Deck chairs on the Titanic

[Pwalo]

You're all beginning to sound like American survivalists. I'm not too sure if that's a good thing, but it's quite amusing.

[scumdog]

If humans only wanted to 'exist' like a chipmunk does the world would be o.k.

But we humans want to 'live' which means we want Maccas, TV, motorcycles, over-seas travel, heated homes, roads, spray insecticides, have electricity, do burn-outs yadda, yadda, yadda.

All which 'use up' resources that are not needed for mere survival and create waste accordingly.

[Indiana_Jones]

DOOMED I TELLS YEA! DOOMED!

-Indy

[James Deuce]

Jim2, the extra billions of people aren't directly going to f@ck this planet. It's their wastes - sewage, air pollution, dead waterways etc that will do the damage. We don't have enough clean air or clean water to sustain the extra people. Yes we may be able to feed 13 billion people, but how will you move the food around the world without the infrastructure we will lack in the future?? Poorer people cant migrate to the better parts of the world, who'll want them? It will just create more world wars.
So, in a sense, over population will destroy our planet.
All caused by you dirty little f@ckers on KB getting your leg over all the time!!

Nah, that's just piss poor management.

Produce and transport food locally. If we didn't export or import foodstuffs, we'd all be a lot better off. Packaging and transport are causing most of our overt pollution issues at the moment. Food production is about making money not feeding people. If we changed that bias things would change for the better fairly rapidly. Only problem is a small minority of the planet would have a greatly reduced standard of living. You know, you and me, those "Westerners".

Dropping our standard of living would immeasurably improve it for the rest of the world.

Population pressures are all local in nature and emigration doesn't fix it. Letting people use their local resources will. At the moment we strip or have stripped in the past, all of the countries in Africa, Asia Minor, the Indian Sub Continent, SE Asia, China, and South America. We've established economic models in most of those countries that benefit us and leave the locals with a reduced standard of living. Europe tenaciously clung to the small farm model and it is starting to turn into a local positive for them, even with subsidies. Capitalist export models impoverish the local population. Look at how expensive relative to the local wage, Fish, Dairy, and Meat has become in NZ, especially over the last 18 months while our exporters have had pressure applied to them due to our dollar being over valued Internationally.

Clean Air? Almost always a local issue, and due to the lack of will to plan for continuous improvement in manging industrial waste. Clean Water problems? Almost always the result of letting areas become over populated (Western Urban Megalopolis model - it's a sign of "progress" you know!) or over farmed due to chasing after more virtual cash and refusing to apply a strict resource planning model. Not the shitty RMA NZ has but one with teeth and a purpose.

The biggest single mistake the Human race made was adopting an agrarian economy closely followed by the birth of the City State. Focussed agriculture is a bad idea.

[idb]

I'm reading a really interesting book at the moment by a guy called Jared Diamond.
He looks at societies over history and prehistory and examines why they have failed.

In the modern day apparently, Australia is at the most risk.
It has very low levels of nutrients in its soil and unreliable rainfall.
If it were to cease importing it would only be able to support approximately half of its current population, and the current political thinking is that it needs double the population!!

[Ixion]

..

Subsistence farming is not romantic. You need lots of people to farm without horses or oxen (or tractors for that matter), and horses and oxen are going to be eaten. Dogs and cats too. Current paddock sizes are much too big to manage witha stick and a bucket.

Dysentery will kill probably 2/3rds of the population within the first 2-3 months. Our model of living is intensely social and without decent sanitation and even rudimentary knowledge about not shitting near rivers or streams upstream from where you drink, crowding diseases will make short work of people. .

Nope . Not romanitic. F**k'n hard work. But practical if it's not agrarian farming. Pastoral doesn't require anywhere near so much in the way of horses (if needs be, none). Dogs would help, though.

NZ can easily support 70 million sheep (we had that many at one time) . Plus cows, goats deer. That's about 6 sheep and at least one other animal per household - even assuming only three people to a household. In reality, family sizes would get much much larger. Add vegie garden - labour intensive but highly productive - fertilise with the animal dung. Enough. Not going to be any fatties, but enough. Add fish, bush meat, bush vegetables, eels, lots of food in the bush.

Disease? Yep. Life expectancy would go down hard. But people survived. Dysentery shouldn't be a problem in NZ. I remember when every household had its own water supply, nobody died. And everybody knows to boil drinking water.

[James Deuce]

Disease? Yep. Life expectancy would go down hard. But people survived. Dysentery shouldn't be a problem in NZ. I remember when every household had its own water supply, nobody died. And everybody knows to boil drinking water.

You're making assumptions. There are people who cannot conceive of what we discuss.

[Hitcher]

As an agricultural scientist, I should plead the fifth, as it is not in our nature to produce high-quality food less efficiently.

If people don't demand a diverse range of foods, then they could perhaps feed themselves locally. In New Zealand's case this would mean forgoing wheat products, such as bread, pasta, biscuits, etc. This is because it is extremely difficult to produce reliable yields of milling wheat in this country. Other grain crops? Different story. Barley and various varieties of corn grow here very well.

