February 28, 2007
300,000,000 is a big number
The site definitely has an axe to grind, but it's interesting nonetheless. The link contains images of very large numbers of things, like, for example, the number of aluminum cans used in this country every five seconds (106,000), the number of shipping containers processed through US ports every day (75,000), and the number of Vicodin pills equal to the amount of annual emergency room visits related to prescription abuse (240,000).
All of which goes towards the realization that yes, there are a lot of people in the US. If you named one person a second it'd take you nine and a half years to get through them all. It'd take almost 35 years to do the same for the number of people in China.
I hereby advance the thesis that the vast majority of identifiable social ills that are blamed on such various things as industrialization, technology, etc. can be traced to a single factor: population growth. From the dawn of history until about AD1700 the world never really had more than half a billion people on it for any length of time. Now within 300 years we've got 12 times that many. So 6000-odd years of cultural and civilizational adaptation to social patterns predicated on the scarcity of people have basically been thrown out the window.
No wonder we're a mess.
interesting theory. makes sense.
Posted by: daniel at February 28, 2007 12:22 PMI blame Dutch immigrants and their damn big hockey playing families
Posted by: Josiah at February 28, 2007 02:04 PMInteresting, and certainly supportable.
At the same time, we had plenty of problems before 1700, and while they might not have been on a "kill the planet" order of magnitude (a designation which still packs a bit of hubris in my opinion), they were certainly significant. True, there are a lot more mouths to feed now, but there's also a lot more food (or at least the potential is there). I tend to think most of our modern problems are just examples of the same old shit we've been living on for millenia, scaled to fit the population. I could be wrong, though.
Posted by: Dave at March 1, 2007 12:27 PMSure, "nothing new under the sun", etc. Let me restrict my thesis by saying that what problems we're dealing with that differ from the problems dealt with in ages past are traceable to population growth.
It's not just food either. Most of the ancient social structures revolve around agricultural societies, and I'd contend that society has not sufficiently learned to deal with population centers above a million people.
Posted by: ryan at March 1, 2007 01:18 PM