There Was a Time Once When the World Was Beautiful
January 10, 2022 1:17 AM Subscribe
The year is 2022. Our overpopulated planet is experiencing catastrophic climate change, megacorporations have excessive power over the government, and clean living is a luxury only the 1 percent can afford. from In 1973, ‘Soylent Green’ envisioned the world in 2022. It got a lot right.
Soylent Green Predicted 2022, Including Impossible Meat Substitutes
This is the year 2022, according to old sci-fi movies
Previously
[CW: Spoilers for "Soylent Green"]
Soylent Green Predicted 2022, Including Impossible Meat Substitutes
This is the year 2022, according to old sci-fi movies
Previously
[CW: Spoilers for "Soylent Green"]
There's the moment in Soylent Green where Charlton Heston tastes a bit of strawberry jam, the point in the film being that this is supposed to be a rare, unusual luxury. We haven't nearly hit that point (at least not yet).
No sci-fi prediction is ever going to hit every mark, but Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather" might be worth a revisit if you want to consider climate change in literature.
posted by gimonca at 3:10 AM on January 10, 2022 [7 favorites]
No sci-fi prediction is ever going to hit every mark, but Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather" might be worth a revisit if you want to consider climate change in literature.
posted by gimonca at 3:10 AM on January 10, 2022 [7 favorites]
I watched this recently with my wife who hadn't seen it.
The (award winning) opening montage is a gut punch and Sol's last scene slays me every time.
posted by whatevernot at 4:17 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
The (award winning) opening montage is a gut punch and Sol's last scene slays me every time.
posted by whatevernot at 4:17 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
The year is 1973, our still sparsely populated planet has become fixated with Hawaiian print shirtdresses, houndstooth cardigans, waterbeds and The Dark Side of the Moon. Few people can obtain foods other than quiche lorraine washed down with a pina colada.
posted by rongorongo at 4:41 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by rongorongo at 4:41 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
The "we have seen the future and it sucks" genre of late-60s-early-70s dystopian sci-fi is a personal favorite of mine. So far as I can tell, Star Wars put an end to it. (As perspective, Logan's Run won a special Academy Award winner for special effects the year before.)
posted by Gelatin at 4:44 AM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by Gelatin at 4:44 AM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]
The article didn't mention how Sol's euthanasia scene is similar to watching Classic Arts Showcase on PBS at 3 am when you just can't fall asleep.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:50 AM on January 10, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by 2N2222 at 4:50 AM on January 10, 2022 [13 favorites]
It's interesting how much dystopia horror includes cannibalism as the ultimate shock. Honestly once I'm dead I wouldn't care if I was eaten? Would be weird to be forced to eat other people though. But without the ridiculous overcrowding scenario, it's not very efficient, honestly.
In horror it's more about being eaten while still alive, or being bitten and turned into another monster. Or someone choosing to eat people for fun.
posted by emjaybee at 6:25 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
In horror it's more about being eaten while still alive, or being bitten and turned into another monster. Or someone choosing to eat people for fun.
posted by emjaybee at 6:25 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
i've asserted on the blue that The Soylent Oceanographic Survey 2014-2019 exists (under a different name) and it's under lock and key at the NSA.
posted by j_curiouser at 6:30 AM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by j_curiouser at 6:30 AM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
Our 9th grade Economics teacher (this was mandated by Georgia) took 2 1/2 days of class time to show us this movie. It was the only time I ever saw him seem interested in anything.
posted by thelonius at 6:35 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 6:35 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
Progosk is certainly correct about some of the toxicity of the overpopulation narrative, but I recently read Make Room, Make Room for the first time and overall found it to be pretty solid as a novel. Harrison was a better writer than e.g. H. Beam Piper, and a less nasty thinker than him or e.g. Niven. His interest in anthropogenic climate change (including terraforming etc.) and cynicism about humanity's ability to allocate resources are in balance in this one, and the sort of Soviet despair of a resource-poor New York is to me captured in a way the film couldn't muster. It's gritty, desperate, and raw - there are no good guys, no suicide booths, and no recycling of people. Just scrabbling for food and water in the dirt of a crumbling society.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:38 AM on January 10, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by aspersioncast at 6:38 AM on January 10, 2022 [11 favorites]
It’s been pointed out that one of the first films to address greenhouse gases starred Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, and Joseph Cotten: all lifelong conservative GOP members.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:38 AM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:38 AM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]
As perspective, Logan's Run won a special Academy Award winner for special effects the year before.
