Back to the original topic, people need a broader idea of what technology means. We tend to think of it as computers and high tech stuff, but it also includes things like the wheel. People that think we can go back to a simpler way of life don't realize that even the horse drawn cart was a technology that irrevocably changed life. The population of Europe concentrated in it's cities was too large to go back to a rural lifestyle hundreds of years ago. So no point wishing away technology, the only hope for maintaining the current overpopulation is more technology.
agree 100%. although on a slight side note, the idea of using technology to solve the current problems has been in place for a long time and never resolved the underlying problems which got us to this pass in the first place. it's always this same situation- only the date and the details change.
when i was mentioning overpopulation the other day, a lady i know rebutted: "someone figured out that you could take every person on earth and stick them in a middle-sized suburban house, one couple and one child per house, and they would all fit comfortably in the state of texas"... a statement of colosally blissful ignorance by my measure, but a very catholic one by other measures.
but it's understandable, because very few people really grasp the infrastructure and costs necessary to support populations (i know i don't). we've all gotten used to the support levels which we are privy to, which are the most spectacular and miraculous in all of history. food crop production, fishing and animal husbandry, ore extraction, refining, manufacture, precision engineering, scientific method and scientific tools, electrical grid capacity and range, ditto water and sewer systems, global shipping and delivery, banking and credit, near-instantaneous news and message transmission, computational tools- these have all reached dizzying heights, and the future truly is now by all known standards.
(as an aside, even current infrastructures have limits. just recently, t. boone pickens was forced to scuttle a massive windfarm project in the texas panhandle because of insufficient transmission lines in place and insufficient financing to build the needed lines. he lost billions by trying to go green but planning a little too aggressively... maybe trying to be too much of a maverick, and now he's stuck trying to sell thousands of wind turbines he can't use.)
all of these plateaus of achievement would be great except for the downsides and costs of said plateaus, which have placed us in a position such that if this civilisation fails, mankind (assuming we survive) will never be able to reach anywhere near these heights again, at least via similar paths that brought us here. this is so because of how much we've impoverished the world's physical resources and how much we've drastically reduced the world's biodiversity. there will never again be the amount of ores as easily obtainable as they were this time around, and the remnant of the petroleum in the ground, which took hundreds of millions of years and the right conditions to form, is going to be much more difficult to extract next time.
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the change that happened to me recently is that i realised that this is not really modern man's fault. as marty said, the mechanisms lie farther back, in examples such as conquest-driven tribes which served to homogenise populations and increase population ceilings, crop-growing peoples who tended to expand in number and use up biodiversity faster than it could be locally replenished, peoples of the metal ages who first started mining and using copper, iron, etc in new and useful ways, not worrying about the fact that metals are a finite resource. basically, all populations that made regular use of resources which were not replenished as fast as they were used or not replenished at all. even building a fire or taking water from a well uses up resources, so almost all human inventions are rooted in this potential and fundamental problem.
for the record, i do believe that there are humans who were able to live in balance with the earth, such as the arctic / far-north tribes, africans, native north americans, australian aborigines, islander tribes, ie all those examples of man who used animals, plants, natural forces, etc to make their societies work, and used resources in such a way that they could have gone on doing the same thing til the end of time. --which is possibly a naive thought, given how quickly tribes disintigrate in the face of exposure to technology, losing their customs and values when their is a little better comfort and standard of life to be had. not to mention the paradigm-busting nature of human ambition, conquest-lust and the seeking of power, which were the kinds of things that probably turned proto indo-european peoples from farmers and hunter-gatherers into nomads who mowed down other tribes like grass. although surely their conditions of life had a hand in turning them in that direction.
anyway, back to the main point, it hit me that this self-destructive nature is not unique to man- it's inherant in animals and all lifeforms, too. the forces which cause lifeforms to succeed and then succeed too well, ultimately getting them in trouble, are the same forces working in man, too...