Anybody think the world would be better of without people?
- Thread starter mace242
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Well, that may be a little over simplifying things a little. I personally feel that many of the problems lie and have lain at the feet of those in the 'western' world for some time. It is entirely possible to live in perfect harmony with nature, with respect and sustainably - you only have to look at the examples set by both aboriginal and american indian societies.
It seems to me that we in the west have a oddly skewed perspective on many matters, the reasons are numerous but much of it, when distilled, appears to me to be directly attributable to religion, 'business' and greed, pretty much in that order. (these are just my thoughts, they may not necessarily match yours, I understand that.)
I've also often wondered on the possible benefits of sterilisation as a punishment for some of the more serious criminals today, given our overpopulation, although I always end up with the same conclusion, such a policy would be too open to abuse and misuse, the thin edge of the wedge if you like.
Certainly I think humanity needs to suffer a sizeable population dent soon, we appear to be killing every other species on this planet at an accelerating rate.
It seems to me that we in the west have a oddly skewed perspective on many matters, the reasons are numerous but much of it, when distilled, appears to me to be directly attributable to religion, 'business' and greed, pretty much in that order. (these are just my thoughts, they may not necessarily match yours, I understand that.)
I've also often wondered on the possible benefits of sterilisation as a punishment for some of the more serious criminals today, given our overpopulation, although I always end up with the same conclusion, such a policy would be too open to abuse and misuse, the thin edge of the wedge if you like.
Certainly I think humanity needs to suffer a sizeable population dent soon, we appear to be killing every other species on this planet at an accelerating rate.
We belong here as much as any other species. Seeing us as separate from nature instead of a part of it is a big part of the problem, in my opinion.
I certainly think there's too many people in the world. We can't live sustainably and have a high standard of living with 6bn people.
I certainly think there's too many people in the world. We can't live sustainably and have a high standard of living with 6bn people.
Don't sweat it, talk to some of the survival members here, they are waiting for TEOTWAWKI, which according to some, is just around the corner
Me, I like living here.
If you are referring to giving the snip to sex offenders, well it does not often work in the sense that the act of sex is not the prime driving motive for their behavior, its the power and control that fuels their acts.
No, not just for sex offenders. But much as I have concluded, any form of state sanctioned sterilisation is open to abuse and has already been proven by one nation I can think of.
+1 to all of this. The sooner people come around to the idea that we're part of the system and not overlords of it, the better.
The second part is sticky, but sooner or later nature will take care of that for us...
Could it be that Mother Earth herself thinks there are too many humans around at the moment?
There seems to be an awful lot of high death toll natural disasters happening recently.
There seems to be an awful lot of high death toll natural disasters happening recently.
If you think about it, the car and the computer are as natural as trees and soil.
Perhaps we just need to go with the flow. There is too many people in all nations, and our smaller numbers in the west have much bigger impacts that twice the number of people in the third world, so perhaps its not actually numbers thats the problem but consumation and growth. The growth needs to stop and recede. Any attempts by mankind to do this would be the biggest atrocity our species could commit against itself.
But nature does these things better than wars and genocide. When nature culls its indiscriminate, it doesnt let you off because you are rich and white or because you live in the west. Maybe we will see plague again. I don't look forward to it, but we certainly need it.
Perhaps we just need to go with the flow. There is too many people in all nations, and our smaller numbers in the west have much bigger impacts that twice the number of people in the third world, so perhaps its not actually numbers thats the problem but consumation and growth. The growth needs to stop and recede. Any attempts by mankind to do this would be the biggest atrocity our species could commit against itself.
But nature does these things better than wars and genocide. When nature culls its indiscriminate, it doesnt let you off because you are rich and white or because you live in the west. Maybe we will see plague again. I don't look forward to it, but we certainly need it.
An article in Saturdays Times may be of interest to readers of this thread.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3952775.ece
From The Times...
"In the 1960s the threat of “overpopulation” applied to virtually every country in the world, all of whose populations were expanding – if at different rates. From 1971, however, western fertility plummeted. Europe has been underreproducing for decades: its total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime – is 1.5, well below the 2.1 required to replace the people already here."