Well Logon's Run is not far off the current mark either given we are prepared to allow a disease that disproportionately kills the elderly to become endemic. The big difference I guess is that we no longer consider 30 to be the cutoff for young.
posted by srboisvert at 6:43 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
Well Logon's Run is not far off the current mark either given we are prepared to allow a disease that disproportionately kills the elderly to become endemic. The big difference I guess is that we no longer consider 30 to be the cutoff for young.
posted by srboisvert at 6:43 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
Logan's Run....30 to be the cutoff for young.
It was 21 in the novel. There was supposed to be a remake of the film, more faithful to the novel, about 15 years ago, but I guess it came to nothing.
posted by thelonius at 6:47 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
It was 21 in the novel. There was supposed to be a remake of the film, more faithful to the novel, about 15 years ago, but I guess it came to nothing.
posted by thelonius at 6:47 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
It’s been pointed out that one of the first films to address greenhouse gases starred Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, and Joseph Cotten: all lifelong conservative GOP members.
The scientists whose work added up to the discovery of the greenhouse effect included quite a few Eisenhower-aligned Cold Warriors and people even further to the right.
posted by ocschwar at 6:55 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
The scientists whose work added up to the discovery of the greenhouse effect included quite a few Eisenhower-aligned Cold Warriors and people even further to the right.
posted by ocschwar at 6:55 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
Seems like as good a place as any to mention that I've been mentally workshopping Soylent Green: The Musical! for 20 years. Songs include the female character solo "Boobs Don't Advance the Plot" and the rip-snorting "Butter! Real Butter!"
posted by daisystomper at 7:04 AM on January 10, 2022 [22 favorites]
posted by daisystomper at 7:04 AM on January 10, 2022 [22 favorites]
I notice the Den of Geek article confuses Dick van Patten with his son Timothy. And while that article notes the parallels with today’s police reaction to protesting crowds, nobody seems to be pointing out the blasé acceptance of the police force’s rampant corruption and role as a private security force for the elite. They mention the rarity of the beef and vegetables Heston and Robinson feast on while ignoring the fact that they were blithely lifted from a crime scene by the investigating officer. That hit me a little close to home during my last rewatch.
Heston, believe it or not, spent the first half of his career as a Democrat, and was one of many Hollywood stars to attend the march on Washington. He switched over to the right wing around the same time as Reagan’s star began to ascend. Not that he didn’t make up for lost time once he got over there...
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:06 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
Heston, believe it or not, spent the first half of his career as a Democrat, and was one of many Hollywood stars to attend the march on Washington. He switched over to the right wing around the same time as Reagan’s star began to ascend. Not that he didn’t make up for lost time once he got over there...
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:06 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
The "we have seen the future and it sucks" genre of late-60s-early-70s dystopian sci-fi is a personal favorite of mine. So far as I can tell, Star Wars put an end to it.
It's interesting to revisit Star Trek (TOS) and see how its real innovation is blending the giddy optimism of the early 60s American space race with some of the concerns that were popping up later in the decade; "The Mark of Gideon" is its overpopulation episode, and very effective and haunting in its own way. The dystopian SF wave largely abandoned the space opera trappings in favor of more serious speculation, and while some of it was quite good (Silent Running, with Bruce Dern, for example), some of it just swapped one set of tropes for another. Logan's Run, for example, was based on the premise that the Baby Boom would just keep on boomin', never minding that the birth rate in American had been on the decline for several years by the time the book was published. And then there's the movie of Damnation Alley, which departed greatly from the book, and just seemed silly instead of prophetic. (It never ceases to amuse me that it was anticipated as the big SF hit of 1977, rather than the full-throated nostalgic return to space opera by the director of American Graffiti.)
Make Room, Make Room was generally better than most of the dystopias, too many of which used the idea of ecological devastation as a way of reviving Western cliches in an SF setting; Harrison was also responsible for Bill, the Galactic Hero, a pisstake on Starship Troopers and an antidote for mil-SF forever. It's been a while since I've either seen the movie or read the book, so I'm a bit short on specifics regarding either, but I will note that the real-life Soylent hasn't done that well. (prev on the blue)
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:28 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
It's interesting to revisit Star Trek (TOS) and see how its real innovation is blending the giddy optimism of the early 60s American space race with some of the concerns that were popping up later in the decade; "The Mark of Gideon" is its overpopulation episode, and very effective and haunting in its own way. The dystopian SF wave largely abandoned the space opera trappings in favor of more serious speculation, and while some of it was quite good (Silent Running, with Bruce Dern, for example), some of it just swapped one set of tropes for another. Logan's Run, for example, was based on the premise that the Baby Boom would just keep on boomin', never minding that the birth rate in American had been on the decline for several years by the time the book was published. And then there's the movie of Damnation Alley, which departed greatly from the book, and just seemed silly instead of prophetic. (It never ceases to amuse me that it was anticipated as the big SF hit of 1977, rather than the full-throated nostalgic return to space opera by the director of American Graffiti.)
Make Room, Make Room was generally better than most of the dystopias, too many of which used the idea of ecological devastation as a way of reviving Western cliches in an SF setting; Harrison was also responsible for Bill, the Galactic Hero, a pisstake on Starship Troopers and an antidote for mil-SF forever. It's been a while since I've either seen the movie or read the book, so I'm a bit short on specifics regarding either, but I will note that the real-life Soylent hasn't done that well. (prev on the blue)
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:28 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
It's interesting how much dystopia horror includes cannibalism as the ultimate shock.I've never understood this. It's choosing to die as the best option to support your family that is horrifying. Being eaten afterward is better than any alternative. (I understand that there are reasonably solid evolutionary arguments for why cannibalism isn't popular, but I don't personally get the instinctive reaction. I'd rather eat a dead man than steal a meal from a living one.)
It's been quite a few years, and I haven't read the book, but I was never particularly impressed by the predictions in the film. It's a very slight extrapolation from a 1973 New York Times headline and feels more relevant to my childhood memories of the '80s than it does today. Getting the details right is fun to discuss and think about. But, it's a stretch to say that a few hundred people spending money to end their lives - and hundreds of thousands doing it the old fashioned way - counts as an accurate or surprising prediction. Or that the way cops respond to protests are radically different now than they were the year of Wounded Knee and Pinochet, and a couple of years after Kent State and Tlaltelulco and brutal attacks on May Day protests. The idea that fake meat would be food for poor people in the US and the rich would eat real meat, rather than the other way around, is laughable. To the extent the predictions were accurate, it's mostly because they were tiny extrapolations. Perhaps the more surprising thing is that so little has changed.
I've become a fan of what I think of as the contemporary version of this story, The 3%. It's not perfect, and it's a lot longer than it needs to be. But, it feels real in 2022 in the same way I imagine Soylent Green probably felt real in 1973 but doesn't today. I'm betting they've got all the future details wrong. But, they certainly captured the mood of the present.
posted by eotvos at 7:37 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
For those who haven't seen this from Oglaf:
Soy Soylent Green
(Big NSFW warning for oglaf.com)
posted by illongruci at 7:57 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
Soy Soylent Green
(Big NSFW warning for oglaf.com)
posted by illongruci at 7:57 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
And of course let's not forget to remember A Boy and His Dog.
posted by mfoight at 8:02 AM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by mfoight at 8:02 AM on January 10, 2022 [9 favorites]
My ranking of Heston's Apocalyptic Sc-fi movies.
