Comment by f- | Hacker News Reader

Comment by f- | Hacker News Reader

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Not long ago, a significant proportion of the scientific establishment - along with a number of celebrities and policymakers - believed that the "population bomb" is an inevitable, imminent, and apocalyptic threat. There was talk of "point of no return", calls for worldwide China-style fertility restrictions, and so forth.

Instead, what happened over the past several decades is not just a drop in birth rates, but also dramatic improvements in our ability to grow cheap food at a scale (something that the article doesn't really talk about).

So it is a very interesting take to claim that the population bomb has been "defused" - since this implies it wasn't an episode of pathological science flirting with mysticism (with frequent allusions to the pristine "natural" order contrasted with the evils of Man), but just some sound science that turned out to be a bit off.

(Please don't read into this as a critique of any contemporary scientific debates; that's not my point, but I think we should be more willing to recognize our past mistakes.)

> but also dramatic improvements in our ability to grow cheap food at a scale

Are those improvements sustainable? Agriculture that is generating high yields from converting very fertile natural ecosystems into deserts and then moving on is almost like eating through fossil resources, only that the timescale for replenishment is a few orders of magnitude closer to being relevant for humanity (but still far or of reach). Failure ecosystems that have been farmed out of existence in antiquity are still as barren as thousand years ago. If you ignore the yields of unsustainable farming, our ability to feed billions looks a lot less rosy.

"Are those improvements sustainable?"

Available evidence suggests yes.

http://plantsci.missouri.edu/grains/corn/graphs/USA-corn-yie...

"Agriculture that is generating high yields from converting very fertile natural ecosystems into deserts"

Iowa didn't look much like a desert the last time I was there.

"Failure ecosystems that have been farmed out of existence in antiquity are still as barren as thousand years ago"

Yeah, that's why you don't want to rely on "organic" farming. Good thing we don't do that any more.

> Iowa didn't look much like a desert the last time I was there.

I don't know the specifics of Iowa, but European soil can only keep up with the rising yields thanks to the dung of a rising headcount of livestock that is fed with imported feed that is at least in part from slash-and-burn farming or from depopulating the oceans. If those animals consume more than the local yields could supply, the farming is still unsustainable despite local soils not depleting.

I'm not saying that there are no improvements (three certainly are), but that they might be much smaller than we think.

> slash-and-burn farming

Slash-and-burn farming is a "traditional", "organic" method.

They don't do slash-and-burn in Iowa.

In what ways were Malthus' predictions rooted in "mysticism"?

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