Population
Treehugger.com had a post up on the touchy subject of population control.
I should preface my statements by saying I'm childless by choice and don't particularly like being around kids for long lengths of time. People that instead coo over every baby-action and imagine a houseful of little ones as paradise are the folks I consider irrational on the subject, or at least biased. They probably consider me biased the other way.
From a sustainability point, it's kind of a "duh" that we shouldn't have more people on a piece of property then that property can sustain. Would you rather have 100 healthy people living on an island, or 200 starving people, contracting cholera and other diseases of overcrowding? Most folks would choose the lower population, but then we have to balance the births to the deaths, and that's where we fail.
One bad idea is mandatory death. Well, okay, death is mandatory, as it happens to everyone eventually, but voluntary removal of yourself when you meet certain criteria is simply not going to happen, even in a 70s action flick. Raising the age limit like some eskimos had to -instead of terminating everyone over 30, just the really old when things were dire - is not a good plan, because a society may need the knowledge and memories of folks who have managed to survive that long. And we can also toss away any other killing off of a subset of the population as ew, ick, and just plain wrong - see Germany circa 1940.
Other ways large groups people die off include wars and disease, which are wasteful and painful, even to the survivors. We're spending a lot of time and effort to combat one, and unfortunately combating in the other. It's a traditional way for a ruler to remove excess population, but with the tools we now have, war leaves scars on planet that are even less sustainable then the quantity of people.
Exile is also a traditional thing to do with excess population. Give 'em a handful of boats, some tools and rations, and wave them goodbye, a la early explorers. What those explorers did was of no concern of the folks they left behind, but occasionally were not sustainable to the areas they explored - although more often, they died. The more educated folks know the death probability and wouldn't be willing to go explore (and die), even if there were places on the chart still labeld "Here be Dragons."
That's basically it for ways to get rid of adults. So instead of managing deaths, we can instead manage births for population control.
In ancient times it was not rare to leave a newborn on a hillside if it is deformed, one of a twin or triplet set, or an undesired product of an unofficial union. Check your history of Rome, India, China, Celts, etc. This is cross cultural, and the logic is unfortunate if not impeccable. If deformed, the child cannot survive without a large support net, and the ancient civilizations did not have the means to provide it. If the mother did not have the means to support the child - ie, there are too many of them, or the mom is too poor, or the father is not available - the child will die anyway and the mother should be freed of the burden early so she can concentrate on the surviving children, or her own survival. This was not often that mother's choice, mind you. Folks with authority over the mother would force this issue - her parents, legal spouse, religious leader, etc - half the time the very person who'd got them with child whether they wanted to be or not. This lack of choice, having the babe they carried for 9 months taken from them, was one of the reasons so many mass converted to christianity - because some of the words preached meant that they did not have to kill off their babies any more (see Shlain). This has been taken to extremes with the abstinence-or-procreate choice the Cee is currently promoting.
Modern medicine can correct many of the birth defects, and most societies have figured out how to manage the support net needed for many other ability issues. We now have many means of preventing conception to begin with, so for the educated with access to these means, the stress of not raising a child can simply being not having one. Having a kid becomes the choice, rather then what to do to survive with or without the once you had to bear.
So it would seem that the technology of birth control is the answer to sustainable population control - only have enough new births to replace the deaths.
But no political system is really going to advocate this.
Why not? Well, think about our moderately democratic system. One person, one vote. If you want something to happen, you need to have a bunch of people believe the same way you do. Generationally, the best way to do that is to breed more people with your beliefs then the other guys. If Portugal decided to cut it's population in half over then next 60 years, and Spain decided to grow it's population, you can bet that the big guys in crowded Spain would be looking for extra land to resettle it's people on, and Portugal would be looking pretty sparsely colonized after a while.
Hopefully it would still have the bodies & technology to defend it's borders, but those who are willing to overbreed will take up all the space left over by those who are willing to underbreed. This is Darwin's survival of the niche-y-est taken to extremes, but also comes from unfortunate yet impeccable logic.
But if we take that island that can support 100 people, and use the technology to defend it's borders as well as maintain it's population at ZPG, it can truly be a sustainable system.
So the next questions I have for sustainability in my area are
* how many people can my town support?