Omega Man
Planet of the Apes
Soylent Green
posted by djseafood at 8:02 AM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
Omega Man
Planet of the Apes
Soylent Green
posted by djseafood at 8:02 AM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
METAFILTER: similar to watching Classic Arts Showcase on PBS at 3 am when you just can't fall asleep.
posted by philip-random at 8:11 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 8:11 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
Eisenhower-aligned Cold Warriors
In 2022, Eisenhower would be drummed out of the GOP for opposing the coup attempt and for being a liberal.
posted by tclark at 8:11 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
In 2022, Eisenhower would be drummed out of the GOP for opposing the coup attempt and for being a liberal.
posted by tclark at 8:11 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
In 2022, Eisenhower would be drummed out of the GOP for opposing the coup attempt and for being a liberal.
Hell, in 1960 the Birchers literally thought he was a communist.
It's been mentioned before, but everyone needs to read the Rick Perlstein series about the birth of the modern right. A slow-motion train wreck played over 60 years.
posted by hwyengr at 8:25 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
Hell, in 1960 the Birchers literally thought he was a communist.
It's been mentioned before, but everyone needs to read the Rick Perlstein series about the birth of the modern right. A slow-motion train wreck played over 60 years.
posted by hwyengr at 8:25 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
The Green Revolution and a growing realization that birth rates actually decline due to urbanization has made the Malthusian Catastrophe less salient these days.
The late 60s / early 70s overpopulation panic and associated media (e.g. Soylent Green, The Population Bomb, ZPG) seems kind of quaint in retrospect. The whole time, it was something else that was dooming us.
posted by xthlc at 8:27 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
The late 60s / early 70s overpopulation panic and associated media (e.g. Soylent Green, The Population Bomb, ZPG) seems kind of quaint in retrospect. The whole time, it was something else that was dooming us.
posted by xthlc at 8:27 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
It’s been pointed out that one of the first films to address greenhouse gases starred Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, and Joseph Cotten: all lifelong conservative GOP members.
There was a time when conservatives had actual things they wanted to conserve rather than just political power and the social hierarchy.
posted by srboisvert at 8:41 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
There was a time when conservatives had actual things they wanted to conserve rather than just political power and the social hierarchy.
posted by srboisvert at 8:41 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
It was 21 in the novel. There was supposed to be a remake of the film, more faithful to the novel, about 15 years ago, but I guess it came to nothing.
In other words, it didn't get renewed.
posted by Gelatin at 8:47 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
In other words, it didn't get renewed.
posted by Gelatin at 8:47 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
one of the first films to address greenhouse gases starred Charlton Heston, Chuck Connors, and Joseph Cotten: all lifelong conservative GOP members.
Soylent Green hit when I was twelve. I didn't see it at the time but my best friend did and it quickly became something that got talked about. Another piece of the horrible future that could be coming (pollution, overpopulation, nuclear war etc). And being suburban brats, we didn't view it as all bad insofar as ANYTHING had to be better than the whitebread cookie cutter split-level banality of our current situation. We were also huge Alice Cooper fans.
I finally got around to seeing it ten or fifteen years later when it showed up in the local video store and recall being struck by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic pessimism and grimy-ness of it. Which I found darkly amusing. Not because I saw anything even remotely fun about any of the the "realities" being presented. No, it was the insight it gave me into the loud and proud nihilism of a certain kind of conservative menopausal male mindset that had been rather influential at the time that Soylent Green was made, that had informed so much of the cultural product I'd been subjected to as twelve-thirteen year old kid.
