Okay but what if and hear me out on this we change nothing and just use this as justification to keep doing that and victimizing the most vulnerable
This is a much less cool post when you realize that the Earth can only sustainably support 10 billion people if we never fly, give up a lot of our modern tech, and have rice make up 50% of our diet. Basically any meat is completely off the table, as with personal cars, and probably standalone houses. If I’m given the choice between not having kids and not flying to see my family for holidays, I’ll take the no-kids option.
As a Mexican I can confirm I’m already eating a lot of rice and beans, and I take the bus instead of flying. It’s really not that bad, it’s mostly over production of resource intensive corps and fossil fuels, which we could have already transitioned from without any real detriment.
So let’s build lots of highspeed rail? We went to the moon on less compute than your cell phone and modern tech could be way more sustainable if we properly optimized. Rice is fantastic and works for a significant chunk of the current population just fine. Meat? Just gotta grow that protein in other more sustainable/efficient ways. Cars are useless in a dense urban environments and make everything worse. Fuck cars. Standalone houses are a giant waste of space and when you design your neighborhoods around this idea, everything is too spread out to actually have proper density and utility.
This is a very cool post that does point out that all of these things are in such excess. You should give StrongTowns and NotJustBikes a watch on youtube for much more on the topic of urban design.
So basically it’s perfectly fine? But for some reason you made it sound horrible?
“I don’t see what’s the problem with everyone living like a desperate Indian untouchable!”
These takes are why socialism is a dirty word, all because you can’t just admit there needs to be some form of democratically agreed on population control and it doesn’t have to be fascist by design.
You’re not being oppressed by having to use the train.
This isn’t a fucking meme.
A meme is a self replicating idea. I think this is a meme.
Malthusianism definitely a meme ideology
What is a meme?
A miserable little pile of in-jokes
Replace “sustainable,” and the bit about profit and capitalism, with “efficient” and “corruption and un-free markets,” then this is a common right-wing talking point (back when the right wing tried to engage intellectually, at least).
In my unscientific opinion, the current population is unsustainable, and there’s no known ways to make it sustainable enough to support the population in the long term (I hope there will be, of course). The most sustainable framing practices are less intensive and result in less output per acre. That’s just about survival, ignoring quality of life. I’ve heard it claimed we’d need 5 Earths for everyone on Earth to live a first-world-like lifestyle. Granted, we should drastically change our lifestyles.
Climate change will also likely lower the human population the Earth can support, and I think we will likely adopt even less sustainable practices to make up for the loss, accelerating our own demise; kicking and scratching and bringing all the ecosystems of the Earth down with us.
First world lifestyles are indeed unsustainable, but not due to food scarcity. We have a global overproduction of food, due in part to logistical inefficiencies but in a larger part due to free market economics with artificial scarcity to drive up prices.
Organic farm practices currently yield about 20-30% less than less sustainable ones. Current US food wastage is 40 % of produced goods. So at least the US could switch over it’s food supply to organic farming and still feed everyone on the same acreage.
There’s plenty other resource usage that first-worlders need to cut back on, mostly petrochemicals and plastics in everything from travel (make walkable cities) to novelty consumption (buy it for life).
In my unscientific opinion
Well you got at least that bit right, so congrats!
Also, death to fascists, including ecofascists.
