From - Fri Jul 5 22:48:28 2002 Message-ID: <3D25A9C8.548750CD@earthops.net> Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 14:14:32 +0000 From: Tiny Human Ferret Organization: copyright 2002 all rights reserved -- non-UseNet transmission prohibited. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.0.38 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.politics,alt.politics.democrats.d,alt.politics.immigration,alt.politics.libertarian,alt.politics.reform Subject: Re: Sustainable population a key concern for the Homeworld References: <3D19DB27.7A89F629@earthops.net> <73ouhu8l21o57as04qq4lpicimq55s31g5@4ax.com> <3D1F9DD5.F6E988F@earthops.net> <4fp1iu4ktq5auu78ol9vfquav582hgk294@4ax.com> <3D20E91D.A88FA942@bellsouth.net> <9hc2iugqfaa3p9s0kic45h2ke5jfv7vfc3@4ax.com> <3d213bcc_8@nopics.sjc> <3D21B26C.892C9E64@earthops.net> <3d232825$1_7@nopics.sjc> <3D243DED.CC987C71@earthops.net> <3D24C62A.D699770F@earthops.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.205.1.226 X-Trace: vienna7.his.com 1025878553 65.205.1.226 (5 Jul 2002 10:15:53 -0400) Lines: 68 X-Authenticated-User: tjh22isp Path: vienna7.his.com Xref: vienna7.his.com alt.politics:855050 alt.politics.democrats.d:69338 alt.politics.immigration:18376 alt.politics.libertarian:18485 alt.politics.reform:3137 Jerry Okamura wrote: > > "Tiny Human Ferret" wrote in message > news:3D24C62A.D699770F@earthops.net... > > Of course, maybe you'd rather folow your political convictions and have a > > catastrophe. I'd rather avoid the catastrophe and worry about politics as > > the catastrophe is avoided. > > Okay, let us try to tackle one part of this complex problem. Let us say > that the population increases to a level that the people start dying because > of the lack of water, until the population stablizes to a level that can be > supported by the available water supply. On the other hand, as water gets > to be a scarce commodity, that would mean the cost of the stuff would start > to rise. At some point, desalination would become a viable option. But > desaliantion can only occur in a cost effective manner that has ready access > to salt water. So, that part of the world that does not have access to the > ocean, would continue to suffer from a lack of water. So, once again, we > would probably see that the population centers would decline in areas that > do not have a sustainable amount of water. In time, the population would > get to a point of being able to sustain itself with the water that is > available. Well, thankfully you are starting to "get it". (In My Humble Opinion) Okay, look at the final statement of your essay. Essentially what you're saying (as I read it) is that eventually the system reaches a state of balance, of equilibrium. The system is, in your view, basically homeotropic, or "trending towards homeostasis/balance". I'd like to digress for a moment here and point out that this is a view which views people as a mass phenomenon, rather than an aggregate of individuals. This view is not entirely unsupportable, but I don't think it's inevitable, which inevitability appears to be the basis of many arguments on the subject of population planning. But really, people aren't necessarily a blind actor running only on the basis of urges or tropisms. For instance, in the 1970s, the Zero Population Growth movement in the US and Europe gained a number of adherents. While actual membership in the ZPG Organization remained really quite low, the ideal of the Movement -- no net population growth -- became sufficiently popular, probably due to its easy meshing with the Womens' Liberation Movement, that the mass of the US-born population did achieve Zero Population Growth in he late 1980s. I'm mentioning this mostly to point out that the attitudes of the population -- as much as market forces or any other blind tropism -- effect outcomes. In fact, sometimes outcomes are affected by political will or personal ideology _despite_ market forces. Don't think of resource limitations as a sort of Malthusian limit to population increase -- though this is indeed the case. Think of resource limitation as an ideological "anti-goal", something to be successfully avoided by the exercise of an act of will. It's not an inevitability. Similarly, allow me to point out that viewing market forces as inexorable, that's very simplistic and for the same reasons; one might have the lowest price on a product, for example, but for ideological reasons people might choose other vendors. For instance, people might be perfectly willing to buy a more-expensive and slightly-inferior shoe because it's not made with slave labor in China, even without government intervention in that market. Personal choices, when held by most individuals in any group under consideration/analysis, becomes a new group tropism which may not be understood easily in the context of "market forces". -- Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae. Whom thou'st vex'd waxeth wroth: Meow. <-----> http://earthops.net/klaatu/