culling the species

[Kevin B. O'Brien]

dsummersminet at comcast.net wrote:
> Original Message:
> -----------------
> From: Kevin B. O'Brien zwilnik at zwilnik.com
> Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:56:38 -0400
> To: brin-l at mccmedia.com
> Subject: Re: culling the species
>
>
>
>   
>> If not, why do you think that the present level of population is
>> unsustainable?  In the US, at least, farms are much more productive and
>>     
> are
>   
>> farmed in a far more sustainable manner than they were 50-100 years ago. 
>> Indeed, my father-in-law's old farm has been gaining topsoil over the last
>> decade or so as a result of improvements in soil management.
>>   
>> That is good, but you yourself have made very persuasive arguments with 
>> respect to global warming that there is no feasible way to cut back on 
>> carbon emissions per capita. 
>>     
>
> What I said was that, with present technologies, we shouldn't expect China
> to do that.  So the world warms, and the best farming zones shift north. 
> Canada and Siberia will gain, others will lose.  On the whole, higher
> rainfall is exspected.
Only China? You don't expect anything from India, or the rest of the 
world? I am fairly certain that everyone in the world want to have the 
same standard of living that we in the wealthy west have. A 
quick-and-dirty estimate is that this will require about a 6x increase 
in output per capita. And that output will come with some load of 
pollution, energy use, carbon emissions, etc. I don't think you can be 
quite so Panglossian with these trend lines.
> Fishing suffers from the tragedy of the commons.  Whale's were overhunted a
> century ago, yet the green revolution of the '60s massively cut into world
> hunger.  I recall when India needed massive imports of US food just to keep
> its people alive.  Until the latest stupidity with regard to biofuels, food
> shortages were almost always caused by men with guns who kept food away
> from starving people and by real studid government policies. 
>   
I don't quite see why applying the label "Tragedy of the Commons" voids 
the main point here. For there to be healthy fisheries there needs to be 
a balance between the rate of reproduction and the rate of withdrawal, 
and that has clearly been violated here, with fisheries collapsing just 
about everywhere you look. And this is a fairly recent phenomenon. I 
think the correlation to population pressure is pretty robust.
>> For example, the so-called bread basket of the U.S. used to be called 
>> the great desert. 
>>     
>
> The Great Desert was in the SW.  
>   
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Desert
>   
>> What changed that was to drilling of wells to tap the 
>> Oglala aquifer, turning places like Kansas and Nebraska into prime farm 
>> land. 
>>     
>
> My experience with farming is that corn and soybean farming relies little
> on irrigation.  Those problems do exist, but more in the arid SW regions. 
> If you look at places like Iowa and Illinois and Minn., 3 out of the 4 big
> corn producers, you see little irrigation.  The environmentalists keep
> yelling non-sustainable, but these areas are not depleting reservoirs in
> order to farm.
>   
I'm pretty sure I never brought up Iowa, Illinois, or Minnesota. I 
brought up the depeltion of the Oglala Aquifer, and you can find more on 
this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer. Note that it is a 
deposit of ground water laid down 2-6 million years ago, and is begin 
depleted at a rate equal to the flow of 18 Colorado Rivers every year.

"There are a number of Great Plains areas where large-scale irrigation 
developments are important. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these is on 
the High Plains from Colorado and Nebraska to Texas. The area is 
underlain by the Oglala aquifer, a vast underground geologic reservoir 
under 250,000 square kilometers of the area that contains an estimated 2 
billion acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot is the volume of irrigation 
water that covers 0.4 hectares to a depth of 0.3 meters.) This is 
"fossil" water, much of it deposited more than a million years ago. 
About a quarter of the aquifer's area is irrigated, almost entirely with 
Oglala water. The High Plains is a major agricultural region, providing, 
for example, two-fifths of America's sorghum, one-sixth of its wheat, 
and one-quarter of its cotton. Irrigated lands here produce 45 percent 
more wheat, 70 percent more sorghum, and 135 percent more cotton than 
neighboring nonirrigated areas. Groundwater withdrawals have more than 
tripled since 1950, to more than 20 million acre-feet annually."