"by 2000 Russia’s total fertility rate was a miserable 1.2. Demeny revealed that even though UN figures assumed Russian fertility would rise by 50% – awfully optimistic – the country’s population in 2050 was still expected to contract back to 1950 levels of about 104m. Meanwhile, although UN figures also assumed that fertility in Yemen would fall by half, Yemen’s population in 2050 was expected to rise to 102m."
"Professor Joel Cohen identifies water as the ultimate limiting factor on human population. Even if it were evenly distributed throughout the world – which it is not – the human race would be expected to run out of fresh water when the global population reached about nine billion – a figure we are now set substantially to exceed."
"you can fiddle with the assumptions underlying the projections and come up with wildly different numbers, and historically the accuracy of demographic prediction has been pretty dismal. (Case in point: only four years after Demeny published his comparison of Yemen and Russia, the UN nearly halved its projected 2050 population for Yemen from 102m to 58m. Yet, Demeny tells me, “there are many more Yemens”: the population of Egypt will exceed Russia’s well before 2050.)"
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3952775.ece
From The Times...
"In the 1960s the threat of “overpopulation” applied to virtually every country in the world, all of whose populations were expanding – if at different rates. From 1971, however, western fertility plummeted. Europe has been underreproducing for decades: its total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of children a woman bears in her lifetime – is 1.5, well below the 2.1 required to replace the people already here."
"by 2000 Russia’s total fertility rate was a miserable 1.2. Demeny revealed that even though UN figures assumed Russian fertility would rise by 50% – awfully optimistic – the country’s population in 2050 was still expected to contract back to 1950 levels of about 104m. Meanwhile, although UN figures also assumed that fertility in Yemen would fall by half, Yemen’s population in 2050 was expected to rise to 102m."
"Professor Joel Cohen identifies water as the ultimate limiting factor on human population. Even if it were evenly distributed throughout the world – which it is not – the human race would be expected to run out of fresh water when the global population reached about nine billion – a figure we are now set substantially to exceed."
"you can fiddle with the assumptions underlying the projections and come up with wildly different numbers, and historically the accuracy of demographic prediction has been pretty dismal. (Case in point: only four years after Demeny published his comparison of Yemen and Russia, the UN nearly halved its projected 2050 population for Yemen from 102m to 58m. Yet, Demeny tells me, “there are many more Yemens”: the population of Egypt will exceed Russia’s well before 2050.)"
It does tend to work if you raise the 'snip' area to just below the jaw and just above the shoulders
When I was a lad, one of the first computer programmes I had on my ZX Spectrum was called "Foxes and Rabbits".
It was dead simple - you entered a number for the rabbit population, and another number for the fox population, and added a few variables (climate etc). Then the programme would show you how the different populations would rise and fall over time - more rabbits means more food for the foxes, so their numbers increase until all the rabbits have been eaten, at which point the foxes decline and the rabbits start to increase.
This happens all the time in the natural world, and humans are not immune to it. Over 1000s of years we will gradually overtake the available resources and we'll reduce our numbers, which will allow the natural world to replenish.
Trouble is, the timescales involved are vast - it might be another 10,000 yrs, but eventually an ice-age or disease pandemic will reduce the population of humans to a more managable number.
Then over many thousands of years, new species will emerge to replace the ones we destroyed.
From a geological point-of-view, we humans have only been around for a blink of an eye... as long as there is life somewhere on the planet, even if it's the last cockroach hiding under a rock in a nuclear winter, the planet will revive itself.
In primitive societies this cycle is much more rapid - infant mortality is very high, death from disease is much more common than in the western world, and (despite what Ray Mears etc suggest) hunter/gatherer societies are incredibly violent.
This means that slight variations in food availability, or a short inter-tribal war, can wipe out large percentages of a tribe, allowing the local fauna and flora to build their numbers back up.
Modern humans, however, have worked out how to control their environment which means we're much more resistant to that kind of pressure. It takes something really large - Black Death, asteroids, ice sheets etc - to cause problems, but they only come around infrequently (from our point-of-view).
