-
- The whole world's population could fit in the state of
Texas...Amazing as it may seem, the entire population of the world can
be housed in the U.S. state of Texas -- and very comfortably indeed, with
each person enjoying a living far in excess of that now available to all
but the most wealthy.
-
- Consider these facts: The land area of Texas is some
262,000 square miles* and current UN estimates of the world's population
(for 12 October 1999) are about 6 billion.** By converting square miles
to square feet -- remember to multiply by 5,280 feet per mile twice --
and dividing by the world's population, one readily finds that there are
more than 1,217 square feet per capita.
-
- A family of 5 would thus occupy more than 6,085 square
feet of living space. Even in Texas, that's a mansion.
-
- These numbers apply to just one-story, ranch house-type
dwellings. With a housing mix of multi-story buildings, including town
houses, apartment buildings and high rises, appreciably greater living
space could be provided. Such an arrangement would allow ample land for
yards and all the necessary streets and roads.
-
- Meanwhile, the rest of the world would be completely
empty, available for all of mankind's agricultural, manufacturing, educational,
and recreational activities!
-
- *The World Almanac, 1999 **UNPD "World Population
Prospects," 1998 UN Revision
-
-
- Comments
-
- Subject: Re: Overpopulation called myth
- Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 19:28:17 EST
- From: AndrewDBasiago@aol.com
-
- Dear Betsy,
-
- I appreciate the fact that this analysis is sincere,
and I think that we have to be on guard about the possibility that political
and economic elites will use overpopulation as a warrant for genocide or
to rationalize economic inequality, but there is a fatal flaw to this analysis
that I simply must address. It is entirely an ORTHOGRAPHIC analysis. In
other words, it relies only on an analysis of the amount of land available
for human settlement to frame its estimation of the compatability between
the Earth's human population and the environment of Texas as a place suitable
for human settlement.
-
- Sadly, many other factors must be considered to ascertain
whether a given human population is "sustainable" within its
delimited geographic area. Prominent among these are the limits of the
sustaining watershed to provide clean, safe drinking water and the limits
of the sustaining agricultural lands to provide sufficient food to sustain
the number of human beings living there. In many countries of the world,
these limits are already being reached. For example, early in the next
century, China and Japan will have to begin importing food from California,
because the Chinese and Japanese are building human settlements on the
lands where they now grow there food. Meanwhile, our so-called "development"
community is planning to urbanize the entire Central Valley of California,
from Sacramento in the north to Bakersfield in the south, where that food
will have to be grown, thereby jeoaprdizing 40% of the fruit and nut crop
and 25% of the table vegetables produced in America.
-
- So you see, such forecasts cannot be based merely on
the amount of acreage avaiable for "settlement." They must also
be based on the natural and artificial systems that "sustain"
urban settlements. In many cities in the American west where there are
as of yet millions of acres of "unsettled" land, urbanization
is already straining the limits of the sustaining watersheds; to cite two
inevitable examples in two of the most ostensibly spacious states, Albuquerque
and Las Vegas. In point of fact, I think to his credit, Governor Jerry
Brown, certainly one of the most intelligent and spiritual American leaders,
described most accurately what a truly overpopulated world will look like,
and it will not be a pretty site either for those who hug trees or for
those who love subdivisions with pools and barbecues -- namely, "a
denuded ant colony teeming with 10 to 12 billion desperate and hungry souls."
Remember, just as there are powerful elites like Ted Turner and Maurice
Strong on the scene who would ask us to curtail OUR consumption while THEY
take their obscene billions and buy up our farm land in order to return
it to nature so that rich people can play on it, there are also powerful
elites eager to risk a future of hideous environmental degradation because
THEY will be on top of the ant heap, and WE will be the ants supplying
their ant heap with 10 to 12 billion consumers.
-
- All the best,
-
- Andy Basiago BA JD Envt'l C MCRP (Dist) MPhil (Cantab)
-
- We are alone around the sun. There is no other planet
to escape to in the event of an emergency. --Jacques Cousteau - _____
-
- Subject: Re: Overpopulation called myth
- Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 15:32:09 -0800
- From: Jon Roland <jon.roland@constitution.org
-
-
- Once again we have the old myth about overpopulation
being a myth, because "the entire population of the planet would fit
in Texas". I have covered this point before, but I guess new people
need to have a few simple things explained.
-
- Yes, it is possible to physically "fit" the
entire population of the planet, now more than 6 billion, within the territory
of Texas. There would be about 3 feet separating each of them if they were
spread out.
-
- The myth arises because, and this should be emphasized,
OVERPOPULATION IS NOT ABOUT NOT HAVING ENOUGH SPACE. Overpopulation is
about life support. Life support is about resources, and space is not the
critical resource.
