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.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-01-12 09:53 pm (UTC)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.