It's also worth noting that in primitive societies deaths from war and violence run at about .5% - that's across all nations and climates, and includes pre-colonial societies - whereas in the West today it's less than 0.3%. To give some perspective, a death rate of 0.5% would mean that instead of the 90 million people who died in wars in the 20th Century, it would have been over 2 billion people. So in primitive societies this high death rate does a good job of keeping numbers down, but isn't a pleasant way to live your life!
Part of the reason there are so many humans today is that we are much less violent that 10,000 yrs ago... I know it doesn't seem like it, but the truth is that a baby born today in the Western world has the best life expectancy that anyone has ever had in history.
When you have infant mortality at 50%, and then add the massively increased risk of a violent death, plus disease and famine, it's not suprising that we used to live "in harmony" with nature. Nature had plenty of time to recover because humans were rubbish at living past their 30th birthdays
A return to aboriginal values would be nice in some ways, but the reality is that life as a hunter/gatherer is far removed from the rose-tinted view that Mr Mears gives... it's not quite the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" life that Thomas Hobbes describes but in many ways it's not far off.
I guess my point is that given time things will sort themselves out - it's just that the timescales are so massive it's hard for us to grasp.
It was dead simple - you entered a number for the rabbit population, and another number for the fox population, and added a few variables (climate etc). Then the programme would show you how the different populations would rise and fall over time - more rabbits means more food for the foxes, so their numbers increase until all the rabbits have been eaten, at which point the foxes decline and the rabbits start to increase.
This happens all the time in the natural world, and humans are not immune to it. Over 1000s of years we will gradually overtake the available resources and we'll reduce our numbers, which will allow the natural world to replenish.
Trouble is, the timescales involved are vast - it might be another 10,000 yrs, but eventually an ice-age or disease pandemic will reduce the population of humans to a more managable number.
Then over many thousands of years, new species will emerge to replace the ones we destroyed.
From a geological point-of-view, we humans have only been around for a blink of an eye... as long as there is life somewhere on the planet, even if it's the last cockroach hiding under a rock in a nuclear winter, the planet will revive itself.
In primitive societies this cycle is much more rapid - infant mortality is very high, death from disease is much more common than in the western world, and (despite what Ray Mears etc suggest) hunter/gatherer societies are incredibly violent.
This means that slight variations in food availability, or a short inter-tribal war, can wipe out large percentages of a tribe, allowing the local fauna and flora to build their numbers back up.
Modern humans, however, have worked out how to control their environment which means we're much more resistant to that kind of pressure. It takes something really large - Black Death, asteroids, ice sheets etc - to cause problems, but they only come around infrequently (from our point-of-view).
It's also worth noting that in primitive societies deaths from war and violence run at about .5% - that's across all nations and climates, and includes pre-colonial societies - whereas in the West today it's less than 0.3%. To give some perspective, a death rate of 0.5% would mean that instead of the 90 million people who died in wars in the 20th Century, it would have been over 2 billion people. So in primitive societies this high death rate does a good job of keeping numbers down, but isn't a pleasant way to live your life!
Part of the reason there are so many humans today is that we are much less violent that 10,000 yrs ago... I know it doesn't seem like it, but the truth is that a baby born today in the Western world has the best life expectancy that anyone has ever had in history.
When you have infant mortality at 50%, and then add the massively increased risk of a violent death, plus disease and famine, it's not suprising that we used to live "in harmony" with nature. Nature had plenty of time to recover because humans were rubbish at living past their 30th birthdays
A return to aboriginal values would be nice in some ways, but the reality is that life as a hunter/gatherer is far removed from the rose-tinted view that Mr Mears gives... it's not quite the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" life that Thomas Hobbes describes but in many ways it's not far off.
I guess my point is that given time things will sort themselves out - it's just that the timescales are so massive it's hard for us to grasp.
Wallenstein - There is a book called the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond which talks about hunter gatherer societies. They pretty much had the lifespan we have today , were largely disease free and on average needed to work only 3 hours a day. Im not sure where you get the figure of 50% mortality rate, thats certainly not across the board. Even in Papua New Guinea in deep jungle its 33%, Im not sure where it is higher.