-
- If you did put the planet's population in Texas, spread
evenly, and the wind stopped blowing, the first thing you would notice
is that they would start suffocating. Not enough plants in that area to
recycle all the CO2 and produce enough O2 to keep 6 billion people alive.
But the wind usually does blow enough, so let's move on to the next critical
resource.
-
- Water. There isn't enough fresh water in Texas to keep
all of those 6 billion people alive. They would die of thirst within a
few days.
-
- Okay, let's suppose you bring enough water to them somehow.
How are you going to feed them? Using intensive agriculture, with enough
water and fertile soil, it takes at least 4 acres of land to support one
human adult.
-
- But most of Texas isn't that fertile or well-watered.
Out in West Texas it takes more than 400 acres to support one human adult,
if he tried to live off the land using agriculture. A cow and her calf
can be supported on 100 acres, but they can eat grass, and humans can't.
-
- So if you put everyone in Texas, you would still need
all the rest of the planet to produce the food to feed them, and who would
produce the food, and bring it to Texas, if everyone were in Texas?
-
- Doing a little arithmetic, one finds that at 6 billion,
and allowing for variations in fertility and water availability, we have
already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. So how come famine
has not already set it?
-
- Well, it turns out that food production can exceed the
limits of long-term productivity with short-term inputs of energy and resources
from sources that are presently nonrenewable.
-
- Let's put it another way. 150 years ago, using dry-land
agriculture, 99% of the energy contained in a grain of wheat came from
the sun, and only about 1% came from artificial inputs, like plowing, planting,
irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, harvesting, storage, transport, and
processing. In today's agriculture, that ratio is nearly reversed. Only
about 2% of the energy in a grain of wheat today comes from the sun. The
rest comes from artificial inputs, which ultimately come mainly from fossil
fuels, especially oil. If those resources or our ability to extract and
deliver them fails, then the dieback will begin.
-
- So what about these "biosphere cities" I talk
about? Many have read my statements that it is possible to put a million
people in a city that would support them indefinitely, and that we could
build a million such cities, site them under ground, thereby housing a
world population of 1 trillion, and leave the surface to return to a natural
wilderness, which people might visit and enjoy for brief periods of time.
-
- Yes, it is possible. But the technology to do that hasn't
been developed yet. It would require that all materials be totally recycled
within the biosphere. That's what "biosphere" means. Even the
air. It could be done, using only a little energy, so little that we could
get it from the interior of the Earth, which is another reason to site
the cities underground, although the main reason is to reduce the costs
of maintenance that would otherwise be increased by surface weathering.
-
- One of the best reasons for an expedition to Mars is
not to get the things we could get by going there, but to develop the closed-system
technologies needed to sustain a city full of people here on Earth.
-
- Okay, so why don't we start developing these technologies
and building these closed-system cities right away? Now that is a good
question. And one of the reasons is that they are expensive, and that they
require a huge diversion of capital resources away from other pressing
demands.
-
- It would cost more than a $million per person to build
such habitats, and except for a few millionaires, and members of the government,
no one can afford that. Most people still have to survive by conventional
subsistence agriculture, using methods that are destroying the land and
depleting fresh water resources.
-
- How many people realize that Americans consume more fresh
water than falls on the territory of the United States in all forms of
precipitation? So why aren't we already dying of thirst? Well, first, we
don't use all of that water for drinking. Most of it is needed for agriculture
and industry. Second, we don't get it from recent precipitation, but mine
it out of the ground. It comes from wells that are drawing down supplies
that fell as rain thousands of years ago, but which are not being replenished
as rapidly as we are using them. Eventually the wells will run dry, and
that day is coming sooner than most of the powers that be will admit.
-
- So we distill sea water, right? Yes, but it takes more
energy to deliver the water to where it is needed than to separate it from
salt. Most current sources are on high ground, and the water runs downhill.
If we had to pump it uphill we would be in trouble.
-
- In closing, it needs to be emphasized that the resource
problems are solvable as long as we have enough energy, and that energy
is not a scarce resource, at some price level. There is enough solar energy
to sustain us, if we had a system for collecting it and delivering it to
where it is needed, like solar power satellites. But we aren't building
solar power satellites, because of opposition from the oil and nuclear
power companies.
-
- --Jon
-
-
-
- From Andrew D. Basiago <AndrewDBasiago@aol.com 3-14-00
-
- Dear Bjorn,
-
- Thank you so kindly for your spirited rejoinder to this
particular imbecilic assertion about overpopulation. My response was written
rather slap-dash, without review, and I did not know it was going to be
posted on the Web, but that is alright. In any case, if I had known, I
would have asked some more specific "salient" questions, such
as:
-
- -- After we get all six billion people into Texas, who
is going to do the mining, the manufacturing, and the farmworking in "the
hinterlands" to sustain Texas?
