Bioregion Quiz & Podcast Response

The Bioregional Quiz proved to be quite difficult. My knowledge of the local bioregion is apparently lacking. McKibben held high standards for "Eaarth"'s ecological direction, and believed that humans should curve use of not just fossil fuels but also nuclear power, although no solution is offered to energy consumption. McKibben's stance on locally produced foods is very relevant to the Bioregion Quiz, as bioregion plays a large part in being able to produce foods. Ensuring that soil quality is of a sustainable level is an extremely important facet of maintaining Earth's population. McKibben believes that we have hit the maximum limit of growth sustainable by humans, although there have many sociologists before who have believed this, and time has disproven them.

Island Civilization and Overpopulation

                In Roderick Fraser Nash’s essay “Island Civilization”, he proposes a somewhat unbelievable situation that would solve many environmental issues in modern society by the turn of the next millennium. Overpopulation is one of these issues, and Nash proposes we instate some form of birth control or selection to limit the planet’s human population to only 1.5 billion. I believe overpopulation is an overblown issue in many cases, although not a non-existent one.

                 Overpopulation is a multi-faceted issue which reflects humans’ many needs to survive. The primary concern many have in regards to overpopulation is the amount of food we have available to us and the space we need in order to produce this food. Humans are able to produce food almost anywhere now that we have the technology of greenhouses, which could be placed on top f any given building to produce food for the residents. Quick-growing plants such as kudzu and bamboo can easily be grown and eaten. Animals such as cows and chickens are largely space-inefficient to raise for slaughter. In a world with several more billion people, it would be an economically better decision to instead use the space to raise beetle larvae- you could raise many more beetles in the same space you could raise the livestock of today, and they provide more protein than either chicken or beef.

                Aside from space for food, humans also need space to live. There are many unexplored or unpopulated areas on earth right now, mostly under the sea. There is also lots of room both above and below current cities that isn’t used. Takenaka Corporation’s Sky City 1000 concept may be the reality of future urban development. The science-fictive Geofronts or Space Colonies may also become a reality in exploiting the near-endless area humans have to work with.

                A more prevalent or serious concern in my mind is providing enough energy for the processes of the future. Nuclear power, especially in the United States, is an underutilized source of energy production. Renewable energy is not currently a viable method of supporting a large human population, but the technology is hopeful and, with more research, may eventually become humanity’s primary form of energy generation.

                Overpopulation is only a true issue once the entire planet suffers from it, although large cities such as New York and Tokyo suffer the problem on a much smaller scale. Both cities built up- they house some of the world’s tallest buildings and make use of nuclear power and clean or hybrid energy. However, neither has any sort of special dietary adjustment due to the ability to import food from other places (although this does make food their marginally more expensive), so it’s not a perfect example of human population beating the odds.

Another thing to consider is how cities such as Tokyo and New York are considered to be at the forefront of human development. Some of the greatest technologies come from large cities such as these, and as more brilliant minds are able to connect in epicenters of human dwelling, quality of human life around the world will improve.  Their capability to house millions in such a relatively small space must be duplicated in order to support a higher population lest we need to implement the inhumane practices of population control.

http://www.learnliberty.org/content/are-we-running-out-resources

Island Civilization Summary and Response

Roderick Frazier Nash, the author of Island Civilization, believes that humanity has gone too far in its colonization of Earth. Early on, humanity set the goal of “conquering nature”, and it was not until late in the second millennium realized the damage and tried to reverse it.

Nash offers three popular continuations of this behavior, and proposes one scenario of his own.

In the first, called “Wasteland Scenario”, sees humans living in a world with no wilderness. They have used all resources and are left with nothing, dooming all of the earth’s species.

The second scenario is “Garden Scenario”, where humans control all facets of nature. This contradiction means there is no real nature at all, and Nash sees it as a failure. Humans may succeed as a species, but they will be homogenized and uncontrollable aspects of nature will be eliminated.

The final popular scenario is “Future Primitive”. Technology is abandoned as its impacts are deemed too detrimental, and humanity returns to a hunter-gatherer society a la Mad Max.

In Nash’s own scenario, “Island Civilization”, humans are expected to reduce their numbers by 75%, construct large dome areas where they can live without harming the natural earth’s environment, and live (with technology) only in these domes. He calls this scenario “Island Civilization”. In this process, humans would allow the Earth around them to return to a more natural state. While this approach may seem far-fetched, Nash believe that with technology developed in the future, Island Civilization will be possible

I believe that humanity will be able to restore the earth’s balance without any ultimatum or bizarre scenarios as long as they truly want to. Humans have always invested in what they believe is best for them at the time, and if restoring earth’s integrity is the best for humans, it’s almost guaranteed to happen.

Most of the proposed scenarios are asinine. We can in no way predict that humans will control all facets of natural process any more than we can predict aliens will come down and fix everything for us. The wasteland scenario might make sense if humans continued to use resources and never attempted to curve their use, but that’s untrue as already we lean towards items such as electrical cars and recyclable materials instead of their wasteful counterparts. The Future Primitive situation is quite literally something out of a science fiction script. Humans will never collectively abandon technology, and it doesn’t make sense to think that they would do so.

Nash’s Island Civilization is fundamentally wrong. It assumes humans with technology are something that intrinsically harms the earth, or humans with technology will exploit the earth for their own benefit. But there are many humans who want to keep earth in a natural state for their own benefit. As “green living” becomes more popular, humans are able to make profits by harming the environment as little as possible, or by helping restore nature to a healthy state.

Humans are a part of nature, and the technology they bring with them is as well. Secluding themselves in giant bubbles will only cause humans to be out of tune with the natural environment around them. Only by interacting with the environment in positive ways can we improve the state of non-human life around us.