Brad mentioned Catton’s theory of response to overpopulation as “We much learn to live in harmony with natural systems…”, which is true enough, but in the details talks about human values and not about how nature physically works. It’s a major “red flag” to talk about solving physical system problems in terms of human values. Our values are what we should use to motivate our learning how the systems work, but not actually what will change them!
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Brad,
One of the interesting “red flags” contained in the traditional theories of growth limits is that they present the physical processes involved “following a theory”, when in fact theories are only persuasive to people, and nature uses a rather different method… Natural systems are only going to be guided by their own increments of accumulation, and the counter increments those end up triggering. The huge error we keep making is thinking that reducing our use of things being overused is the solution, but fail to see what happens to the savings we make that way, that become the multipliers of things we’re paying no attention to. If interested in a more complete statement of that see The Efficiency Mistake…
When the increments of change get progressively larger what you can be as sure of as gravity is “something” in the environment will come along to upset that! Humans generally don’t think to look for it, that’s all. It’s not that the growth of good things is bad, but that you need to ask what will bring it to an end, and see the good in that too. In a world of increase you just start listing ALL the things that add to the increments, and the struggle with the real dilemma. The real dilemma comes down to promoting human welfare without linking it to human self-restraint.
If we don’t *link self-restraint* and *the feeding our desires* for charitable aid, money growth, new technology, improving productivity, leisure activity, healthcare, great monuments and artifacts, travel, etc. etc., then the ‘theories’ of the counter culture are just so much philosophizing without effect. So to construct the “counter system” we need to construct the “counter increments”, know how and why the aid, and the money, and the technology, and everything else would be good to stop adding to. Almost none of the “counter culture” people are even talk about that, do they?
I mention our crossing the EROI Line of Sustainability (degrading our resources as it multiplies their costs ) as one inescapable physical boundary to definitely avoid, that I think we seem to have already begun to cross. See Crossing the Line of Sustainability It’s a little ‘scientific” in approach, so I need help is getting the idea out other ways too. The problem is not just population growth, but ALL factors that persistently add to our uses of the earth (see list above)…