We are stumbling—seemingly oblivious—into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it’s not here. https://countercurrents.org/2022/07/the-corporate-oligarchs-have-put-humanity-on-a-path-toward-self-annihilation/
The world today is on the verge of a major food emergency, provoked in part by Russia’s attack on Ukraine but more broadly by the damage heat from global warming is doing to crops worldwide. This is both a crisis and an opportunity.
Let’s start with the basics. Food is the raw material that makes people. More food, more people; less food, fewer people.
This is a basic law of nature. The insect-eating bird population around us, for example, is a fraction today of what it was 20 years ago because its food—the insect population—has been decimated by pesticides and loss of habitat (their food source), over the past few decades.
Pick any species and the law of nature is the same: more food produces population growth while less food shrinks population (often in brutal ways). It’s why areas like desert and scrub that produce little food were, over the past millennia, lightly populated, whereas areas rich with food like forests and seacoasts carried large human populations.
Humans reaching the limits of food’s ability to sustain population is not a new story; it’s as old as humanity itself.
For the first few hundred thousand years of our history (more or less) modern humanity worldwide was limited to an estimated 5 million or so humans. As Daniel Quinn would say, we “lived in the hands of the gods,” repeatedly booming and busting our own local populations as we spread to new territories, discovered new food supplies, and then depleted them.
We are not without resources, and it’s always a mistake to bet against human ingenuity. On the other hand, we are facing an unprecedented level of avarice mobilized by billionaires and corporations with more power and wealth than the world has ever seen.
Will they win, and, in the process, set human civilization back millennia? Or will humanity prevail over the forces of greed and destruction and help salvage our biosphere while reinventing our culture and world?
30/07/2022