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the problem may not be population numbers per se, but the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.
It's well-established that the main driver of extreme population growth is poverty. Obviously, public health is a complex subject, and you need to factor in the impact of hygiene, etc., but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology (understood in the modern sense; I guess you could also interpret traditional modes of sustainable agriculture like in India and China as technology).
yes, the privileged few consume the most and do the most damage by a massive margin, albeit that "few" is now circa 1bn people.
I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption. Astonishingly, the worst polluters are just a few thousand people. That's not to try and oversimplify it; of course it has an impact if 'ordinary' Westerners fly to the Maldives on holiday. However, we're talking about people who take at least several flights a week. The ratio of that to an 'ordinary' Western household is mind-boggling.
Obviously, even if all those people changed their ways, it would still leave that kind of 'lifestyle' as 'aspirational' and the cycle would begin all over again of people jockeying to get into that kind of position and perpetuate the nonsense that got us here in the first place.
Oliver Schick-
I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption.
I know you go on to address this slightly but we should talk about it. Yes the ultra wealthy are highly destructive from a resource consumption point of view but the ordinary western consumption, especially in areas like the southern US states, middle east, affluent far east pockets is not sustainable if others aspire to it.
I don't have time to look for it but there are reasonable estimates that the global population could live a western 1970's-80's level of consumption sustainably. This would see a massive uplift in living standards for the global majority, a minor reduction for many and a unthinkable level of reduction for the wealthy.
We can't afford to perpetuate that the current 'typical' western lifestyle is without harm or just
There is a large body of work in the degrowth/ steady state economics looking at this but it challenges societies political and economic expectations of endless growth
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but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology
i realise that population growth is currently centred outside of the "developed" world, but nonetheless, something changed 300 or so hundred years ago:
https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time
so it could be that we can do a bit of levelling up / levelling down at a global level, population peaks somewhere between 9 and 11? Bn and we muddle through. it just seems unlikely to me.
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populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology (understood in the modern sense; I guess you could also interpret traditional modes of sustainable agriculture like in India and China as technology).
I hate the way the term technology is used to mean just stuff with transistors in it, or worse, just whatever has a screen. Technology is a set of techniques. Cooking is technology. Language is technology.
Culture is technology. Technology is culture. It's something we should all own.
greentricky
ChasnotRobert
Kimmo
the problem may not be population numbers per se, but the "use of machines" and related industrial "progress" is what has allowed the population to expand in the way that it has. i'm not sure that the two things can be decoupled.
yes, the privileged few consume the most and do the most damage by a massive margin, albeit that "few" is now circa 1bn people.