Source: http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/geography/geog11.htm

Now, if it runs from Colorado and Nebraska to Texas, I'm pretty sure it 
runs through Kansas to get there. Or you can consult the map at 
Wikipedia to confirm that it does indeed underly Kansas as well as the 
other states.
> Places like OK and the TX panhandle may have problems, but that's more
> ranching country.  
>
>
>   
>> The problem is that we are essentially mining this resource in a 
>> non-renewable manner.  The water in this aquifer was collected over 
>> millions of years, and we are using it up in decades. When it is gone, 
>> Kansas and Nebraska will return to being desert, and what happens to 
>> food supplies then?
>>     
>
>
>
> If you look at these rainfall maps, you will see that Kansas and Nebraska
> get far too much rain to be remotely consistent with being deserts.  Far
> West Kansas is a bit dry, under 20 inches/year, but east Kansas is in the
> 36 to 40+ range.  Eyeball averages give about 25 inches rain/year.  That
> should be plenty for sustaining crops. Nebraska's a bit dryer, averaging
> about 22 inches/year. That's not a desert.
>
> http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/precip.html
>   
The term was applied to this area historically. But it does some justice 
to the idea that without irrigation these areas would not be major 
agricultural producers. The fact on the ground is that agriculture in 
these places *does* rely on irrigation right now. Maybe all of these 
farmers are just being foolish and investing money in irrigation for no 
good reason and ignoring all of the rainfall that they are getting for 
free.
>> If you look globally, water supplies are strained just about everywhere. 
>>     
>
> Clean, safe water supplies are. But water is usually available, we just
> don't spend the modest amount of money to make it safe for undeveloped
> countries. It is possible that we will have to improve our use of water,
> and the cost thereof to handle farming.  But, we now have or are on the
> edge of having design capacities for better drought resistent crops.  If we
> don't do stupid things like divert 40% of corn production to ethanol, then
> food shouldn't be a problem.  
>   
For the U.S. it is not overall a critical problem yet, though in certain 
areas it is becoming more of a problem. I note that California is 
casting covetous eyes at the Great Lakes, for instance. As a resident of 
Michigan, my first reaction is that anyone stupid enough to move to the 
desert deserves their problems without my help. But I suspect it won't 
exactly play out that way. And I agree that for the U.S. the money to be 
spend is relatively a "modest sum". But take a look at what happens when 
you try to increase output by 6x. Water consumption per capita goes way 
up, not just for agricultural and home use, but for industrial use, 
which has the side-effect of generally polluting the water. So the real 
question is whether the water supply is sufficient to cover a global 
population of over 6 billion (and still growing) producing approximately 
6x the current level of global output. If you are looking at 
sustainability, that is the real test. And I don't think water supplies 
can stretch that far, frankly.
>> This is one example of a bottleneck factor. To me it seems obvious that 
>> the present level of population is higher than the environment can 
>> support sustainably in the long-term.
>>     
>
>
> OK, let's look at an area with >2x the average population density of the
> world: Western Europe.  Where's the environmental catastrophy there? 
> Indeed, Europe can afford to supplement very inefficient agriculture
> policies (with about half of the EU's budget) and still produce enough food.
>   
OK, let's look at Europe. The environmental problems that they are 
having are modest at this point. And they do have a high population 
density. Europe has a pretty benign climate, good soils, and an 
abundance of water. Two of those factors depend critically on global 
climate. The benign climate and high levels of rainfall are dependent on 
the current global climate, in particular the Gulf Stream. And global 
climate change is already causing alterations there. Europe is getting 
drier now, and scientists are predicting increased environmental stress 
(including reduced crops) from that. If the Gulf Stream were to either 
shut off or significantly shift, both of which are considered very 
possible as a result of global climate change, there is no doubt that a 
very significant environmental catastrophe in Europe would result.

The point of my argument, to restate it, as that numerous indicators are 
pointing to the fact the human populations have risen beyond what can be 
sustained within our environment, and I think that is still a valid 
point. I could also have mentioned extinctions/loss of biodiversity and 
the loss of habitat, which are also clearly caused by population 
pressure from humans. Some of these can be overcome, to a degree, by the 
clever use of technology, but that must do so at a level of output that 
provides a standard of living to all humans equal to those enjoyed by 
the West to be viable over the long-term. And even that probably 
understates the task, since I don't see any sign right now that people 
in the West are willing to settle for stagnating standards of living.

Regards,

-- 
Kevin B. O'Brien         TANSTAAFL
zwilnik at zwilnik.com      Linux User #333216

"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an 
international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week." 
-- George Bernard Shaw