Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Pete Vukovich <pvukovic1@yahoo.com>]

Resource use is a part of it, carrying capacity is a part of it, the problem is carrying capacity isn't investigated or considered until a population goes beyond it (in my experience). I think when you come to a point where the world tells you you're using resource X (water) better (say 10x better as in the article)  than everybody else and you're still running out of X its safe enough to say your carrying capacity has been exceeded if the resource has no substitute.

Still you're right, it would be nice to know what that carrying capacity truly is before culling the herd. The only fear there is evidenced by issues such as global warming. For some reason humans like to turn survival issues into political or reactive ones instead of thorough objective considerations. I believe this may stem from being predators, predators I'm told can't survive without optimism, even though it can be delusional and lead to their demise.  Like watching a coyote try to steal a grizzly bear kill.

China is a great case in point, its population growth is nonzero, the situation is politicized to the point where pro-population growth advocates are given newsworthy status, its resources are being degraded, its more than willing to rob stable sustainable communities and countries to get what it needs, and it still can't say what its carrying capacity is. Partially because carrying capacity is not a stationary target, it moves as the land is degraded both by desertification and misuse.

I attended a Joel Salatin lecture a couple months back, he said something interesting. He's his own guy of course, a self described environmentalist capitalist christian or something like that...

Anyway he said at one point (paraphrasing), 'he believed people should pay more for decent food , he wasn't concerned so much with person on food stamps living in the poor section of town, he wasn't out to save them, perhaps (his words) they couldn't be helped or saved'. I believe he was indicating that he felt we'd exceeded carrying capacity, and the appropriate response was to attend to the survival of the wealthier segments of society since in his mind that was a workeable system. Since the audience was largely middle/upper class nobody batted an eye, and nobody thought it was interesting that his dislike of monocultures didn't apply to humans. Just a wierd aside. Still it was a good lecture.

--pete

---

From: Dan Conine <dconine@bertramwireless.com>
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2012 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Population (again)

"Crying 'overpopulation' is another way to shift the blame from the rich
to the poor."  - George Monbiot

I think that too many discussions about resources don't go to the bottom
line of what we DO with the resources, and instead stay in the
anthropocentric context.
If humans live so that they give more to the land than they take, rather
than just thinking about how they can make more humans, then the
problems work themselves out.
(You can't increase population beyond a certain point AND properly care
for the land at the same time, but you also can't properly care for the
land without enough people on it).

The Invisible Hand concept controls our thinking far too often. We tend
to think, "We have always been consumers and will always be consumers,
until we run out of resources to consume, so if resources are running
out, there are too many people."
This is the practice of questioning only the bust phase or the failure
mode of our growth cycles, rather than questioning whether we should put
so much effort into economic (population) growth for growth's sake as
the center of our logic.
The belief that humans have some magical purpose that they aren't
supposed to question is the problem with population and resource use in
general.
Animals in nature don't have to know their purpose of giving more than
they take: the natural process of symbiosis takes care of that. Humans
eliminate the competition and the symbiotic links and then believe they
have "conquered" nature as though it is our enemy, somehow separate from
us, and let our own populations grow unchecked.

Population control is a good idea, but first we have to figure out how
to decide what the population of a particular place needs to be, rather
than (like China) trying to moderate population across a broad spectrum
and failing to consider the needs of each geographic part of nature, and
what people can be doing to improve it, not just how many are consuming it.

We've replaced the usefulness of people with buttons and cheap energy,
and forgotten how to utilize people to serve the future (the soil),
rather than just themselves.

This is the fundamental question to be addressed before deciding on the
population level.

What are people FOR? What CAN they be good for?

Dan C.
Belgium, WI



On 6/5/2012 11:00 AM, livingontheland-request@lists.ibiblio.org wrote:
> --
> From: "John D'hondt"<dhondt@eircom.net>
> Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Can Anything Save the Drying Southwest?
>
>
>
>    So yes the mideast is more careful about water but it isn't going to save them. Just like compact lightbulbs and pumping up your tires aren't going to make other resources appear in abundance. All good ideas, but not serious solutions.
>
>
>    The bottom line seems to always be population. No matter how people dice it, no matter how careful they want to be there just isn't enough water to go around.
>
>
>
>    --pete
>
>

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