If you think the earth is dying because poor people are having too many babies, that's about three logical steps away from ecofascism.
If you think the earth is dying because poor people are having too many babies, that's about three logical steps away from ecofascism.
The left really needs to leave this knee-jerk reaction to this topic behind. Malthus is a strawman, and overpopulation is a real thing that we need to talk about coherently.
There is no number that is the maximum number of people the Earth can hold, but there is if you want a minimum level of consumption for all people to enjoy. Population and consumption levels are two sides of the same coin, and talking about one without both is like saying your car is fast because it can go from 0 to 60mph without talking about how long it needs to do that.
Talking about this issue honestly has nothing to do with poor-shaming or white-washing the role capitalism plays in sustaining poverty.
So yeah if we want on earth to live with a similar consumption level to Bangladesh, fine the Earth can probably sustain life 20 billion people (I haven't looked at recent numbers so this is ballpark). However, if you, like me, want to raise everyone in the world not just out of poverty but to a stage where everyone can have a dignified existence and live a full and complicated life that is necessarily going to result in a major strain on the Earth. For context (and again, it's been a few years since I looked at the numbers in detail) if you want people to all consume like the US I think the estimate is around 1 billion people, like France I think it's around 4 billion, etc.
And saying this doesn't mean apologizing for the inefficiencies inherent in a capitalist system either, but we need to be able to talk about what level of consumption we want people to be able to enjoy, what goal populations are that are commensurate with that goal and what policies can be embraced to encourage that.
If you can't listen to anyone talk about this issue and your start foaming at the mouth and calling them a fascist, that is seriously counter-productive to a major issue that will potentially destroy the Earth.
if you're talking about overpopulation without talking about the inefficiencies and epic waste of capitalism and statism, it's just genocide snuff. full stop. and i never hear capitalist waste as a factor when libs bring this up, so its just their genocide porn. which is sick. because libs are sick.
and honestly, you need to talk about efficiency before you talk about genocide. because it's a bigger factor and can't be fixed with mass murder. at least not with JUST mass murder.
Lol nobody is talking about genocide, you just put that on people who act like overpopulation is a serious issue worth discussing.
I'm sure you can find a few weirdos on Twitter but basically ecofascism doesn't really exist, it's a fiction that anarchists like to obsess over instead of the actual problem of an impending climate apocalypse.
Yes and no. It doesn't have any major following now, but it's easily foreseeable. Talking about it is as realistic as talking about the possibility of getting a competent post-Trump fascist in 2024 or 2028.
If you look in this thread can you point to one person who is referring to ecofascism in a way that refers to some theoretical future movement?
I see people talking about it with the same certainty they talk about getting a competent fascist in the near future, and I think both discussions are reasonable. The dangerous nature of fascism means you can't wait until it's kicking down your door to take it seriously.
This is always what Libs do. It’s not fascism until the fascists win. Every. Single. Time.
How does ecofascism even work? Like would wealthy nations bomb poor nations or use structural adjustments so they stop developing? Because that is already happening.
ecofascists exist. I was extruded from the vagina of one.
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This is why I said Malthus is a Strawman. Maybe there are some 17-year-olds on Twitter who just learned about Malthus but today basically nobody concerned about overpopulation is concerned because of starvation. It's a concern because if we are to raise the standard of living of billions of people (which we should) we are going to necessarily increase their carbon emissions.
To answer your question the numbers come from average climate emissions relative to the ability of the Earth to act as a carbon sink.
What in the world? See this is the problem. Basically nobody except for some weird freaks think the overpopulation issue should be solved by killing people. How you got there from what I typed says a lot about your ability to discuss this rationally.
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Cool, nbd. I will say though, if it really is disturbingly common to think overpopulation should be solved by killing people on the global south why have I literally never heard a single person say it, in person or in media?
Like I'm sure if I went looking on the internet for communities with heinous views I could dig up an example, but literally the only time I hear that idea is when some anarchist is going on about how ecofascism is some sort of serious problem.
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Again, literally never heard anybody say that ever. Are you sure you're not projecting that onto them in the same way you did me, since this topic is triggering to you?
Basically all the libs I see talking about this do so with the lens of empowering and educating women, increasing access to contraceptives, and raising the standard of living (which is correlated with a reduction in birth rates) etc. I've never seen a single person seriously advocate solving this with murder.
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We manage to do that only thanks to fossil fuels and mass fertilizer production - both of which we need to stop. Without fossil fuels, without huge factories filled with Haber–Bosch reaction chambers, right now we can't produce enough food. Perhaps alternative approaches such as labour intensive, decentralized mass permaculture could work though (but definitely not on a planet where warming exceeds, say, 3C and possibly less - and that's a level of warming we will reach).
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It cannot. All fossil fuel use should have been stopped years ago.
But moreover, nowhere in my comment did I suggest killing anyone, and I even suggested possible avenues for solution.
My own mindset though is that based on climate publications these past few years we're completely fucked anyway; have kids, don't, do what makes you happy at this point. Maybe they'll even survive to live in the apocalyptic hell-hole that will precede human extinction, and find a measure of happiness there. Enjoy the time you have left in any case.
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No worries, I understand completely - like 90% of the time when someone talks about overpopulation in that context they're a fucking ecofascist, so it's easy enough to jump on that conclusion.
Not having children is equivalent to killing people?
this is like the one topic where people here are okay with completely misrepresenting what the other side says. Like of course overpopulation is in many cases a supposedly empirical justification for ecofascism. And yes overconsumption and waste are def larger problems in terms of priority. But it's wild how he thought he had to state "But killing huge swathes of people for the sake of the planet should be off the table pretty much no matter what." Like holy shit what?? No duh sherlock. P sure not promoting indiscriminate killings is like the bare minimum of being a leftist. Idk very uncharitable to say the least
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:pigpoop:
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This isn't true at all. That's an idea you're irrationally smuggling into what could be a serious discussion. What you're describing is eugenics, which is a completely different topic that is basically universally reviled.
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Of course, that is very simple, (ignoring that you also smuggled in a top-down method which nobody mentioned). Proven positive interventions to reduce birth rates include:
•raising standard of living
•increasing access to birth control
•education of girls and women
•increasing wealth
•empowerment of women
There are other potential interventions that haven't really been tried because people insist on not talking about population - like honestly even a public education campaign about how maybe reducing the number of children could help the environment would probably shift some numbers as well. Honestly because we've made this such a hotbutton issue the actual environmental cost of a new human is basically never talked about and a lot of people have no idea that it could be an issue.
And look, the idea of genetically testing fetuses for genetic traits that might make a new human less happy is a touchy, controversial and complex topic that is obviously something close to your heart and I don't haven't thought much about and don't have much to contribute. I will, however, posit that it is completely unrelated to the topic of overpopulation.
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India, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka etc etc. Population control can be as simple as giving women contraception, education etc. That's what these countries did.
Covering every acre of the earth with soy farms to own the libs