ramonmercado
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A bit much to call it an apocalypse but it very likely is unsustainable development.
The title of this thread is, Population growth - the real apocalypse, not Comfortably Off Baby Boomer Home Owner Retirement Property Speculators.ramonmercado said:A bit much to call it an apocalypse but it very likely is unsustainable development.
An increase in the number of homes being built is index of the rising population, which, left unchecked, would become, first a crisis, and untimately an apocalypse.Pietro_Mercurios said:The title of this thread is, Population growth - the real apocalypse, not Comfortably Off Baby Boomer Home Owner Retirement Property Speculators.
It's still hardly the case that when there's no more room left in Hell, or Devon for that matter, they'll build in Cornwall. It's also an indication that property developers like to make money. The article says that the land in question has been earmarked for new development for 25 years, they've finally got permission.rynner2 said:An increase in the number of homes being built is index of the rising population, which, left unchecked, would become, first a crisis, and untimately an apocalypse.Pietro_Mercurios said:The title of this thread is, Population growth - the real apocalypse, not Comfortably Off Baby Boomer Home Owner Retirement Property Speculators.
Property speculators wouldn't build these homes if they didn't have a market.
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I lived and worked in Cornwall, for three or four years, back in the Eighties. Even then, incomers were mostly of two sorts: second home owners wanting a get away from it all cottage by the sea and the recently retired looking for a nice cottage by the sea, warmer weather and an easy stress free retirement. I doubt things have improved in the last 25 years, either. The baby boomer generation are the ones either retiring, or about to retire, with the money to buy these nice new homes....
And WTF have 'comfortably off baby boomers' got to do with it?
I've said before that many people don't understand the maths of exponential growth, and therefore choose to ignore the problems that the maths foretells.
You can worry about what MIGHT happen when you find evidence for it.Pietro_Mercurios said:I find the idea that blaming population growth might become an easy excuse and justification for all sorts of NIMBY or social Darwinist claptrap, rather worrying.
And they'll spoil the view and bring down property prices.rynner2 said:...
An extra 300 houses may seem no big deal by itself, but it's another straw in the wind. Especially when they're built on farmland...
We may already be seeing it.rynner2 said:You can worry about what MIGHT happen when you find evidence for it.Pietro_Mercurios said:I find the idea that blaming population growth might become an easy excuse and justification for all sorts of NIMBY or social Darwinist claptrap, rather worrying.
...
Kondoru said:But this means an area short on lakes will now be able to take up dingy sailing and fishing...
Kondoru said:Ok, they will have to use Mirrors; Red sails and so less chance of showing up the dirt.
Emphasis mine. Rest of the links at link.http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/22/no-population-explosion-too-few-owning-too-much
There is no population explosion on this planet
Our population problem isn't too many humans on the planet, but too few owning too much of it
The Guardian, Robert Newman. 22 September 2013
Too many people for too little land," David Attenborough said last week, makes it "barmy" to send food to Africa, before going on to say that he wants to "start a debate about overpopulation". Stephen Emmott, author of overpopulation bestseller Ten Billion, says he wants to start a debate too. What insights does each bring to this debate? Attenborough says, "Humans are a plague." Emmott says, "I think we're fucked." It sounds as if they're inviting someone else with less to lose to step forward and say something disgraceful.
Let's get one thing straight from the start. There is no population explosion. The rate of population growth has been slowing since the 1960s, and has fallen below replacement levels half the world over. But what about the other half? That's where population is exploding, right? Well, actually, no. The UN Population Division's world fertility patterns show that, worldwide, fertility per woman has fallen from 4.7 babies in 1970–75 to 2.6 in 2005-10. As Peoplequake author Fred Pearce puts it: "Today's women have half as many babies as their mothers … That is not just in the rich world. It is the global average today."
Attenborough's overpopulation thesis is, therefore, flawed. But even if the whispering naturalist were right, even if there were a population explosion, it would still be inhuman to say that there are too many humans on the planet. You can say there are too many people in a lift ("eight persons max") but not on Earth. To wish to reduce the number of living, breathing humans on this planet is an obscenity.
Today's overpopulation hysteria is not a patch on what it was a hundred years ago, however, when mainstream intellectuals such as HG Wells, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence were proposing not just sterilisation but actual extermination. Back then, there were fewer people in Britain, of course, but many more of them were homeless. It was thought that homelessness came from there being too many people. It was a population problem. Simple as that. But then voters – as opposed to intellectuals – realised that homelessness was caused not by too many people crowding too small a country, but by too few people owning too much land.
In came social housing and down – spectacularly – went urban homelessness. It's never gone away, but neither has it returned to anything like it was. And the era of notorious doss houses the Spike and the Peg came to an end thanks to extending democracy to cover land ownership and land use.
As with shelter then, so with food now. Today's population panic goes on as if the Earth's temperate grasslands are straining under the weight of supporting voracious humans rather than voracious Big Ag. "We've run out of farmland," shriek op-eds and talking heads. "We're already at the limit. The population is booming, but every last hectare of prime arable land is already taken!"
Taken by what? According to the National Corn Growers Association, 30% of US corn ends up as fuel ethanol, while 5% is grown as corn syrup for junk food sweeteners and fizzy pop. Ain't it grand that we'd sooner say there are too many human beings in the world than too much Coca-Cola, Honey Nut Cheerios or Special K?
Food security and ecological sustainability are impossible without democratic control of land. Only through land nationalisation can we introduce the connected landscapes, smart cities and wildlife corridors that will let ecosystems bend, not break. As with homelessness a century ago, the problem facing a population of 7 billion is not too many people crowding too small a piece of land, but too few people owning too much world.
Don't Panic: The Truth About Population is on BBC Two tonight at 9pm
Too much of a good thingrynner2 said:You're all missing the essential point. These various diseases are getting more dangerous by the year, simply because bugs reproduce so fast - and of course it's the drug resistant ones that reproduce. Scientific research takes years, but bugs reproduce every few hours or minutes, so we can never keep pace, let alone keep up.
It's a good thing that some experts are willing to discuss this - only international efforts at the highest levels stand a chance of discovering new approaches, because antibiotics have had their day. (In fact, it's the over-use, and mis-use, of antobiotics that have created the problem in the first place - in effect, for the last few human generations, we've been selectively breeding for bugs that are resistant!)