Where humans life expectancy plumeted is the point in history where we introduced farming. A farming community has to work harder and longer and the switch to largely carbohydrate based food stuffs has not been good for our health. However the advantages of farming means that many many more people can live in one area whereas hunter gatherers have a population cap, wherein food in the area is too depleted and some, or all , of the group must disperse. Our brains are geared to remember around 150 faces, and h/g people rarely live in bands bigger than this. Lack of large scale intermingling keeps diseases at bay at well. But H/G people cannot compete against farming groups owing to the farmers larger numbers, gradually farming spread to take over the planet, despite their shorter life spans and preveilance of disease. (infact they probably bred new diseases which other peoples didnt have immunity to)
There is no way we can return to hunter gathering lives because our numbers are now many times to great, we can only be sustained by intensive farming of the land and seas.
Where humans life expectancy plumeted is the point in history where we introduced farming. A farming community has to work harder and longer and the switch to largely carbohydrate based food stuffs has not been good for our health. However the advantages of farming means that many many more people can live in one area whereas hunter gatherers have a population cap, wherein food in the area is too depleted and some, or all , of the group must disperse. Our brains are geared to remember around 150 faces, and h/g people rarely live in bands bigger than this. Lack of large scale intermingling keeps diseases at bay at well. But H/G people cannot compete against farming groups owing to the farmers larger numbers, gradually farming spread to take over the planet, despite their shorter life spans and preveilance of disease. (infact they probably bred new diseases which other peoples didnt have immunity to)
There is no way we can return to hunter gathering lives because our numbers are now many times to great, we can only be sustained by intensive farming of the land and seas.
This may have already been posted - I may have missed something.. But it pretty much looks like we're going to find out the answer; 'Life after People' starts at 21:00 on Monday on Channel 4:
'If humans suddenly vanished off the face of the earth, what would happen to the world? This film explores the possibilities for future life and how "our" planet would continue without us. Life After People follows the time line after our departure, from the immediate effects on electricity and our pets, right through to the distant future when there may only be traces of human civilisation left.'
Should be quite interesting.
'If humans suddenly vanished off the face of the earth, what would happen to the world? This film explores the possibilities for future life and how "our" planet would continue without us. Life After People follows the time line after our departure, from the immediate effects on electricity and our pets, right through to the distant future when there may only be traces of human civilisation left.'
Should be quite interesting.
everyone. I am new to the forum scene and it is my daughter who said I should use them as I would gain alot of information from people with similar outlooks and perspectives as myself.
In response to "Would the world be better without humans?" I also think that the issue is that we as a popuation do not consider ourselves as part of nature. So many times you hear people saying that certain species need to be culled to stop them over populating an area. When it is us who are over popualted. We are nothing more than parasites - living on our earth and stripping it of its natural resources.
The sooner we learn to slow down, listen, and live with our natural environment rather than trying to control it the better the whole world would be.
This sounds great in theory but not entirely possible in the capitalised western world. But we can all do our little bit. Someimes I go out into the country side or woods and just sit and watch and listen to feel the energy of nature. Especially in woodlands.
If you are lucky you may see the spirit of the woods.
HI
In response to "Would the world be better without humans?" I also think that the issue is that we as a popuation do not consider ourselves as part of nature. So many times you hear people saying that certain species need to be culled to stop them over populating an area. When it is us who are over popualted. We are nothing more than parasites - living on our earth and stripping it of its natural resources.
The sooner we learn to slow down, listen, and live with our natural environment rather than trying to control it the better the whole world would be.
This sounds great in theory but not entirely possible in the capitalised western world. But we can all do our little bit. Someimes I go out into the country side or woods and just sit and watch and listen to feel the energy of nature. Especially in woodlands.
If you are lucky you may see the spirit of the woods.
Fell asleep towards the end as it had been a long day. Bit miffed that I missed the end, maybe I'll catch a repeat at some time as it was very good IMO.
Reassuring that even our nuclear foul ups don't mess Gaea about too much.
If we can just sort out our petrochemical addiction we might just make it.
If we can just sort out our petrochemical addiction we might just make it.
Do you think the Human race is really worth saving Gary? We've made a right mess of a whole host of things on this planet and continue to do so every day. Maybe when fuel is priced so high that only the rich and famous can survive, we will get that reduction in population that could save the planet from turning into total poison.
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