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Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy



In <587ngd$l83@news.inforamp.net> dlj@inforamp.net (David Lloyd-Jones)
writes: 
>
>On Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:59:11 GMT, bg364@torfree.net (Yuri Kuchinsky)
>wrote:
>
>>Brian Carnell (briand@net-link.net) wrote:
>>: On 16 Nov 1996 17:31:49 GMT, yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky) wrote:
>>
>>[someone else:]
>>: >: Over what chosen time interval was the human population ever
"stable"?
>>
>>: >Over 99% of human history it was more or less stable.
>>
>>: And *that* was a great time to be alive, eh , Yuri?
>
>Brian's good point aside, Yuri's claim is bloody unllikely to have
>been true.  More plausible is that each encroaching ice-age brought
>immense die-backs, to say nothing of horrible wars at the margins
>between different human groups.

This is more than plausible;
many groups have died off completely.
Nevertheless, Yuri's claim is, in a sense, true:
on the *average*, the human population of the globe only
increased slowly: by the factor of maybe thirty of fifty
in a million years. This was the net result of the upsurges
and the die-offs. The average yearly growth was therefore
on the order of 0.0004 percent - which might indeed be
called "more or less stable". If we had lived then, however,
we would have noticed neither a steady growth nor any
stability - but rather a demographic roller-coaster.

[...]
>Our last three hundred years are an idyll of tranquility, it seems to
>me.  

Especially the last two hundred.
Which shows that "tranquility" and "stable population"
are two very different concepts.
Are they even *compatible*? I am not at all sure.
We may have to choose.




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