james_davis_nicoll | Your Next Fifty Years by Robert W. Prehoda

From: (Anonymous)

That is the sort of obituary Stasi might have written.

My memory bump is itching madly - I've heard of Prehoda before but I'm not sure where. Maybe Robert Anton Wilson's *The Cosmic Trigger*?

From:

rezendi

If the obituarist was upset Prehoda grew skeptical of cryonics, presumably they're more than irate at Wikipedia: "It is a pseudoscience,[3] and its practice has been characterized as quackery."

From: (Anonymous)

I've seen some places say that the word 'corpsicle' is considered offensive by cryonicists. I weave it into every conversation I possibly can.

From: (Anonymous)

To quote a well-known pundit “you would make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store.”

Thank you for this.

From:

ckd

"I understood that reference." -- Steve Rogers, The Avengers

Edited Date: 2020-01-12 10:05 pm (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

Hardinist? Salvor Hardin, or someone else?

From:

james_davis_nicoll

Garrett Hardin, author of The Tragedy of the Commons. Avid racist. If someone cites Hardin, check their closets for white sheets.

From:

ba_munronoe

"Sounds like common sense" is a common red flag.

I like science fiction but I also like big cities: is there something wrong with me?

From:

dsrtao

Nah. Turns out most people prefer cities, and lots of people like SF flavored entertainment.

From:

estrevan

These days when people talk in glowing terms about small communities, I like to calculate my chances of ever encountering another trans person in my hunter-gatherer band, solar-powered commune, or agrarian small town. Cities of 200,000 people give a bit more scope - somewhere between 400 and 2000 trans and GNC people by current estimates - but that's still not very many, especially when you start to break it down by age and identity.

From:

jreynoldsward

Interestingly I know several trans people in small communities. And the other day at a sewing gathering, talk of one person's adult child was basically--"some days he's a he, some days she's a she. Just depends on how is dressed." No judgment, no big deal, just yep, that's that person doing their thing. It really does depend on the community and the degree to which conservative religion dominates (and in Oregon, which is highly unchurched, your odds of encountering toxic religion really does depend on the location and its history. There are places I won't touch with a ten-foot-pole, and others where even though overall politics are red trending to purple, folks are pretty tolerant. Gotta know the community. In my opinion some of the Southeast Portland suburbs are the most toxic in the state).

From:

estrevan

I wasn’t really thinking about tolerance, though - it’s easy for people to be tolerant as long as you’re the rare exception. More that I didn’t even start figuring out I was trans until I came into contact with trans communities who had the information, advice, and support I needed.

From:

frith

Oooo! My grandparents lived on SE 76th decades ago. I remember some nice front gardens a few streets uphill from there. But now Portland looks huge and really hard to navigate.

From: (Anonymous)

Norman Borlaug got the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for the 'Green revolution' of high yield food crops (& dependence on pesticides) etc that averted famine in Mexico, India, .... (and became the global agri business of today)

Club of Rome style Malthusian predictions entered the popular consciousness around the same time, 1972 say. (I've never read the original texts).

The reviewed book, published 10 years later, sounds horribly derivative, popularisation of a popularisation. It marks the end of a decade of such near future predictions.

By the 1990s, Malthus was no longer taught to 10 year olds in geography classes, or the subject of popular books.

What's the intellectual history of these ideas? Why is that it is only after a Malthusian crisis was averted that the crisis was 'noticed' in the industrial west?

(I try not to ponder where we are now, perched in Sydney, the air unbreathable and the state burning)

From:

james_davis_nicoll

In fairness to Prehoda, he mentions Borlaug:

The population Pollyannas of the 1970s had said that "the Earth can easily support populations many times larger than today's." Now the reality of the 1990s has proven them wrong. The world's "carrying capacity" (the total number of people that can be fed using available resources) was exceeded in the middle decades of this century. Many scientists predicted that any attempt to increase food production would only aggravate the decline in the quality of life unless population was brought under control.

Dr. Norman Borlaug was the "father of the Green Revolution," and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his pioneering work on miracle high-yield seeds. In 1974, he issued a dire warning: "It is going to take a tremendous disaster from famine before people come to grips with the population problem. The stage is set for such a situation right now ... but there will be no coming together of minds until a major famine brings people together."

Edited Date: 2020-01-12 07:43 pm (UTC)

From:

graydon

Intellectual history is going a bit far, maybe.

The public drive for Malthusian ideas was and is generally pretty darn racist; "let them die, but not my pure people". (It's not like the Right Reverend Dr. Malthus didn't have a political position to advance on initial publication!) It turns into "They can't have children, it would just waste resources valuable children could use" pretty quick.

The present problem -- soil mining, open-loop additives, no more yield to be had, ecological collapse driven by insect population collapse; it's not a good place to be -- is still there; the Green Revolution was a delay, not a solution. (This problem is independent of climate change; we'd have these problems even if Benevolent Alien Space Bats were keeping the atmospheric carbon load constant at 280 ppm.) The other side of the problem is that to a first approximation the population growth issues go away if you socially empower women and give them control of reproduction, reducing the food security problem to abolishing the patriarchy. No amount of being factual does anything to get that viewpoint widely presented.

