The Junkman makes a point:
George… family unit-sized hunter gather bands have to range over areas of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of acres to forage for their basic needs. Industrialized man manages enormously higher productivity (technology basically means doing heaps more with significantly less) and this is why hunger has not increased despite human population increasing from under 2.5 to over 6 billion people on the planet — all without increasing the net area under cropping — since WWII. Unlike our agrarian past, net economy is not tightly coupled to resource demand and the bulk of GDP has nothing to do with grain harvested or herds managed.
If we were still reliant on say, sperm whale oil to light our lamps, then resource depletion would be a problem but this is not how humanity, technology and development work. Biotechnology (despite George being agin it) is just one technique that will be utilized to increase our resource availability and it is not obvious that we will need to increase land area devoted to agriculture prior to the inevitable end of human population growth.
George… ingenuity is a resource and humans are an asset — your misanthropic nit-wittery notwithstanding.
A reaction to George Monbiot's Population growth is a threat. But it pales against the greed of the rich, January 29, 2008 in The Guardian.
George… family unit-sized hunter gather bands have to range over areas of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of acres to forage for their basic needs. Industrialized man manages enormously higher productivity (technology basically means doing heaps more with significantly less) and this is why hunger has not increased despite human population increasing from under 2.5 to over 6 billion people on the planet — all without increasing the net area under cropping — since WWII. Unlike our agrarian past, net economy is not tightly coupled to resource demand and the bulk of GDP has nothing to do with grain harvested or herds managed.
If we were still reliant on say, sperm whale oil to light our lamps, then resource depletion would be a problem but this is not how humanity, technology and development work. Biotechnology (despite George being agin it) is just one technique that will be utilized to increase our resource availability and it is not obvious that we will need to increase land area devoted to agriculture prior to the inevitable end of human population growth.
George… ingenuity is a resource and humans are an asset — your misanthropic nit-wittery notwithstanding.
A reaction to George Monbiot's Population growth is a threat. But it pales against the greed of the rich, January 29, 2008 in The Guardian.
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