Our consumption of seasonal fruits and vegetables would become seasonal. A lot of things we take for granted like bananas and oranges would largely disappear. The old arts of storing potatoes, onions and other staples would have to be resurrected.

The change in our standard of living by reverting to what is little more than subsistence agriculture, would be enormous. Like less than 15% of our current GDP. Probably much less.

And the ensuing societal impacts would be huge. As a nation we would no longer be a nation. Instead we would become a series of communities servicing large towns, that is assuming that anybody would want to remain here. This means that many roles and functions our society currently enjoys would be little more than frippery and dismissed almost immediately. People who did not have skills or knowledge that could make a direct and tangiable contribution would be dispensed with.

In some ways we would be better off than other societies facing similar pressures. In other ways we would be worse off. If we were no longer exporting food, there would be no reason for anybody to want to come here -- by sea or air -- which would make us a very remote and isolated place indeed.

[Pex Adams]

Nah, that's just piss poor management.

Are you telling me my bosses are running the world - shit that explains a lot

[scumdog]

I'm reading a really interesting book at the moment by a guy called Jared Diamond.
He looks at societies over history and prehistory and examines why they have failed.

In the modern day apparently, Australia is at the most risk.
It has very low levels of nutrients in its soil and unreliable rainfall.
If it were to cease importing it would only be able to support approximately half of its current population, and the current political thinking is that it needs double the population!!

So how would NZ fare with it's selenium deficiency in the soil etc??

[Ixion]

Y'know, I remember seeing all this angst before. Except it was back in the 13th, 14th centuries.

And it wasn't global warming that gave them the shits, it was global cooling.

The world quite quickly (over maybe a century) got real cold. About like it is nowdays . And stayed that way. Right up to now.

Communities were abandoned all over Europe. Greenland, Iceland, Scotland Russia, North German Plain, Scandanavia, North America. All of them had massive population loss as communities died or moved on because the world had gotten too cold for them to be able to survive where they were .

And of course plenty of people were quick to anounce that the world was ending. became a very popular theme, and people made a living out of travelling round spinning the Doomsday Spiel.

Especially once disease started adding to the problem - people werent immunised to cold weather diseaes - influenza and such.

Economies collapsed, farms were abandoned, whole villages in England. Farming had to change massively - from agrarian to pastoral. No more grapevines in Greenland or England.

And, population pressures forced northern nomadic people (Mongols, Tarters etc) to move south and west, driven out by the cold. Which in turn meant massive wars. If the temperature drops too low for grass to grow, a horse-centric nomadic people MUST move south. or die. And nomads are usually warriors.

But, y'know, somehow, the world survived. Even though the cold continued.

Now, at last, maybe the good times are coming back. Warmth. The sooner the better I say, the last 700 years have been bloody hard. Roll on the return of the Warm Ages.

[Ocean1]

You're making assumptions. There are people who cannot conceive of what we discuss.

Yes, feeling of guilty, perverse interest in that. You can modify peoples behaviour in ways that are completely unsurvivable in a more "natural" environment without consequence. But if the "real world" ever returns they'll all be fookt.

Having said that I don’t know if too many that do remember the ways of the semi-self-dependent days would still be capable…

[Hitcher]

So how would NZ fare with it's selenium deficiency in the soil etc??

The selenium deficiency issue is only a problem in parts of the South Island. But your point is valid. Other parts of the country are deficient in other trace elements such as cobalt and molybdenum. Currently that is managed either by land use (growing trees instead of animals or food crops) or by additives applied to fertiliser. All of our fertiliser is imported. Superphosphate dependence is more of a concern than anything else when it comes to growing food here.

New Zealand's soils are geologically *new* compared with other parts of the world, and our production systems little more than land-based hydroponics -- which is great when the rain falls and the sun shines and we can apply artificial fertilisers.

It is in these situations that the tree-hugging devotees of "organics" encounter a significant reality check.

[James Deuce]

Now, at last, maybe the good times are coming back. Warmth. The sooner the better I say, the last 700 years have been bloody hard. Roll on the return of the Warm Ages.

Precisely.

However. Back then, people didn't have things that did all the really hard work for them. Like washing machines, electricity, and internal combustion engines. What were basic survival skills then are utterly foreign to their modern descendants.

Back then infant mortality was rife, and people died of the flux more often than you'd think, because they simply didn't understand the concept of disease transmission vectors. Most of us do now, but we don't know how to prevent the transmission of disease without running water, and enclosed sewers.

[Ocean1]

Our consumption of seasonal fruits and vegetables would become seasonal. A lot of things we take for granted like bananas and oranges would largely disappear. The old arts of storing potatoes, onions and other staples would have to be resurrected.
~
we would become a series of communities servicing large towns, that is assuming that anybody would want to remain here.

Dude you're old enough to remember just such a situation, or damn close to it.

This means that many roles and functions our society currently enjoys would be little more than frippery and dismissed almost immediately. People who did not have skills or knowledge that could make a direct and tangiable contribution would be dispensed with.

More or less describes my current feelings.