Similarly, we're pretty sure that various indigenous farmers with neolithic tech did as well or better in terms of yield than we do today; absent climate change, that could be a fix -- there's plenty of small-scale evidence in favour of it -- if we could manage to reorganize food production. (Reducing the problem to "abolish capitalism".)

With climate change, well. The amount of change affects the carrying capacity for a given food ecology. "Interesting" isn't quite the word I want, here.

From: (Anonymous)

Interesting as always.

> we're pretty sure that various indigenous farmers with neolithic tech did as well or better in terms of yield than we do today

Is this supposed to be true only for small scale farming, or also to scale ? (A reference would be useful, it's not something I know much about.)

The intellectual history part of the question was about how these ideas disseminate. Was 'Limits to Growth' influenced by the ongoing 'Green revolution'? A crisis averted making people _more_ aware of the possibility of disaster, the memory of global catastrophes because of war still present even in comfortable lives. Or did this occur independently, with the `third world' as other, and structural racism the only lens with which to parse it, as you suggest?

The robustness of the Malthusian argument - exponential growth vs bounded resources -- means that its validity is almost tautological. It misidentifies the actual problems that industrial overreach have caused (eschatological and otherwise), and has little predictive power. Toy models with differential equations are illuminating conceptually, but about as predictive as the same ideas expressed in English.

It's only now that climate change is viscerally real to most of the population (and oh hell is it real faster than the worst predictions, we are fucked). So it is fiddling while Oz burns to ask about the dissemination of apocalyptic predictions, 1968-1980, and how they relate to the transformation of agriculture.

Yet still, I ask.

From:

graydon

Indigenous agricultural yields are contentious about six ways. "Maybe they were only farming the best sites because low population meant they didn't need to farm more extensively" (leaving out that no comparable soil survives! but that's important, too!), "it was all gardening, you can't call it farming", "we don't really have actual yield figures", "combined crop fields make it impossible to describe yield in an apples-to-apples way", "you can't decontextualize agriculture from land management" (which rapidly turns into its own large bucket of angry self-referential squid....) Googling "chinampa" (for a mesoamerican start point), "new england indigenous maize yields" and so on and starting to wade's productive. But it's massively, massively scattered because un-scattering it is equivalent to an argument that capitalism needs replacing. (Which, well, set bullshit filter to high when wading.)

So I don't have a single summary source! Modern experiments/gardens with combined crops and attempts at soil reconstruction indicate that, yeah, yield per hectare is better. Why and how much and if this scales, all contentious. (You'll get people arguing that global warming means all post-1980 (1990, 1950, 2000...) maize yield figures can't be compared to prior centuries because warmer and corn heat units are for sure a thing. This is not obviously wrong!)

Presently, yeah, we're going to lose at least field agriculture, and we're going to lose it soon. (by 2030 doesn't seem obviously crazy; even the IPCC says by 2050, and that's with now known-optimistic projections. Wadhams et al. seem to have been bang on the money about Arctic Amplification as a process.)

So, anyway; the thing about both Limits to Growth and the Green Revolution is that they're both attempts to grapple not with the prospect of shortages -- nobody involved in either narrative expected to be hungry -- but with the appropriate policy response to certain 3rd world mass starvation. They were definitely in dialog with each other, and they were both structurally tangled by the shadow of the Bomb. (Lots of stuff got forced into axiom territory when it didn't belong there by the structure of the Cold War and MAD and so on.) Limits to Growth functioned socially (though I don't think this was the intent of the folks doing the projections) as an argument (exactly parallel to the natural order arguments about the Irish potato famine!) that nothing could be done and the most merciful outcome is to do nothing and let them die. (Because otherwise deserving people are poorer; that's immoral! that's much more immoral than non-white starvation!) The Green Revolution functioned socially as "we can be nice! (and incidentally make buckets and buckets and buckets of money through controlling agriculture from end to end everywhere...)" and that's what won at the time because it was an opportunity for new profit sources, rather than an argument for the status quo.

From a long term perspective, neither argument really stands up but that wasn't the point; the point was to resolve a policy dispute about revenue sources.

From:

jreynoldsward

The big problem with the Green Revolution is that it focused on crop yields, not crop durability. That focus is changing with current research, to the degree that researchers are commenting that GMOs are insufficiently flexible (it takes about ten years to implement changes in seed strains). There's a LOT going on with ag research that you won't read about in the Guardian, much of it focused on that durability issue as well as carbon capture processes. Pinpoint agriculture is a thing and there's a lot of startup funding going toward some significant innovation.

Note: currently researching for a near-future agtech book, and the stuff I'm finding which isn't making it into the overall news is fascinating. Ag future is in drones, computerized tech, and microbial treatments. One rancher told me that weed herbicide resistance is real, and that things have to change.

From:

graydon

I would consider that this is not the problem.

There's a tradeoff between yield and reliability; subsistence farmers are heavily biased towards reliability for obvious reasons. (you only starve once; good year, good year, etc. twenty times and "all die, O the embarrassment" is still "all die".) Agriculture has been shifting away from subsistence for basically the whole Carbon Binge.

