{"id":63834,"date":"2022-10-17T09:00:44","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T14:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63834"},"modified":"2022-10-17T09:00:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-17T14:00:44","slug":"overpopulation-and-the-collapse-of-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=63834","title":{"rendered":"Overpopulation and the Collapse of Civilization"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"single-header\">\n<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/mahb.stanford.edu\/blog\/overpopulation-and-the-collapse-of-civilization\/\">Overpopulation and the Collapse of Civilization<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"single-featured-img\" class=\"attachment-960x450 size-960x450 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/mahb.stanford.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/overpopulation-and-the-collapse-of-civilization.jpg\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 568px) 100vw, 568px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mahb.stanford.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/overpopulation-and-the-collapse-of-civilization.jpg 568w, https:\/\/mahb.stanford.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/overpopulation-and-the-collapse-of-civilization-400x272.jpg 400w\" alt=\"\" width=\"568\" height=\"386\" \/><\/div>\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"flexible-content\">\n<article>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\">A major shared goal of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) and Sustainability Central \u00a0is reducing the odds that the \u201cperfect storm\u201d of environmental problems that threaten humanity will lead to a collapse of civilization.\u00a0 Those threats include\u00a0 climate disruption, loss of biodiversity (and thus ecosystem services), land-use change and resulting degradation, global toxification, ocean acidification, decay of the epidemiological environment, increasing depletion of important resources, and resource wars (which could go nuclear).\u00a0 This is not just a list of problems, it is an interconnected complex resulting from interactions within and between what can be thought of as two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system.\u00a0 The manifestations of this interaction are often referred to as \u201cthe human predicament.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0That predicament is getting continually and rapidly worse, driven by overpopulation, overconsumption among the rich, and the use of environmentally malign technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service the consumption.<\/p>\n<p><em>All<\/em>\u00a0of the interconnected problems are caused in part by overpopulation, in part by overconsumption by the already rich.\u00a0 One would think that most educated people now understand that the larger the size of a human population,\u00a0<em>ceteris paribus,<\/em>\u00a0the more destructive its impact on the environment.\u00a0 The degree of overpopulation is best indicated (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis, which shows that to support\u00a0<em>today\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0population sustainably at current patterns of consumption would require roughly another half a planet, and to do so at the U.S. level would take four to five more Earths.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Overpopulation and the Collapse of Civilization A major shared goal of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) and Sustainability Central \u00a0is reducing the odds that the \u201cperfect storm\u201d of environmental problems that threaten humanity will lead to a collapse of civilization.\u00a0 Those threats include\u00a0 climate disruption, loss of biodiversity (and thus ecosystem [&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":[2,3,4,7],"tags":[138,150,6633,162,18373,606,33223,681,5680],"class_list":["post-63834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-civilisation","tag-collapse","tag-collapse-of-civilisation","tag-consumption","tag-mahb","tag-overpopulation","tag-paul-r-ehrlich","tag-resources","tag-stanford"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63834","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=63834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63835,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63834\/revisions\/63835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}