I'm taking a human biology course online ... and we're discussing the ethics of bio "pharming", embryonic stem cell research and the like. It got me thinking how incredibly arrogant we all are ... the we meaning westerners of a certain class and education. Here we are arguing the merits and ethics of advanced technological bio-medicine, and over 1,000,000 Sub-Saharan Africans a year die of Malaria!

And to bring it closer to home, I don't know how many countless thousands of Americans loose feet to Diabetes for want of basic preventative care.

So yes, the basic conversation is: someone does always lose. And what we've done brilliantly in this country is give the *illusion* that with enough hard work and gumption (gosh darn it) ... you too can make it to that life style. You can drive a hummer or even a hybrid if that's your choice, have a nice big house with central A/C and passive solar design maybe to stave off your angst about the environment filled with every kind of media junk you can ever dream of ... and even get treated with genetically modified drugs as you smooth on the collagen for the age lines on your face, but at what cost; if we are truly not willing to "walk the walk" when it comes to finding a way to balance our way of to allow for sustained and humane development that provides for all of those nice to haves like clean air and water and enough disposable income to travel to Ethiopia or Sri Lanka or anywhere to have those sorts of conversations.

... a high quality of life while drastically reducing the environmental foot-print.

E.g.zero energy houses are all the rage in Germany.

Even without widespread adoption of this technology Germany's per capita energy consumption is less than half than that of the US - this is all the more notable when taking into account that Germany's economy is still much more based on manufacturing.

That is why Europe is just as bloated as the US in your linked maps although it hosts a much larger population.

The key is to popularize life-style and policy changes that are a net energy gain. For instance home office use and tele-commuting. One of my new pet peeves with Canada - the country I recently moved to - is a nonsensical tax regulation that keeps companies from adopting home office policies. If an employee has a home office that they can claim deductions on than the company can not claim any deductions on additional office space and equipment that they provide for the employee. It is either or. This cements the status-quo. For a country that struggles to meet Kyoto and has terrible traffic problems in many urban areas such silly constrains are just infuriating.

This is but one little example – I think a thorough audit could uncover many ways to regulate and steer citizens towards a lifestyle that is more rewarding while at the same time being more energy efficient. It just requires some tedious and not very glamorous governing - we certainly can do better then just the unimaginative outlawing of incandescent light-bulbs.

I hope you continue.

To make matters worse, our current tax laws ENCOURAGE people to have more children and reward them for this behavior. It is the exact opposite of what is logical. People who have chosen to limit the size of their families or to even have no children should be given tax breaks, not people who have small armies of kids but lack the emotional maturity or the resources to raise them. Our courtrooms are filled with the children that result from this insanity.

I also believe that resentment about the refusal to limit their families size is at the root of much of the opposition to immigration. It is one of the many things people will say in private but not in public.

Frankly, I would rather subsistence farm than work at Wal-Mart.

Just to add some oddball perspective ... I think lots of folks in the U.S. would like to give up a 2 hour one way commute to work every day ... meaning that there are all kinds of aspects about the U.S. lifestyle that nobody in the U.S. finds particularly worth keeping. Does anyone really find strip mall fast food joints valuable ? I don't think so. We just tolerate them because they are there. Nobody really wants them, they just sort of show up and don't go away.

Also, regarding Ethiopian agrarian communities. Agrarian communities worldwide tend to have more in common with each other than they do with urban communities in the same country.

What "us"? The 60 million Americans who already live on less than $7 a day perhaps?

Half of the human race - three billion people - would simply like to live on slightly more than the less-than-$3-a-day they currently do, have sufficient calories to feed their kids and maybe not live in a war zone.

I think we can oblige them pretty easily. We've already figured out how; we just won't do it.

Here is Henry Carey, leading economist of what used to be known as the American System of Political Economy, writing in 1851 about British “free trade” economics:

We thus have here, first, a system that is unsound and unnatural, and second, a theory invented for the purpose of accounting for the poverty and wretchedness which are its necessary results. The miseries of Ireland are charged to over-population, although millions of acres of the richest soils of the kingdom are waiting drainage to take their place among the most productive in the world, and although the Irish are compelled to waste more labour than would pay, many times over, for all the cloth and iron they consume. The wretchedness of Scotland is charged to over-population when a large portion of the land is so tied up by entails as to forbid improvement, and almost forbid cultivation. The difficulty of obtaining food in England is ascribed to over-population, when throughout the kingdom a large portion of the land is occupied as pleasure grounds, by men whose fortunes are due to the system which has ruined Ireland and India. Over-population is the ready excuse for all the evils of a vicious system, and so will it continue to be until that system shall see its end...

