Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Beyond dwindling oil production leading to an economic nose-dive, Yemen faces a plethora of other problems; overpopulation, unemployment, poverty, malnourishment, violence etc. A significant part of its scarce water resources are used for cultivating the mildly narcotic and widely popular plant qat. Yemen is a country heading for collapse.
The National Intelligence Council has released a report on the expected effects of climate change to the Caribbean region. This 21 page report is entitled Mexico, The Caribbean and Central America: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications (NIC Conference Report, Jan. 2010). The report is authored by a team of private researchers under the Global Climate Change Research Program contract with the CIA’s Office of the Chief Scientist.
Should climate activists and feminists support campaigns to slow population growth? Laurie Mazur says that alliance will strengthen the movement. Ian Angus strongly disagrees …
-A Future for Agriculture, A Future for Haiti
-Towards a more sustainable livestock sector
-Red Menace: Stop the Ug99 Fungus Before Its Spores Bring Starvation
-Is There Enough Food Out There For Nine Billion People?
-Growing Your Own Wheat
-Number of farms in state grows, report finds
Farmers are invisible people, and middle-class city dwellers choose to pretend that the long lines of trucks bringing food into the city at dawn every day have nothing to do with the white-collar world. Perhaps it is a mark of the civilized person to believe that the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter have no relevance to daily life. Yet if the farmers stopped sending food into the great vacuum of the metropolis, the great maw of urbanity, the city would soon start to crumble, as Britain discovered in the year 2000 [5]. The next question, then, is: Where does all this food come from?
One of the authors of Limits to Growth, talks about growth, peak oil, and the possibility of collapse at the World Resources Forum. He says: “The current growth in population and in material use cannot continue–absolutely, with 100% probability, that it is going to stop. When? How? How seriously? We have no scientific way to make predictions. The longer we wait to do social measures, like birth control, or voluntary simplicity, the more likely it will be that physical measures will cause this decline.”
The collapse of the globalized society we now inhabit will be exceedingly uneven geographically and one that is spread over many years. And, I believe that that collapse has already started to appear.
Science has a paper on the changes to the current global food system required to support the expanded global population we’ll see in a couple of decades time, noting that radical changes to agriculture will be required to support 9 billion people.
-The population crash
-Getting connected: Europe’s green energy ‘supergrid’
-Pro-Moscow Yanukovych ‘to win Ukraine election’
In a new book, Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, William Catton, Jr. says human society is now on an unstoppable trajectory for a significant die-off. Catton, author of the well-known classic of human ecology, Overshoot, expects that by 2100 the world population will be smaller, perhaps much smaller, than it is today. We are in what he calls “the bottleneck century.”
As others have pointed out, many of Haiti’s problems have been related to its population density, associated environmental degradation and its need for cheap energy. Now, with the worst earthquake shaking the Caribbean in 200 years, we must sadly add another chapter to the Haitian book chronicling the linkage between its human and ecological disasters.
“as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold”
