- #31
brainstorm
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How do you validate this statement? How can you define some parts of the world as being more overpopulated than others except with reference to resource-utilization? Are you equating density with "overpopulation?" What about less dense areas, which are nevertheless overbuilt and overrun with ecologically harmful activities, such as recreational beaches, amusement park cities, etc.?Evo said:
You're assuming a conclusion prior to setting up the parameters for research. You're also assuming that "locally sustainable" living is utopian. I have read that the most growing urban form is slums. Slums or shanty towns utilize almost exclusively recycled debris to construct housing. If such areas could be improved in terms of sanitation and agricultural land-use, they could be self-sustaining with a relatively high density (i.e. low sprawl).
At the same time, there are many sprawling urban areas where the first step to densification is really to stop or at least severely limit automotive transit. Once people are getting around by foot or bicycle in such areas, space seems to expand relative to human geography, because cars not only use more space due to their size and speed, but they also scale down your perception of space as you traverse more over a shorter periods of travel.
People also can carry less by foot or by bike, which means they have to take better care of their stuff so that it lasts longer, or refurbish it instead of replacing it. This vastly increases resource conservation.
Urban gardening should be able to replace the market for most vegetables, and possibly some meat as well, although it would probably be just a few goats or cows and some chickens that are raised for fertilizer and people should at least reduce their consumption of meat to being occasional. I think grains and certain crops are more efficiently farmed by machines on a large scale, but these are more efficient to ship because they can be dried and packed into high-density containers.
If these kinds of cultural reforms were adopted, space-utilization and resource-conservation would vastly expand. At that point, it still might be a good idea to encourage cultures of small family size, but the best way to do that is to allow migration to increase urban density.
As urban density increases, people tend to value the space they have more and view small nuclear families as preferable to larger families that demand more space. This way, family planning geared toward reproductive control happens more naturally, as a choice of parents instead of public policy. It is very abstract, though, to construct population-limiting social control for people who aren't directly affected by population growth. That is the reason migration is central to cultural impetus to have smaller families.
It's not just that people in less dense areas don't feel population growth at planetary levels. It is also that people in denser areas look at less dense areas and see that there is plenty of land to expand onto. You can tell them repeatedly that their children won't be allowed to migrate onto such land but they will just see that as ethnic exclusion, which it probably is for the most part.
If you want to replace war and terrorism as the means of population control with responsible family planning, the best approach to take is to combine social-geographical cultural reforms with policies that allow densification through migration. If you want to get more heavy-handed, you could restrict new development in undeveloped areas. This way, people will learn to adapt culturally and economically to tighter land-use policies and scarcer resources.
As such, when they do continue to reproduce, which many ultimately will, the growth will have less of an impact than if they would have maintained a more deleterious culture of land-use and consumption. This reduces the pressure for war, genocide, abortion, divorce, euthanasia, health-care withholding, and other population control measures.