As I understand the situation, in comparison with smaller population centers, large population concentrations have relatively higher environmental costs due to in-transportation of such things as food and water, out-transportation of waste products and greater concentration of water, land and air pollutant loads. Large population centers can also have higher intra-urban transportation costs because people actually tend to end up living farther from where they work, buy things and socialize. Others who are more knowledgeable on this probably have the data to back this up.
And of course we can hope no one is advocating dispersing everyone onto 5.7 acre hobby farms; that's even more costly in terms of infrastructure support and transportation costs as well as land use inefficiencies and losses of biodiversity. That would certainly result in a much higher consumption of resources per capita compared to persons living in compact communities. Warren Aney (503)246-8613 -----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of patrick Sent: Saturday, 07 April, 2007 13:01 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Equilibrium/Steady State and Complexity/Evolution The population density of the earth is estimated to be 112 people per square mile of land surface. That approximates a 500 by 500 foot plot of land per person, or 5.7 acres per person (~23 acres for a family of four). If families were more evenly distributed across the landscape instead of being concentrated within cities (and considering that a significant portion of the earth's surface is inhospitable to human colonization, e.g. Himalayan peaks, Antarctica, Sahara desert), it seems like there would be even more serious resource management issues and conflicts than we have today (e.g. a grizzly bear home range is between 10 and 380 square miles), despite the assumption that people would be consuming the same quantity of resources per capita. Patrick -----Original Message----- From: Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ashwani Vasishth Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 12:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Equilibrium/Steady State and Complexity/Evolution At 11:32 PM -0700 4/5/07, Warren W. Aney wrote: >First, I would hope to see an economy and population that is stabilized and >optimized world wide. One in which wealth and amenities are fairly >distributed across urban, suburban and rural communities. Where >economically and socially viable communities are well dispersed around the >world, and each such community has its own stable economy based on a clean >and sustainable industry. And less than half of the world's population >lives in metropolitan areas or communities of over 100,000 population. Yes, that would be a start. Give us this much, and the rest gently follows. The most recent population projections from the UN, taking account of myriad factors such as the changing rates of HIV/AIDS and plummeting fertility rates, puts world population at over 9 billion by 2050. That number does not go away, no matter what we might think to do in the here and now--short of massacre and mayhem. We're just going to have to learn to live with that. And that's not all, folks. There's going to be a surge in consumption rates across the board that will effectively double the world's population for all practical purposes. That's not going away either. The West has set the standard for what it means to be modern, and there's a few billion decent human beings out there who hard and want a taste of that as well. Thus my allusion to Garrett Hardin's call for a "life boat ethic". Can we say to them, we've got it, but you can't have any? (We tried this back in the 1970s, by the way, we really did. We developed biogas plants and solar cookers and alternative technologies galore--read Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World, for instance. We didn't have the Whole Earth Catalog, but we knew the content of it backward and forward. We were deep into this stuff, went out to villages, did demonstration projects, presentations, trying to convince folks that we had to grow smarter not bigger. And we never made it to first base. They weren't having any of that. They knew modern when they saw it in the movies, and that's what they wanted. If it was good enough for the West, it was just what we ought to have.) So, populations and consumption are both going to go up. Way up. And we're simply going to have to adapt. Because, make no mistake, there's a few billion people coming down that pike, and they're going to want their fair share of the world. They've been fueled by centuries of propaganda telling them the West is the best. And you know what? They've bought it!!! As ye sow... None of this is to say that "anything goes." None of this is to say that we do not face a clear imperative to find and actualize proper action. But these are the parameters within which change must happen. Almost double the population, with some legitimate claim to a better material life--more stuff. Now, can we do this smarter? How? Steady state economics tells me nothing about what I need to be doing, here and now, in my every day life, to accommodate this reality. I love the imagery of Daly's writing, I buy that he is one very, very astute man. For years he was my lode stone. But a manifesto does not a plan make. Finally, carrying capacity and ecological footprint are evolutionary as well. They are not finite numbers enscribed on the walls of some obscure cave, waiting to be discovered by seekers after the greater truth. I=PAT is only the tip of that particular iceberg. Read Robert Kates, "Population, Technology and the Human Environment: A Thread Through Time," in that 1996 issue of Daedalus I mentioned. Carrying capacity has always been at least plastic and perhaps entirely organic. We don't know what the carrying capacity of the planet actually is, and we never will. Its constantly being renegotiated. Cheers, - Ashwani Vasishth [EMAIL PROTECTED] (818) 677-6137 http://www.csun.edu/~vasishth/ http://www.myspace.com/ashwanivasishth
