Village Network Organizing
The Village Network is a growing model supporting the localization of culture and economics initiated in Fairfax, CA at Circle Center. This model is beginning to replicate across the country, and members are joining to form a cross-regional network of local people, circles, and organizations. The core intention of this network is to support one another in de ...learn more
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Created: Mar 19, 2008
Updated: Nov 06, 2009
Membership: Open
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Optimum Human Population Size
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Optimum Human Population Size
"In general, we would choose a population size that maximizes very broad environmental and social options for individuals. For example, the population of the United States should be small enough to permit the availability of large tracts of wilderness for hikers and hermits, yet large enough to create vibrant cities that can support complex artistic, educational, and other cultural endeavors that lift the human spirit.""To summarize this brief essay, determination of an "optimum" world population size involves social decisions about the lifestyles to be lived and the distribution of those lifestyles among individuals in the population. To us it seems reasonable to assume that, until cultures and technologies change radically, the optimum size of the human population lies in the vicinity of 1.5 to 2 billion people. That number also is our approximate best guess of the continuous standing crop of people, if achieved reasonably soon, that would permit the maximum number of Homo sapiens to live in the long run. But suppose we have underestimated the optimum and it actually is 4 billion? Since the present population is over 5.5 billion and growing rapidly, the initial policy implications of our conclusions are still clear."
Read the full article at UrbanHabitat.org >>
It is possible that an optimum population size may be smaller than we initially imagine - and that "food and resources" may not be out most immediate limiting factors. There is, unfortunately, a widely-shared misperception that population growth and overpopulation need not be taken seriously so long as "vast amounts of open space" remain.
Recent mathematic perspectives, however, suggested by real-world red-tide dinoflagellates such as Karenia brevis show that during red-tide outbreaks, calamitous red-tides and fish-kills are produced even as the dinoflagellates themselves occupy less than two one-thousandths of one percent of the "open space" that remains theoretically available to them. - The mathematics of this assessment is posted elsewhere (e.g., rocky.xviii.tripod.com) - along with an accurate proportional depiction of a two 1000ths of 1%. -
This is not to necessarily suggest that the trajectories and impacts seen in dinoflagellate populations are directly applicable to the current human condition. It is provocative, however, to consider that the dinoflagellate calamities arise from the metabolic and biological secretions of each individual dinoflagellate cell.
Unlike dinoflagellates, however, an average human being living in an industrialized country today is not only releasing their cellular and biological wastes into their surroundings. Instead, we release these comparatively harmless and normal biological wastes - and then add, each day, our many industrial and societal wastes.
Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman in his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded cites comments by Cal Tech chemist Nate Lewis approximately as follows: Picture an average human being driving along an interstate highway. Suppose that with each passing mile we roll down the window and toss out one pound of trash onto the roadside. That, says chemist Lewis, is what we are doing - but it is not readily apparent to us because the CO2 is invisible and diffuses into the atmosphere.
It is sobering to consider that no other animals on earth supplement their natural biological wastes in this way - and no other animals have EVER done so. Evidence suggests that we may be, in fact, embarked on a trajectory that is, if anything, even worse than that of the dinoflagellates.