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Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy
In <57dgat$e82@news.inforamp.net> dlj@inforamp.net (David Lloyd-Jones)
writes:
>Brian,
>
>I would have thought that there is a good case to be made that Siberia
>is overpopulated.
Paradoxicaly, this makes sense. The net flow of people across
the Urals has been westward for many decades.
At this very moment there is a terrible fuel and food
crunch in parts of Siberia, and desperate
people are fleeing to European Russia, where they have neither
jobs nor apartments.
> It's now twenty-four years since I've been there,
>but since that time Lake Baikal has been found to be severely polluted
>and shrunken in size. When I was there people already talked
>wistfully about how good the hunting had been in their fathers' time.
Though true, it is not the reason
for the "overpopulation". Hunting and fishing couldn't
support that many people, anyway. The real reason
is given in the next sentence: this is not really
overpopulation but underdevelopment.
>To find a place that is not over-populated you have to go to someplace
>like Holland -- where there is the technical superstructure to provide
>for the human beings. Oddly, we know how to do that for a region of
>industrial agriculture. It's wilderness, with which we have thousands
>of years of experience, that we don't know how to handle properly.
But we do: turn it into a Holland.
We don't have a proper treatment for poverty -
*except* to eliminate it.
The same is true of wastelands.
References: