i do want to correct a part in that essay, about malthus.

discussions about malthus tend to get very emotional, but they're almost always based on actual specious reasoning. the connection between malthus and nazism is particularly shaky. malthus argued that the amount of resources on the planet are finite and that we will eventually outstrip them past our carrying capacity if allowed to breed without checks on the population, like predation or disease or war. hitler argued that all of these other races are inferior and need to be enslaved or annihilated to make space for the superior race(s). while i suppose it is true that both positions have something to do with population control, one is a pretty dour and entirely scientific analysis that we should probably pay some attention to, whereas the other is just pseudo-scientific nonsense that has no outcome besides pointless death and destruction. malthus never argued for a master race...

has malthus been wrong? it's not as obvious as his detractors would like to claim. we've certainly seen a lot of people starve to death over the last two hundred years, haven't we? further, malthus has a particularly poignant point in the context of imminent climate change, specifically desertification.

i know that religious groups tend to flip out at the mere mention of malthus, but i have absolutely no interest in their opinion at all, whatsoever; if you're going to push me, i'd actually advise them to pull their heads out of their asses, then clean the shit out of their ears, then shut the fuck up and listen so they can educate themselves, and stop making idiots of themselves. is my opinion clear, or should i tell you what i really think?

if you read malthus in the worst way possible, then, yes, he was more alarmist than we've seen, up to right now. the reason for this is that, by a fluke of luck, technology has happened to move faster than population growth has. by "technology", i'm referring to things like oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as refrigeration, and also building technology.

so, then, what does negating malthus completely mean doing? it means swallowing the line of infinite growth. there's no way around it. we haven't crashed yet, because our growth curve has been ridiculously unsustainable, in ways that malthus could not have imagined, regardless of if you think he was a dumbass or not. we need to maintain these unsustainable growth rates in order to keep this bubble from bursting.

anarchists generally reject infinite growth, and have little choice but to adopt some concept of malthusianism along with it. on the most extreme scale, you have the primitivists and thoreauvians, who want to cut us down to a few million people. in the more moderate scale, you've got the family planning advocates that just want to get the birth rates under control, in the hopes that it prevents the need to do something more extreme. but, hovering over all of this is the reality of climate change, and the fact that we're on a projection to a series of natural disasters - famines, droughts, hurricanes, floods - that are going to take a good cut out of us, even as our ability to utilize fossil fuels in farming comes down due to scarcity.

i like the general thrust of the article. really. i do.

but, this part in the middle where the author decides to lace into malthus as an ideologue, and argue that a human carrying capacity is a racist fantasy, is really just kind of stupid.

it is true that malthus' disaster scenario has not happened....yet....because we've found ways to use all of this incredible growth in technology to our advantage in food production. "therefore, the scenario will never happen" is actually just a specious deduction from that recognition. in fact, we know that our resources are depleting faster than ever, that we're destroying the planet worse than ever and that our likelihood of a malthusian-style collapse is increasing by the decade.

i don't know when this will happen. maybe we'll develop fusion, tomorrow. maybe a spaceship will land with an anti-matter reservoir that will last us the next thousand years. who knows. but, does that sound crazy? that's what happened with the increases in oil technology and refrigeration, you just don't see it that way. your recent ancestors from the nineeteenth century would be pretty baffled at your fridge, you know.

i do know, though, that a carrying capacity is not a racist fantasy reality, but a solid scientific concept. i know that if we keep assuming infinite growth, if we don't get a handle on our use of resources, and if we continue to breed like humans, then, yes, we're going to crash - or at least certain areas are.

again - are you sure it hasn't already happened?