[Skybird]

The Ehrlicxhs sinc elogn ad mit that with their famous book The Population Bomb they underestimated the impact of fertilizers to help boosting farming results. But that book was half a century ago. By now even intensive farming seems to hit limits, mostly deriving from secondary effects like poisening and from falling ground water levels in critical areas. And we have talke dof repeateldy here that the next big wars may be fought about - sweet water. In the Middle East, this already is the case, if only you look lose enoiugh. africa as well.



If I understand them correctly, they are today bout non-sustaining rates of consuming of natural resources, waste, poisening of the environment. Ands that is somethign we indeed can see everywhere. Ground water. Fishing. Extinction of species. Erosion of farming land. Plastic. Farming fruits becoming worse in nutrition content. Overfarming soil.



Many wars in africa and conflicts that usually get attributed to ethnic and tribal roots, often are demographic conflict between old men owning farmign ground and cattle, and young men in much bigger quantities being excluded from powre, possession and family founding and sustaining families. The genocide in Rwanda for exmaple has to be attributed more to this than to anything else. Its also where the war index and the youth bulge theory by Gunnar Heinsohn tell grim stories about what drives such conflicts really. If you only read about biology and ecology, you miss these links and contexts, necessarily. But they are decisive. Jarred Diamond did a good job in his books looking beyond such theoretical borders between academical branches.


I recommend the chapter sin Diamonds superb book "Collpase" where he writes in severla chapters about the rais eand fall of the Vikings on Greenland, and the Esater Islands. Those events really hold lessons we refuse to learn until today - and that will cost us dearly. It already does.



We are living on a party island. With every tide coming and going, we see the water climbing higher on the beach, and still many are not worried althoigh increasing ammounts of the siland'S soil get spilled away. We have boats, some say, we go into space, others say, we make the tides stopping, the last ones say. Am I surrounded by imbecile maniacs...? This is not some optimistic Hollywood scripts in action.


And war is explicitly excluded from being considered here, Mr. Quattro. So are epidemics and atronomical disasters and other ELEs. With these the time until man is gone could be shortened even further, yes.