Epiphany in the Park

Amador County had its first Earth Day last Saturday in Detert Park. After visiting one of the tables and one of the panel sessions . . . I had an epiphany I’d like to share.

There were maybe 40 tables with all kinds of interesting environmental related themes. One was called, “The Argument Shop”. Intrigued, I wandered by. The old gent pointed me to the major theme of the table, “Population Overshoot”
This is the idea (first put forward by Thomas Malthus in 1798) that any life form will multiply itself up to and beyond the capacity of its environment to sustain it. When its numbers have gone well beyond the capacity of the environment a large portion will starve (or die from some other critical shortage). This dynamic will keep the population over the long term close to the “carrying capacity” of the environment for that type of life. This works for microbes in a petri dish or for humans on a small planet.

The old gent had a number of graphs taken from the MIT 100 year simulation of “Humanity vs Earth’s Resources”. The results of that very expensive supercomputer simulation were published in 1972 as “The Limits to Growth” (or L2G). It showed our world’s population starting to decline due to lack of food, potable water, medical services, etc . . . starting in 2030.

That’s only 11 years away! I asked, “1972 was 47 years ago. Has anyone checked the accuracy of this L2G prediction?” He said, “Yes. The University of Melbourne in Australia compared 30 years of data to the L2G predictions. There were some small errors, but overall they gave it an A- for accuracy.” I said, “Then why have our media made almost no mention of this?”

He smiled, “The more workers there are, the cheaper they are to rent. The more workers, the greater the demand for the things the rich are invested in (land, new homes, fuel, manufactured goods, etc). And besides, through history declining population is always associated with economic depression. The rich don’t want the workers to know most of them are headed for starvation. And one of the things the rich control is the media. ”

After this depressing conversation, I attended the panel discussion on “Sustainable Forests”. Each of the three speakers reiterated that we are finally learning from the several thousand year practice of the Indians to regularly burn the forests to keep undergrowth down. These low intensity fires do not kill the larger trees. But when a massive overgrowth of shrubs and young trees are available as fuel, a fire will burn even the largest trees.

It struck me then that the rich view a massive die off of workers the same way that a forester views a massive die off of shrubs and understory. Of course the rich view themselves as large trees that are unlikely to be killed by such an event. They see both the fires and the coming mass starvation as part of nature’s effort to eliminate the weak or ill adapted. This also explains the silence of the rich about what lies ahead for most of humanity.

by Joseph Mitchener

527 words

published in the Amador Ledger Dispatch

on 4/30/19