(Pages 64-65 of The Harmony of Interests) http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1851-1875/carey/harmxx.htm

The so-called American lifestyle, as defined on teevee, is that of an elite that is becoming more and more exclusive everyday. Maybe the Republicans are the ultimate environmentalists.
Impoverish the American middle and working class and then they can't afford all the energy consuming treats of the American lifestyle. Trickle down as a green policy. Who'd a thunk it?
At some point above $5.00 per gallon gasoline, 30 years of conservative cheap labor policy will collide with most current transportation policy. Maybe we can loosen zoning laws and allow shanty towns to arise near workplaces to fix it.
We will probably meet much of the 2nd and 3rd world somewhere at the lower end of the middle if worse things don't happen. People trying to get by on $7.00 per hour are already there.
Douglas Watts, above,is very close to the truth:
"Frankly, I would rather subsistence farm than work at Wal-Mart."
The subsistence farm will kill you rather quickly if things don't work out, whereas Slave-Mart will do it slowly with a good amount of physical and psychic suffering.

All of the issues we ought to be talking about - issues about sustainability, fair allocation of resources, and so on, flow from your question. Nor should we reflexively posit that the Western solution is the best. It has two problems:
1) it is not sustainable. Not in the form we live today. It derives from and it requires ever-expaning frontier. We've run out of that.
2) Reduced to its essence it produces a very uneasy and often unsatisfying and disconnected social existence. Many other cultures foster closer connectedness.

It is easy to see the benefits but it is difficult to recon the costs. The benefits derive from a particular kind of cooperative, educated, hard-working culture thriving in an underpopulated, resource-rich frontier. Once any of those assumptions breaks down, civilization collapses or unravels.

I lived for some years in Africa as a child. I have an appreciation of the material poverty that exists. Yet for as desirable as all of the trappngs of civilization are, I remain to be convinced that Africans led lives that were much less happy than those of many Americans. We pay more than we realize to live this life. (Think about the fact that first generation immigrants are always much happier to live here than their progeny. What happens?) And I expect that we will have to learn to make do with less. And soon.

Some other useful questions will be "How much less.?" "How to allocate fairly?" and "Can we do it without falling into chaos?" "How do we build sustainable techologies that allow us to preserve the best of what we have in the face of looming shortages?" "How do we move toward sustainable population levels?" "How do we build societies that simultaneously foster close and satisfying social ties and engender tolerance?"

Technology alone is not enough. Nor is laissez-affaire capitalism. We need to objectively understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we need to listen to each other. Be diligent, and be patient.

The 1972 Club of Rome book, Limits to Growth, modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies, has been shown to be scientifically inaccurate, to put it mildly. Basically, the Limits to Growth model fails to account for the development of new technologies. New technologies which allow for more efficient use of resources, the viable extraction of resources that were not economically viable before; and the substitution of new resources for old ones.

For example, we have the technology in hand to build vehicles powered by internal combustion engines that get 100 miles to the gallon. This means that the full deployment of this technology increases the expected life of petroleum reserves four to five times. I submit that the problem is the lack of purchasing power to get more expensive, lead technologies into use faster. There is also the political problem of bad decisions: as Stirling Newberry pointed out about two years ago, the amount of money wasted on waging war in Iraq in less than one year would have more than covered the cost of increasing U.S. CAFE standards.

The Club of Rome model calculated the carrying capacity of the planet at 7.7 billion people – which we will soon reach. Westing in 1981 calculated carrying capacity at 3.9 billion people, based on total land area, cultivated land area, forest land area, cereals (grain) and wood assuming technology and politics of 1975. These low estimates are invalid, having been surpassed by reality without the massive social disaster these and similar studies predicted. On the other hand, Helig in 1993 calculated carrying capacity at 14.0 billion people, based on biophysical capacity, and accounting for increased technology.
http://www.ilea.org/leaf/richard2002.html

Then, there is Rosenfeld's Law:

From 1845 to the present, the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of gross national product has steadily decreased at the rate of about 1 percent per year. This is not quite as spectacular as Moore's Law of integrated circuits, but it has been tested over a longer period of time. One percent per year yields a factor of 2.7 when compounded over 100 years. It took 56 BTUs (59,000 joules) of energy consumption to produce one (1992) dollar of GDP in 1845. By 1998, the same dollar required only 12.5 BTUs (13,200 joules)

In the June 14, 2002 MIT Technology Review, 1982 MacArthur Fellow, and UC-Berkeley Physics Department professor Richard A. Muller noted

The United Nations now estimates that the population of the world will peak, sometime in this century, at about ten billion. That sounds bad—it is much higher than the current level—but it is a peak. After that, the population will decrease slowly. The predictions are now believed to be quite robust, as a paper in Nature last August documented (Vol. 412, pp 543-545, 2001). Malthus’s population bomb is fizzling. The year 2026 will pass without a singularity.

