al., I'm obviously simplifying here) but if billions of people die due to ecological and economic collapse, is it really all worth it?
As a concrete counter-example to modern mass agriculture there are ecological systems of food production that result in high yields while increasing fertility, biodiversity, and biomass (such as Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc.) So we can have our both well-stocked grocery shelves and healthy ecosystems.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a...
Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did?
My current understanding is that the U.S. overproduces what it needs, exports the excess at dirt cheap prices, killing off developing countries’ farmer livelihoods. So in the U.S., there’s multiple birds killed with one stone.
https://gerrymarten.com/human-ecology/chapter03.html
The green revolution was a big increase in the carrying capacity of the Earth.
> Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did?
Of course it does. Listen to yourself here. You're saying that it'd have been better for billions of people to simply not have lived at all and for growth to be capped for all time. Would you go back in time, prevent the green revolution, and erase all those billions of people from history?
Christ, I think you would.
Limiting growth means billions, if not trillions, of people will simply never exist at all. All those moments of hope and joy and rest and relief: never existed, all on your say-so. We have a word for that: genocide.
We don't need to limit humanity's growth. We need to go to the stars.
Today, gardens amongst the general population basically don’t exist (are so few/small that they don’t represent a measurable fraction of food supply or available arable private land).
So, it’s difficult to know whether or not we would cease to exist.
I suspect not.
To me that easily outweighs the sum of all those joys; temporary and impermanent, unlike the extinctions of species and glories the planet will never see again. And, I'll remind you that we still have more than enough starvation, despite the ability to feed all.
Your reading of the arguments here as "against science" are a straw man.
You're right. The arguments I'm reading here are not "against science". That's too specific. The arguments I'm reading here are actually against humanity.
As I mentioned in another post, suggesting that it would have been a good thing that the population not have grown over the past century is the same as wishing to wipe billions of people, along with their minds, memories, and experiences, out of history.
And for what would you erase these billions of lives? So some fish? A few trees? A few rocks? A toad spotted in some special way? None of these things can sing, feel hope, dream, or even suffer. Humans can. The desire to limit human growth on ecological grounds is monstrous and anti-human and there's no word for it other than "evil".
Temporarily taking more from the environment than is sustainsble brings temporary human happiness, followed by great human suffering when the environment we rely on collapses.
Civilizations throughout history have collapsed for this reason. Our civilization is not so powerful as to be immune.
There is no particular reason to believe that we've overshot the planet's carrying capacity, that our technological ability to deliver prosperity will break down, or that some kind of collapse is about to come.
This belief in imminent ecological collapse is just a rebranding of eschatology, the idea that the end of the world is coming and that when it does, the good and bad will be separated and judged. It's an aesthetic judgement --- you start with the premise that industrial civilization is bad, understand that bad things must be punished, and hope for Gaia to be the instrument of that punishment.
I don't subscribe to this kind of thinking. I don't see any limits to human ingenuity. There's no need to limit growth, and anyone attempting to do it is committing a crime against the future.
Our water sources are polluted. Our oceans are acidifying. We've strip mined our topsoil. Our rainforests are at a tipping point, on the verge of catastrophic loss. Did you see those fires in Australia last year? Disastrous weather events are up 83% in only twenty years. Top strategists and CEOs are preparing for water wars and refugee crises.
And you're here telling us there's no need to limit growth, that doing so is criminal, that the environmentalist cult predictions are failing? In the comments of an article about how there's no American Bumblebees in eight states, which was predicted 20 years ago? WTF Broseph.
Every single generation points to things going wrong now and thinks the end of nigh. It's been that way since at least the invention of writing. All you've done is present a list of problems. You have done nothing to build an actual case that the engine of human innovation is breaking down. What makes you think we won't overcome the problems you mention just as we've overcome all our previous problems?
> And you're here telling us there's no need to limit growth, that doing so is criminal, that the environmentalist cult predictions are failing?
Yes, I am. Because those predictions are failing, and they are failing because they imagine that we exist in a bizarre alternative world where we don't invent technology to solve problems but instead just breed, like deer or something, until we collapse. Wrong model, thus wrong predictions.
Did you know forest cover has actually increased over the past 100 years? Under your theory, we should have chopped down the last tree ages ago.
Our rivers don't catch on fire anymore either. Under your theory, we should all be drinking turpentine by now.
Turns out we can live in a clean world without arbitrary and murderously limiting growth or capping the number of people who can exist.
> In the comments of an article about how there's no American Bumblebees in eight states, which was predicted 20 years ago?
Well, yeah. Doing something about the neoniconoid pesticides causing the bee problem is probably wise. That's not the object of my objection.
The object of my objection is this idea that bees are suffering because humanity arrogantly tries to "play god" with technology and that we should stop and go back to the trees or something. That's an absurd and destructive worldview, and one that's embarrassingly common among comfortable tech types.
... It's not a strong argument.
That's not Chicken Little, that's the denouement of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Except in this case, the boy had decades of charts and photos and graphs showing that a whole pack of wolves were on their way.
It's not that we wouldn't have well-stocked shelves: it's that we wouldn't be alive. We can feed as many people as we do because of the incredible advances we've made in agricultural sciences. Without those, there just wouldn't be enough calories to go around. Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture? All this invective against technology is sophomoric, short-sighted, and fundamentally unserious, and if we followed the recommendations of people to whom science is a bad thing, just "playing god", then a huge number of us would simply cease to exist.