-
- -- Where are they going to live, in the air?
-
- -- What kind of impact will they have on the lands outside
of Texas?
-
- -- How are they going to achieve zero or negligible levels
of impact on the rest of the global ecosystem, in order to prevent the
areas where they have to do these necessary Texas-sustaining functions
from becoming "another Texas"?
-
- -- How are they going to meet or exceed current levels
of agricultural performance in the agricultural lands currently available
for production that would see depopulation of their adjacent cities, where
all the manpower and resources reside that already use synthetic chemicals
to boost crop yields on these lands, many of which are the only ones that
possess distinctively nutrient-rich soils laid down after the last Ice
Age?
-
- -- How would they transport this food from "the
world garden," surrounded by inhospitable "wildlands," to
Texas, before the food spoils?
-
- -- Would not roads have to be built and fossil fuels
consumed to transport food from "the hinterlands" to Texas, hence,
would not the rest of the world sustaining Texas have to strike a balance
between wild, agricultural, and urban lands?
-
- -- What "zero emissions" energy would be available
to permit this vast production system from despoiling all that is not Texas?
-
- As you can see, the fact that these questions (and hundreds
more like it that could be formulated) cannot be answered reveals the absurdity
of their original assertion.
-
- It is premised on the faulty view that a city is just
a settlement that can thrive without regard for sustaining the performance
of the natural and urban systems upon which it relies, which, is, alternatively,
the population-driven despotism of the East, or the "development"-biased
ideology of the West.
-
- In point of fact, the crisis of the environment and development
must account for both biological limitations on the one hand AND the social
cost-benefit analysis on the other, not either of these considerations
taken in isolation. Social, economic, and environmental sustainability
factors are inextricably inter-linked and interdependent, and must all
be maintained in a system of productive harmony if survival is to be achieved.
-
- In the final analysis, propositions such as this recent
Texas example are pernicious nonsense, and are formulated, I fear, to disguise
the threat that overpopulation already presents to the sustainability of
our civilization.
-
- Sincerely,
-
- Andrew D. Basiago
-
-
- Comment
-
-
- From Lance Latham <LANCE_LATHAM@Conseco.com 3-14-00
-
- The assertion that the entire population of the world
(6 billion people) can fit within the land mass of the state of Texas is
flawed for mathematical reasons.
-
- If it's given that the land mass of Texas is 262,000
square miles, then one would only multiply this number by 5,280 ft./mi.
ONCE (NOT twice, as the article's original author states) to get the equivalent
square footage. This is the correct way to perform the calculation because
the 262,000 value is ALREADY in square units - no need to 'square' it again
to determine square footage.
-
- Peforming the calculation CORRECTLY, one finds that the
262,000 square miles of Texas equates to only 1.4 billion square feet (NOT
7.3 trillion square feet, as the original author would have one believe),
resulting in an actual square footage allocation per person of less than
.25 square feet (NOT 1,217 square feet per person). Assuming that the world's
population is made up of typical-sized people across all ages and sexes,
I submit that less than one fourth of one square foot per person is NOT
enough room in which to house the world's population.
-
- It's frightening that basic math plays such a small part
in every day logical thought - it IS still taught in elementary schools,
isn't it?
-
-
- --Lance Latham
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- I would like to respond to Lance Latham's comments at
the foot of the story. He makes some disparaging remarks about the calculation
of square footage in the original article and makes a 'correction.'
-
- Lo and behold, Mr. Latham appears to be the one who missed
out on elementary mathematics. Mr. Latham's formula is: take the square
mileage X 5280= square footage. It doesn't.
-
- One square mile=27,878,400 square feet (5280 ft X 5280
ft). Multiply 27,878,400 (the square feet in a square mile) by 262,000
square miles and you get the 7.3 trillion or so square feet noted in the
original story.
-
- The 262,000 square miles represents 262,000 of one (1)
unit, a square mile. Mr. Latham incorrectly assumes that the square mileage
number already has the square footage calculated. It doesn't.
-
- I think it's frightening that Mr. Latham's concept of
logic entails this sort of thinking.
-
- By the way, I would like to comment on some of the articles
seen on Jeff Rense's page. Is this the proper route to do so? Also, if
I would like to submit an article is this the place?
-
- I would like to compliment you on a fine-looking web
page. The artwork is just remarkable.
-
- Best regards, Ron Decker decker@wtez.net
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