In Which I Channel Malthus

It might be relatively easy to dismiss mockery of President George W. Bush, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and their ilk for episodes of apparent “airborne fact finding” (or aff as I prefer to call it) as simply taking these events out of context for either political or comedy fodder. (The archetypes of making an aff of oneself are Bush’s flyover of New Orleans, and Rumsfeld’s August 2006 take on the Iraq security situation). I can’t help but wonder, however, whether there is more to this than isolated incidents, or even broader evidence of a flyover presidency. Rather, I am beginning to suspect that there is a wholesale willful ignorance afoot here, mixed with a dim recognition that the common experience of aircraft vistas can serve as a useful means to transmit hollow messages brimming with naught but ideology. Exhibit B is Linda Chavez’ stunningly moronic AFF-based analysis of population statistics on Weekend America in December 2007.

A more recent example that seems to me to be consistent with aff analysis is advanced by Michael Anissimov and bolstered by Tsteel. Basically these arguments, arguments that I have seen in nearly limitless and infuriating permutations, are little more than, “whoa, look out the window of my plane, all that empty land, all that sunlight. Dude, it’s all cool!” Tsteels agreement with Anissimov’s claim that concern about overpopulation is a selection effect based on people living in crowded cities, is patently and quantitatively unsupported by his aff argument. Showing that there are regions of this country where population density is higher and regions where it is lower, imagining that somehow all the population might be spread out so that both yellow and blue regions turn green, and from that sunnily concluding that there are enough resources on this finite planet to support six billion, rushing headlong to ten billion, people is sophomoric at best.

Randomly selected from among a vast list of issues this conclusion ignores are the additional resource impacts of those formerly yellow regions turned green (shouldn’t our experience with the suburbanization and exurbanization of America have at least a bit of a role in considering how this might work out?), studies showing that dense urban areas can be more resource efficient in many ways than less dense communities, and a quantitative and scientifically/technologically grounded consideration of the many, many parameters beyond map colors that determine the population carrying capacity of the earth and the quality of life of its inhabitants.

Technology, ah yes technology. It has been a wonder at, for instance, delivering porn to your desktop, engineering Segway scooters to search for a problem, developing Humvees that can lay siege to nearly any landscape, and distributing obscenely large high definition television screens to homes across our great nation. At reducing the consumption of finite resources, um, not so much. In my own view, this is only partly due to the market failures that many other commenters have identified. It is also due in large part to the second law of thermodynamics – an inviolable principle that so many of the technology pollyannas have chosen to ignore, the brick wall to end all brick walls, dead in the path of all those schemes that propose to replace, joule-for-joule, the extraordinarily low entropy and high energy density, and efficient and easy to transport energy source of fossil fuel with high entropy and low energy density, low efficiency and difficult to transport energy alternatives. It’s all so reminiscent of that long ago watershed, when a president came before a nation in crisis and asked, not for sacrifice, but shopping. Our resource pollyannas tell us that we’ll be able to shop ourselves out of this one as well, that we can plan on consuming in the same gluttonous way we have for the past century, that by buying more we’re saving more, that we live in a Wal-Mart biosphere whose shelves will be miraculously stocked and pennies knocked off the price while we sleep, a more absurd and fundamentally flawed prospect than President Bush’s own prescription.

The elephant in the room as the Hubbert peak passes, as ocean fish stocks collapse, as fresh water becomes a battleground, as media and corporate interests design, spread and buttress a culture of consumption even for the impoverished, as ugly anitbiotic resistant strains of microrganisms multiply, as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations relentlessly exponentiate, as the global arms market continues to boom, as extinctions accelerate, as the economics of global food supplies continue to undermine the meager foundation that has kept many millions just this side of starvation (not to mention the many millions it has abandoned to that horrific fate) really IS becoming how many people is too many? As the most extraordinarily successful large life form that has ever existed on the planet, we had better start asking the very painful question whether it is possible to be too successful. I still remember what I learned over the course of a few days from a little jar of nematodes and pablum with a tight fitting lid, a failed science project from many years ago: the problem with biological systems and finite resources is that they always ask that question about success – and then answer it - if someone else doesn’t ask it first.