This gets off into a massive tangle about mechanization of agriculture, dependence on fossil carbon, cash flows (farmers don't make a profit), and so on. Still not the point.

The point is that we're heading into circumstances where we have no idea how much or when it's going to rain. At that point, field agriculture is done. If that happens before the replacement is in place, up, and running, industrial civilization is done. (at least wherever that agriculture was feeding people and cannot be replaced on short notice.) The idea that we're going to maintain the full armamentarium of Peak Carbon Binge techniques strikes me as wildly implausible.

From:

scott_sanford

Rain, while very important, is not an absolute limit. We've been doing irrigation for thousands of years, and these days powered pumps let us do it really hard. Current reservoirs are usually too small for greater instability but that's an understood problem. Making useful water where there's just not enough is expensive; this has been a concern for decades in California and Israel.

From:

graydon

Reservoirs get filled by rain. (consider the current condition of Venice, months after record floods....)

Pumps and desalination are real things, but area -- and in this case roofed area! -- is constrained; greenhouses are completely dependent on ecological services from a much larger area than that enclosed in the greenhouse.

And the minimum area for ~2.5 MCal/day (the food calorie being a kilocalorie...) for everybody is pretty honking big. The resilient minimum area is larger still.

To a first approximation, Saskatchewan grows half the food in Canada; between 46 and 48 percent. Presume we can double productivity per area; that gives the roughly 40 million acres of cropland in Saskatchewan as that required for Canada. Cut that to a quarter, since roughly three quarters of Canadian agricultural products are exported. Ten million acres is ~40,500 square kilometres; 405 by 100 km. That's a lot of pipe and a lot of greenhouses per ~40 million people.

And, critically, that bit about if that happens before the replacement is in place, up, and running, industrial civilization is done. Someone has to get all that water pipe in places, all those greenhouses built, debugged -- remember, closed greenhouses not reliant on a larger area for ecological services is not in any way a known technology -- and producing prior to immediate demand. Plus a zero-fossil-carbon greenhouse tech and figuring out where to put them and how to distribute the food from them.

This ought to be happening as a full-industrial-mobilization every-nerve-and-sinew project. (There are doubtless other useful approaches which should also be happening.)

I observe that not only is it not happening, the timeline for successful completion now extends past the point in time where there are significant risks of agriculture failing.

From: (Anonymous)

Ouch. Insightful, and plausible. So _many_ ways the future looks bleak.

Comment on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_desalination_plants_in_Australia

From: (Anonymous)

Ouch. Insightful, and plausible. So _many_ ways the future looks bleak.

Care to comment on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_desalination_plants_in_Australia

From:

graydon

Food is mostly water. That's "run the city", not "grow the food", amounts. Still worthwhile but it's not an input into food security.

Expected sea level rise from present-day (2020) atmospheric carbon load is around fifteen (15) metres. How fast? when? etc. much more open questions, but there's some solid data from past events from a cave in Mallorca and the amplification folks have been screaming in academic about the likelihood of a sudden two metre rise for just ages. (Note there's an indigenous tradition about the last time preserved in Australia and they describe the sea coming up as abrupt. Since they're plausibly describing glacial lakes draining off NorAm, there's no reason to suppose they're wrong.) So any existing desalination plant and all its power infrastructure needs to be sited well above current sea level; I'd be going for 25 metres. I rather doubt that's true of the Australian desalination plants as they presently exist. (It costs you in pipe and pumps and nobody had the cave-in-Mallorca numbers when those plants got built; they were probably built on the "1 metre, tops, by 2100" IPCC numbers.)

From:

scott_sanford

Sadly true. While building some kind of crazy nuclear powered desalination and canal network isn't technically impossible at any single point, we don't have the political backing or time.

From:

estrevan

My guess is that the rise of Malthusianism in the 1970s, along with concerns about big cities and rising crime, is part of a wider racist backlash in the West. (Particularly America, but there's blame enough to go round.) I don't have a single easy cause, though - some combination of the end of the post-WW2 economic boom, the threat of former colonised nations getting their act together, and anti-discrimination laws starting to take effect?

We got taught Malthusianism when I was at school in the UK in the early 80s, but also the demographic transition. The line was that "population problems" were a product of the transition from agricultural to industrial economies, and thus temporary. With hindsight, it was a kind of liberal middle-ground between the pure racist version and an actual analysis, which would have meant criticising capitalism.

From:

jreynolds197

First 2020 Vision and now this one. Do I sense a trend of reviewing 40-50 year-old books of futurism?

~

I (very vaguely) remember a book of futurism in the school library where I served my Grades 5 & 6 sentence (late 1970s). It purported to show what the shiny future of 2000 would look like.

I've no idea of the title or author. Or even what the cover looked like. A book completely stranded in my brain - all I know is that it existed.

From: (Anonymous)

I remember a *poster* from the same time period, positing three possible futures from Star Trek to Mad Max (though not couched in media allegories).

Looks like we're getting Mad Max.