
Empty half the Earth of its humans. It's the only way to save the planet - mitchbob
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/save-the-planet-half-earth-kim-stanley-robinson
======
mduggles
I love this sort of bold thinking and think it’s long past due as part of the
climate change conversation. Too much has been made of technical solutions I
think in part because there is a motivation among those who design and sell
that technology to view this as an opportunity. Electric cars, solar, these
are all valuable steps and we should do what we can to encourage their growth
and development.

But the harsh reality is that we cannot continue living as we are now. The
clear water floods in areas of the US show us this. The dramatic increase in
temperate and chaotic weather patterns show us this. We are going to need to
abandon large swatches of what we consider prime real estate and it is much
better to do in an organized and deliberate fashion than a perpetual refugee
crisis which is what I worry we are headed for.

These problems are not unsolvable they just aren’t something we’re going to be
able to crack with solutions like technology alone. Sacrifice will be required
and on a level we’ve never really done before as a species. It will require
global coordination in a world where it seems the divisions between us are
greater than ever politically.

It’s impossible to say whether these things are truly doable but I believe
that we are lucky that we are part of an ecosystem that if left alone can self
correct. It needs space, it needs time and it also needs us to live within our
means. We cannot continue treating our aquafers as renewable resources. The
ocean is not an unlimited source of food. We need birth control and family
planning to be an essential human right and a free resource for anyone wishing
to use it. Otherwise we aren’t giving the planet a fighting chance and we’re
dooming the human species.

------
IXxXI
In this current era of job killing automation, the natural progression is a
trend where people abandon big cities to live off grid, produce their own
electricity and grown their own food organically. City living is fast becoming
unsustainable due to job automation coupled with high taxes, bad regulation
and poor policy on the part of corrupt states like california and new york.

Population size isn't the main issue with resource consumption, pollution nor
negative trends associated with society. The real problem involves key aspects
of our civilization being designed and implemented by investment bankers.
These investment bankers make unimaginably poor decisions such as feeding farm
animals in factory farms constant streams of antibiotics to prevent disease
rather than give animals humane or clean environments to live in.

Lack of healthy food can be attributed to investment bankers wanting to
centralize and patent the human food supply under monsanto and GM foods which
they own key patents to. This lack of competition and the predatory business
practices adopted do much to kill diversity in food stocks and produce
otherwise inferior products via lack of free market competition.

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jmiskovic
For anyone that has read the book, does it show the numbers? This article
delivers intriguing narrative, but little proof that it could make the
difference or that it could accomplished in time.

~~~
jwilk
AFAICT we already use less than half of land:

[https://ourworldindata.org/land-use](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use)

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knolax
Think about the number of people needed to maintain the Linux Kernel, to
maintain the Unicode standards, to maintain the w3c standards, to maintain a
webserver, to maintain a web browser, to maintain a desktop environment. Now
multiply that by the number of options needed to maintain competitiveness and
you have the fixed amount of manpower needed to maintain the software stack
needed for websites. This amount of manpower is needed whether there are
20,000 websites in existence or 20,000,000. The type of people prone to
Malthusian thinking only consider marginal costs when we live in a world of
fixed costs. Economy of scale is how we maintain our current standard of
living and no matter how much you fantasize about being a simple farmer or a
hunter-gatherer the fact of the matter is that few people on this forum would
not survive in those conditions, let alone be content.

Pragmatism aside I can't believe that it's fashionable nowadays to advocate
for outright genocide in the name of environmentalism. Priorities have become
entirely perverted to the point where people no longer value humanity first.
You should be asking about how to save Humanity, not the planet. You are a
human being, not a tree, you should care about the latter in the context of
the former.

Human population growth has shown itself to be logarithmic while food
production isn't hitting any limits yet[0]. This desire to cull humanity can
only come from some sort of religious misanthropy that should not be tolerated
anywhere.

Since we are dealing with what are essentially death cultists here we can also
approach it from a existential angle. Think about all the times where amongst
the people around you you were the only person that knew a specific piece of
information. A reasonable assumption in the modern age would be that that no
matter how obscure your knowledge is, there are probably others who also share
it. Now imagine that the population is so small that you truly are the only
person who knows that piece of information, should you die, or even have a
lapse in memory, all of it is dissolved into the void. Imagine a world where
you truly are a alone, where you are all that there is protecting your
interests from entropy, and that is the world that these Malthusian Death
Cultists want.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/17/world-
cr...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/17/world-cropland-
feed-3-billion-more-people-study)

------
Sidious
Propaganda, designed to keep you in a scarcity mindset riddled with fear, to
take away your freedom, privatizing water etc. look at the Nestlé for example.
They seek to enslave you and destroy you with dysgenics such as eating insects
and veganism. We have K9 teeth, single chamber stomachs, eyes at the front of
our face for a reason.

Check the science, real science is not what you hear about in any newspaper or
big science journal, peer review is a control system to keep truth out and
companies as well as universities are corrupt to the cornerstone, companies
only care about profit to the extent that it allows them to continue to
promote the agenda. Universities are full with dishonest parasites which want
to drain the your pocket through taxes while they brainwash your children.

A small section of the sahara desert equipped with solar panels would generate
enough energy for the entire world. And populations of intelligent and naive
peoples are plummeting, which is music to their ears.

Discard these people who try to pull this guilt tripping crap which is all
based on lies! Do not buy into it, they want to castrate and put you in a
smart city gulag which they will control for their benefit. If they sell you
on the scarcity mentality they can justify all sorts of evil, satanic acts
such as death panels, abortion etc. Pharisees cultist wack-jobs who only know
degeneracy and destruction.

Take a real close look at the signature of an actual president on your twenty
dollar bill Americans, an actual hero who once, not so long ago, freed you
from usurious serfdom, which now we are all currently under, and he has left
you a message. Unlike buzz terms and rhetoric you see everywhere from the
accuser class, it's plain and simple.

This is a spiritual war and evil has no power on it's own, it has to be let
in, do not buy into it, do not take the ticket. They will call you names,
censor you and fool your brothers into break your body, but never surrender
your spirit.

------
waste_monk
The hardest choices require the strongest wills.

~~~
ghego1
Came here for this. I was not disappointed.

