{"id":35700,"date":"2018-07-03T06:51:18","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:51:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35700"},"modified":"2018-07-03T06:51:18","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:51:18","slug":"population-whats-the-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35700","title":{"rendered":"Population: what\u2019s the problem?"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2018\/06\/population-whats-the-problem\/\">Population: what\u2019s the problem?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Apologies for the clickbait-y title. My question isn\u2019t a rhetorical one intended to suggest that human population levels aren\u2019t a problem. I don\u2019t doubt they are. But it seems to me much less clear than a lot of people seem to think exactly what <em>kind <\/em>of problem they are, and what \u2013 if anything \u2013 could or should be done about it, which is what I want to aim at in this post. I raised these issues in my <a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2017\/12\/the-broken-glass-some-thoughts-on-population-10-billion\/\">last post of 2017<\/a>, which prompted some lively debate. But neither the post itself nor the comments under it quite nailed the issue for me, so here goes with another attempt.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1. Of proximal and underlying causation<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2018\/jan\/11\/theresa-may-plastic-plan-economy-consume\">article<\/a> by the evergreen George Monbiot bemoaning plastic pollution in the oceans, the first comment under the line had this to say: \u201cTwo answers \u2013 population control and capitalism control \u2013 but no takers\u2026not even George!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It strikes me that this response is spot on\u2026and also entirely misses the point. It\u2019s spot on because although plastic pollution in the oceans is an immediate problem, it has deeper underlying causes which are summarily encapsulated by the words \u2018population\u2019 and \u2018capitalism\u2019 about as well as by any others. I think it\u2019s a bit unfair to accuse George of not being a \u2018taker\u2019, since part of the point of his article was to suggest that self-fuelling economic growth \u2013 \u2018capitalism\u2019 by another name \u2013 is intrinsically destructive of the environment. Still, it\u2019s surely true that without large global populations subject to the forces of capitalist commodification, the problem of plastic in the ocean would be very much less severe than it presently is.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Population: what\u2019s the problem? Apologies for the clickbait-y title. My question isn\u2019t a rhetorical one intended to suggest that human population levels aren\u2019t a problem. I don\u2019t doubt they are. But it seems to me much less clear than a lot of people seem to think exactly what kind of problem they are, and what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[111,20762,15683,6112,1371,8011,9738],"class_list":["post-35700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-capitalism","tag-cause-and-effect","tag-chris-smaje","tag-george-monbiot","tag-population","tag-population-control","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35700"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35701,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35700\/revisions\/35701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}