That’s what I’m banking on. Because if growth goes fully exponential, we best start looking real close at Mars.
It’s worth noting that as well as with Commune pointing out the declining birth rates of highly societies - Japan, Singapore, China, etc - that as well: the western world is more or less at a stagnant or mildly declining rate. For the large part the population boom is in Africa or lesser developed parts of the world, which is more a reflection of the economic status of those countries and the sort of equal protections or empowerment people don’t have access to that “”“the west””” or developed countries have access to. In America and Europe a lot of it comes down to education and economic opportunities for women that has shifted cultural norms to seeking personal fulfillment other than the family. While in Japan declining birth-rates are a result of the economic depression Japan is technically still in since the 1990’s, people there are working just too much to support themselves let alone a family; even with the government stepping in to try and curb excessive over time, the Japanese work a lot. China’s has been declining because the One Child Policy effectively clipped the birth rate needed for anything more than simple replacement: two children per couple for a steady unchanging population.
But as stated earlier, for simple commodities like food we have more than enough for everyone. Last I checked the amount of food we produce is double than what we need for the population. It’s just how the food gets to where it’s needed and what happens after that effects just how much it actually does. In the case of Africa and the under-developed world food waste comes into effect because of the inability to effectively store it, they don’t have refrigeration. Americans just like to throw it out at the kitchen, although there’s a lot to do with us throwing it out at the very starting point of production because it doesn’t meet our
image of food standards ; not that it’s in-edible.
[Another source on the above, with a smattering of links for further reading within.]
Western - or American - waste comes as a result of our marketing culture vs Third World inequalities in simple technology to keep it, as well as not having developed the material and social equalities to effect a cultural shift all together.
It could be argued from the question of food waste alone that addressing the compounding elements of capitalist marketability of the “ideal product” and improving the third world’s ability to keep and hold onto food so it doesn’t go to waste so fast would have the effect of fully realizing the potential of feeding double the population, and cutting back on farm subsidies to discourage over-farming, which would encourage of force farmers to stop using up their land and roll back agricultural use of our land and water resources at least. If wilderness and re-wilding is what we need, then all that unused land can be returned to nature. You could use it for development, but as I talked about before
we hardly need more homes.
But even in the case of housing and urban planning, and planning our urban-wilderness spaces that can be deflected and moved to a whole other field of discussion now opened up by the above implications: we’re at the stage and by doing the above may have the power for radical redesign of the space we use. We may have to bulldoze entire cities in America to go about the radical urban design of the likes of La Cabousier, but if Africa is the locust of current new growth and with cities like Lagos being some of the fastest growing and expanding cities in the world they might even realize the ideas of La Cabousier or any other urban utopian idealist to better balance their use of space.
To frankly fret about population growing, and to pretend that we need to cut population too, or find a whole other planet feeds into the Malthusian Myth that should have been dead for over a century. All the material for accompanying the existing population is present here in the world. It’s just not being used right.
Nothing is more so symbolic of the silly waste of space than pencil towers as well.