busyI think we should start with the low-hanging fruit: most governments control large areas of land that are not yet designated as nature reserves but could be. They're currently used for logging, grazing, mining, etc. Simply switch the classification and we'd gain a huge amount of nature reserve without needing to oust or even regulate a single private owner. Ditto oceans, there's a lot in national control that could be switched over.
We could also employ a bunch of people as conservationists just by letting rural folks sign up for a program that would pay them to keep their land in a natural state. This would make it feasible for people to repopulate a lot of areas that are losing population, thus reducing the flow into already overcrowded cities. Mine is a bit catch-as-catch-can but it sure has more wildlife than surrounding farms. Imagine what someone could do with a few dozen or hundred acres in Vermont. This would also let us convert marginal cropland to healthy shortgrass prairie, without running farmers out of house and home. Here, we'll pay you to quit trying to grow wheat and grow native grasses instead.
Thoughts
March 20 2020, 01:23:33 UTC 1 year ago
We have ways to do that and they work great. So great, in fact, that the countries on the leading edge are now having replacement problems.
It turns out that when you give women birth control, almost none of them want to have 12 babies. Most women want 1 or 2. That's below the replacement rate, which is about 2.1 children per woman: replacing the parents and a little extra to account for losses. The handful of women who want 3+ kids aren't enough to make up for the women who want 2 or less.
Want to solve the population problem? Make birth control free without a prescription. BOOM ... smaaaash.
Of course, then we'll all have to figure out how to make a graceful condensation without causing more problems than we solve. So far, the countries facing this challenge have flailed around and utterly failed to solve it. China is headed for absolute disaster with their 4-2-1 crunch. Which I predicted (along with the female infanticide) as soon as I heard about their One Child Policy decades ago, but nobody listened to me.
>>Have you seen any articles talking about whether or not the corona virus has made it to Brazil or Africa yet?<<
I am not participating in the worldwide panicfest on that topic. It's contaminated the whole damn internet. >_
Re: Thoughts
March 20 2020, 05:33:09 UTC 1 year ago
What's needed is to give people Family Planning Information.
Almost no one in the second or third-world countries has any idea that what they do impacts on everyone around the world.
Then too, simply giving everyone family planning information and birth control isn't enough. They need a stable, peaceful world so that they will feel secure enough to only produce 2-3 children instead of as many as they can pop out.
Not sure how we can bring about that stable peaceful world without first trimming the human population down sharply. (pretty severe catch 22 here.)
Re: Thoughts
March 20 2020, 06:02:24 UTC 1 year ago
What's needed is to give people Family Planning Information.<<
Family Planning and other health care are helpful adjuncts. But anyone can figure out how to use a condom, pills aren't much harder, and since most third-world women are poor, they often don't want another mouth to feed. Birth rate stays higher in farming communities because extra hands are needed, but most people live in cities now, where children are a burden.
>>Almost no one in the second or third-world countries has any idea that what they do impacts on everyone around the world.<<
That's because they're too busy scrabbling to survive. But lowering the birth rate has an immediate concrete advantage: they don't have to split scarce resources with another baby. Unless they need that child -- like the first 2-3 for various reasons -- extra babies make life harder rather than easier. Concentrating resources makes it more likely that a smaller number of children will survive. This works better if the health care is good enough to push down the death rate. As long as the death rate remains high, the birth rate does; it's when the death rate drops but people have no birth control that we see huge spikes in population growth.
>>Then too, simply giving everyone family planning information and birth control isn't enough. They need a stable, peaceful world so that they will feel secure enough to only produce 2-3 children instead of as many as they can pop out.
Not sure how we can bring about that stable peaceful world without first trimming the human population down sharply. (pretty severe catch 22 here.) <<
That's a nice theory, but nobody's going to have a safe situation much longer. The biosphere is falling apart.