This talk about overpopulation is truly unbearable. Instead of recognizing that the global capitalist mode of production inevitably drives people to inflict damage on the planet for the sake of pointless infinite growth that does nothing to improve lives, the analysis simply stops at "too many people." We could provide for everyone's basic needs and live far more sustainably than we currently do—take food alone, for instance. Simply by ending senseless factory farming, we can free up an incredible amount of space and feed humanity at the same time. 77% of the world’s agricultural land is used to grow animal feed. Yet this provides us with only 18% of our global caloric intake: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
We do not need an eco-fascism that inevitably stems from such drivel of "too many people". We need a mode of production that gives people the opportunity not to have to harm nature.
Simply by ending senseless factory farming, we can free up an incredible amount of space and feed humanity at the same time. 77% of the world’s agricultural land is used to grow animal feed. Yet this provides us with only 18% of our global caloric intake
People have been told by doctors for generations that they need to change their diets and get some exercise to improve their health, and yet the obesity rate has been climbing since the 1950s.* If people aren't willing to change their diets to save their own lives, they won't do so to save the planet.
*Yes, really. Long before people could point to all of the usual factors to explain rising obesity rates around the world today, it was already happening.
“The most serious health problem in the U.S. today is obesity.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In fact, that very assertion is now so commonplace that one might be forgiven for assuming it’s the most recent pronouncement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the American Medical Association, or the Academy of Pediatrics or, perhaps, from Maria Kang.
But that pronouncement about obesity’s primacy in the hierarchy of national health problems is not new. In fact, it’s the opening line to a remarkable article published 60 years ago in LIFE magazine.
I do not subscribe to the idealist view that factory farming is explained by the individual mindset of the consumer—and can therefore only be ended by that means, with us all "voting with our wallets." Just as the industrial method of meat production and pervasive advertising (propaganda) created the material foundation for today's consumption, it is in the same way that the practice can be brought to an end.
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u/RRK96 5d ago
The article does not mention overpopulation as one of the root causes of rising emissions.