It's now clear that you actually care more about overpopulation as a point rather than ecology itself and all the multifaceted complexities of the field and its insights. Everything in your analysis is reduced solely to overpopulation such that you're writing about how it is critical that people understand overpopulation even more than climate change itself, otherwise, it would not concern you that overpopulation seemingly ranks lower than climate change in the populations awareness.MythOfProgress wrote: ↑Wed Jun 21, 2023 8:52 am
we can keep talking about the socioeconomic systems we live in and how they're to blame for our collapse- everything we've done up until this point has only just been an evolution of we've been doing all along- extracting resources we're still the ones who manifested it into being- and as it is- this requires impossible levels of introspection on the part of everyone else in terms of recognizing our predicament and changing our patterns from exponential growth to degrowth. we've got the appearance of having normal population levels, and yet if you take a brief look as to the amount of animals we've supplanted and dominated for our use, you'd start to recognize the erroneous statements folks have made about this- the carrying capacity when it comes to earth and humans was originally 1 billion- leaving aside the industrial agriculture that arised upon our discovery of fossil fuels.
as opposed to you and i making assertions that we claim to be self-evident- i think it'd be best if we came in with some type of evidence or referential data- case in point; the amount of people aware of climate change and its various consquences in the first place, as well as the general level of concern amongst those folks. extrapolate that to the amount of people aware of secondary environmental catastrophes, including overpopulation(at least from the general public's perspective, overpopulation comes second, third or fourth considering climate change gets most of the runtime on mainstream media in environmental publications).
leaving aside the religious folks(like Evangelical Christians or Mormons) that talk about being "fruitful and multiplying", the eco-fascists who will inevitably take advantage and use draconian policies to turn away refugees and kill off "undesirables" and the "just the distribution issue" crowd, i would like to at least get some type of quantification or the statistics on the amount of people that understand and "believe" overpopulation to be an actual issue, cause as it is you've got more people ignorant of what overshoot entails(not just referring to MAGA and neoliberal folks).
There is a great ideological bias on display here that I don't have any interest in attempting to bridge beyond this final post as it would be a waste of my time in the same way it's a waste of time for people to try to convince me that capitalism is actually a good thing due to my own entrenched ideological bias. I can only hope that whatever reasoning has lead you here can one day be redirected into something more life affirming than reasoning by ideology, not science, in a manner that purports most people must perish for anything to get better.
Overpopulation ideology as a reductionist metric fails to recognize that humans have had stable relationships to their ecology in various cultures and periods of time, even post agriculture, and thus precludes such future possibility condemning us to "understand" our "destiny" in such a fatalistic manner that there is nothing more to do than simply "accept" the "reality" of overpopulation as the only metric that truly matters beyond all else. So it is said, though not by you explicitly, it is unacceptable for 10,000 to defile a forest, it may yet be perfectly fine for a band of 100, as there is simply no way of life for women but to defile the forest; and, should the forest be defiled too much, women will perish. Nevermind that the answer is to not defile the forest at all and both bands of 10,000 and 100 are doomed in doing so.
Thus it is said, the way of life, is a life in harmony with the forest no matter how many women should live within it, and whatever bounds may exist are bounds that would organically be respected should this harmony be observed. In this way it is the relationship with the ecosystem itself that takes the most precedent in human action, as only that relationship is able to inform us how to live.
Moreover, it is historicist to appeal to history in such a way that since our relationships are predominately harmful in the past, post-industrialism, or post-agriculture if one is so inclined, that they must be in the future. This leads to an assumption that all seemingly large populations and or large industrial populations are inherently harmful so much so as to project this assumption onto hypothetical post-human sapient life.
My final statement is thus, human impact on the environment in ecology is not studied in modern science as a sole function of population. The function of human impact is complex and includes various factors besides population such as resource usage, land use practices, agricultural practices, industrial design, and so on. These factors vary within different population groups of varying size and are all meaningful to environmental impact. An analysis of environmental impact by reduction to one factor is incapable of seeing the scope of said impact or solving it.