What is happening? Where was Malthus wrong? At a United Nations conference last March, demographers discussed many possible explanations. The most appealing one was that the declining growth is a consequence of the expanding worldwide rights of women. Others attribute it to poverty reduction. Wealthy people have fewer children, for reasons we don’t fully understand. Western TV is also cited: people see happy families with small numbers of children. I get the sense that scientists are groping, putting forth plausible explanations for an observed fact that they didn’t predict. Fertility is declining far faster than expected in many regions, even in nations with no government family planning efforts (e.g., Brazil).

The happy news comes when we combine limited population with conservation growth. The conservation bomb wins. Rosenfeld points out that at 2 percent growth—the 2 percent solution—conservation outruns population by a large factor. Two percent compounded over 100 years reduces energy use by a factor of 7.2. By 2100, with a world population of 10 billion people, everyone can be living at the current European standard of living and yet expending half the energy we are using today.

In fact, energy through-put in the earth’s eco-system is basically infinite, the only limiting factors being 1) the output of the Sun and a2) tmosphere absorption and diffusion, and 3) our level of technology employed in capturing and utilizing the Sun’s energy. The first two we can do nothing about; the third factor we can do a great deal about. L. Merrick Lockwood, for example, developed a 5-HP Stirling Cycle engine in Bangladesh that burns rice husks, the detritus of raising and processing a basic food staple in Asia.
http://www.stirlingengine.com/ecommerce/product.tcl?product_id=84

Lockwood’s major problem was a lack of financing. That is, in fact, the major problem for technology-driven solutions to the problems of population growth and resource use – unless you are willing to forcibly prevent people from reproducing. Everybody is quick to write and say that people need to use less, and have less babies, but nobody is willing to face the ugliness that solution entails – true tyranny and the end of many basic human freedoms. As Prof. Muller went on to note, a technology-driven solution is much better:

The solution may lie in making the developing world wealthy. What a delightful vision! Economics—the glorious science. Wealth reduces population growth; conservation wins; the environment is cleaner; the world is happier.

Now, it so happens that the world is awash in financing. According to the latest Quarterly Report from the Bank for International Settlements, dated March 2007 (see page 24):
http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt0703b.pdf

Trading on the international derivatives exchanges slowed in the fourth quarter of 2006. Combined turnover of interest rate, currency and stock index derivatives fell by 7% to $431 trillion between October and December 2006.

So, derivatives trading – mostly futures contracts on interest rates, foreign currencies, Treasury bonds, etc -- is now $1,200 trillion in a year. That’s $1.2 quadrillion a year.

By comparison, U.S. GDP last year $12.456 trillion.
( Table B-1 of the 2007 Economic Report of the President,
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/tables07.html

The entire U.S. economy of goods and services produced is traded once every two days. Assume speculators are able to capture as profit one fifth of one percent of that $1,200 trillion a year in derivatives turnover, and that is $2.4 trillion a year.

What if that $2.4 trillion a year were instead devoted to developing new technologies such as Lockwood’s 5-HP Stirling Cycle engine?

Yet when I half jokingly wrote a week or so ago that an “accidental” cruise missile attack on Zurich or the Cayman Islands would help force the financiers and bankers to accept a new regime of finance aimed at actual national development, rather than speculation, a few people here had the temerity to denounce the idea as tyrannical.

So we have a choice of who to impose tyranny on: most of the world’s population of 7 billion or so souls, or a few tens of thousands of financiers and bankers and “free market” ideologues.

So again I proffer the quote from Henry Carey in 1851:

Over-population is the ready excuse for all the evils of a vicious system, and so will it continue to be until that system shall see its end...

Kids are a pain in the ass. You can love one child just as much as ten, so why have ten? If you have 100 acres of land to work for survival - you might need ten. Or if the mortality rates in your area are high enough that having ten kids means three or four will eventually survive to maturity.

So in the developed nations with low mortality rates, why load yourself down with lots of kids? You have less money to give each for education and personal enrichment as you have more - so people stop at one or two.

Thank you T Wikrent for making some obvious points re overpopulation being used as an excuse to forget how that bloated wealth was created in the first place. I get too tired of people dragging out Malthus. The real capital of many of these less wealth endowed countries is their human population. How do we measure this wealth? GDP per capita? In all that bloated N America there were humans, those whose bloated bodies weren't floating in the iridescent wake of Katrina, trapped and blamed for being too poor to get out while help offered from the less wealth endowed countries went to waste. Technology per se does not create these problems but how we finance its development and application. We do have the potential to get out of this but do we have the commitment and the will to develop an appropriate systemic infrastructure to devise a solution is the real issue. Talking about non-white peoples having too many babies is simply a KKK obfuscation.

While all the discussion is good, the issues are symptoms of our fundamental natures, both individual and collective, that mandate our exhibition of a will to power. Technology, population explosions, excess wealth and economic power are all manifestations of that drive to dominate. And the conversation above is an inevitable outgrowth of the manifestation of that drive in its final self destructive stage.

There is no solution, man will always seek the parabolic growth curve until he creates the conditions that kill the civilization.