* how can we stabilize on a number lower then that figure?
I should preface my statements by saying I'm childless by choice and don't particularly like being around kids for long lengths of time. People that instead coo over every baby-action and imagine a houseful of little ones as paradise are the folks I consider irrational on the subject, or at least biased. They probably consider me biased the other way.
From a sustainability point, it's kind of a "duh" that we shouldn't have more people on a piece of property then that property can sustain. Would you rather have 100 healthy people living on an island, or 200 starving people, contracting cholera and other diseases of overcrowding? Most folks would choose the lower population, but then we have to balance the births to the deaths, and that's where we fail.
One bad idea is mandatory death. Well, okay, death is mandatory, as it happens to everyone eventually, but voluntary removal of yourself when you meet certain criteria is simply not going to happen, even in a 70s action flick. Raising the age limit like some eskimos had to -instead of terminating everyone over 30, just the really old when things were dire - is not a good plan, because a society may need the knowledge and memories of folks who have managed to survive that long. And we can also toss away any other killing off of a subset of the population as ew, ick, and just plain wrong - see Germany circa 1940.
Other ways large groups people die off include wars and disease, which are wasteful and painful, even to the survivors. We're spending a lot of time and effort to combat one, and unfortunately combating in the other. It's a traditional way for a ruler to remove excess population, but with the tools we now have, war leaves scars on planet that are even less sustainable then the quantity of people.
Exile is also a traditional thing to do with excess population. Give 'em a handful of boats, some tools and rations, and wave them goodbye, a la early explorers. What those explorers did was of no concern of the folks they left behind, but occasionally were not sustainable to the areas they explored - although more often, they died. The more educated folks know the death probability and wouldn't be willing to go explore (and die), even if there were places on the chart still labeld "Here be Dragons."
That's basically it for ways to get rid of adults. So instead of managing deaths, we can instead manage births for population control.
In ancient times it was not rare to leave a newborn on a hillside if it is deformed, one of a twin or triplet set, or an undesired product of an unofficial union. Check your history of Rome, India, China, Celts, etc. This is cross cultural, and the logic is unfortunate if not impeccable. If deformed, the child cannot survive without a large support net, and the ancient civilizations did not have the means to provide it. If the mother did not have the means to support the child - ie, there are too many of them, or the mom is too poor, or the father is not available - the child will die anyway and the mother should be freed of the burden early so she can concentrate on the surviving children, or her own survival. This was not often that mother's choice, mind you. Folks with authority over the mother would force this issue - her parents, legal spouse, religious leader, etc - half the time the very person who'd got them with child whether they wanted to be or not. This lack of choice, having the babe they carried for 9 months taken from them, was one of the reasons so many mass converted to christianity - because some of the words preached meant that they did not have to kill off their babies any more (see Shlain). This has been taken to extremes with the abstinence-or-procreate choice the Cee is currently promoting.
Modern medicine can correct many of the birth defects, and most societies have figured out how to manage the support net needed for many other ability issues. We now have many means of preventing conception to begin with, so for the educated with access to these means, the stress of not raising a child can simply being not having one. Having a kid becomes the choice, rather then what to do to survive with or without the once you had to bear.
So it would seem that the technology of birth control is the answer to sustainable population control - only have enough new births to replace the deaths.
But no political system is really going to advocate this.
Why not? Well, think about our moderately democratic system. One person, one vote. If you want something to happen, you need to have a bunch of people believe the same way you do. Generationally, the best way to do that is to breed more people with your beliefs then the other guys. If Portugal decided to cut it's population in half over then next 60 years, and Spain decided to grow it's population, you can bet that the big guys in crowded Spain would be looking for extra land to resettle it's people on, and Portugal would be looking pretty sparsely colonized after a while.
Hopefully it would still have the bodies & technology to defend it's borders, but those who are willing to overbreed will take up all the space left over by those who are willing to underbreed. This is Darwin's survival of the niche-y-est taken to extremes, but also comes from unfortunate yet impeccable logic.
But if we take that island that can support 100 people, and use the technology to defend it's borders as well as maintain it's population at ZPG, it can truly be a sustainable system.
So the next questions I have for sustainability in my area are
* how many people can my town support?
* how can we stabilize on a number lower then that figure?