And here I'm thinking of the Chuck Hestons, Joseph Cottens etc who were of that generation that had more or less owned things culturally through the early-mid 1960s but then got profoundly sideswiped by the revolutions of the 60s, the hippie stuff, The Beatles, the so-called Summer of Love, the opposition to and inevitable abject failure of the Vietnam War -- not to mention all the psychedelicized consciousness that erupted through everything, which among other things got a lot of humans (most of them young, under the age of thirty) thinking about the fragility of our ecosystems, our planet, our place in it, all the gauntlets being thrown down in terms of the changes we'd have to be making as a species if we were to survive and thrive into the future. And bluntly, these now aging heroes just weren't up to it. They saw a wild, mad freakout of possibilities erupting all around them (in music, in movies, on TV, everywhere) that they couldn't even begin to get handle on, let alone control ... ... so of course they were going to buy into the worst possible outcomes, pitch into their white male middle aged despair and throw their cultural weight around appropriately.
So yeah, finally seeing Soylent Green in 1984 or 85, I found it all darkly hilarious and revealing for what it told me not about some dystopic future, but about 1972. In particular, some particularly powerful people who had completely missed the boat on the coolest, weirdest, wildest most revelatory party humankind had ever known. So now goddammit, they were going to make sure they erased any possible positive interpretation of what had gone down. I don't think they were doing all this consciously -- just that rigidity of their conservative worldview allowed no other course of action. Which I suppose means that Soylent Green was/is very much about today.
posted by philip-random at 9:06 AM on January 10, 2022 [12 favorites]
Soylent Green hit when I was twelve. I didn't see it at the time but my best friend did and it quickly became something that got talked about. Another piece of the horrible future that could be coming (pollution, overpopulation, nuclear war etc). And being suburban brats, we didn't view it as all bad insofar as ANYTHING had to be better than the whitebread cookie cutter split-level banality of our current situation. We were also huge Alice Cooper fans.
I finally got around to seeing it ten or fifteen years later when it showed up in the local video store and recall being struck by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic pessimism and grimy-ness of it. Which I found darkly amusing. Not because I saw anything even remotely fun about any of the the "realities" being presented. No, it was the insight it gave me into the loud and proud nihilism of a certain kind of conservative menopausal male mindset that had been rather influential at the time that Soylent Green was made, that had informed so much of the cultural product I'd been subjected to as twelve-thirteen year old kid.
And here I'm thinking of the Chuck Hestons, Joseph Cottens etc who were of that generation that had more or less owned things culturally through the early-mid 1960s but then got profoundly sideswiped by the revolutions of the 60s, the hippie stuff, The Beatles, the so-called Summer of Love, the opposition to and inevitable abject failure of the Vietnam War -- not to mention all the psychedelicized consciousness that erupted through everything, which among other things got a lot of humans (most of them young, under the age of thirty) thinking about the fragility of our ecosystems, our planet, our place in it, all the gauntlets being thrown down in terms of the changes we'd have to be making as a species if we were to survive and thrive into the future. And bluntly, these now aging heroes just weren't up to it. They saw a wild, mad freakout of possibilities erupting all around them (in music, in movies, on TV, everywhere) that they couldn't even begin to get handle on, let alone control ... ... so of course they were going to buy into the worst possible outcomes, pitch into their white male middle aged despair and throw their cultural weight around appropriately.
So yeah, finally seeing Soylent Green in 1984 or 85, I found it all darkly hilarious and revealing for what it told me not about some dystopic future, but about 1972. In particular, some particularly powerful people who had completely missed the boat on the coolest, weirdest, wildest most revelatory party humankind had ever known. So now goddammit, they were going to make sure they erased any possible positive interpretation of what had gone down. I don't think they were doing all this consciously -- just that rigidity of their conservative worldview allowed no other course of action. Which I suppose means that Soylent Green was/is very much about today.
posted by philip-random at 9:06 AM on January 10, 2022 [12 favorites]
The year is 1973, our still sparsely populated planet has become fixated with Hawaiian print shirtdresses, houndstooth cardigans, waterbeds and The Dark Side of the Moon.
Definitely the last two but I somehow missed that stylish timeline where houndstooth cardigans and especially Hawaiian print shirtdresses were hip. 1973 was just a few years after the Dress Code was abolished and everybody was wearing blue jeans and denim ONLY.
posted by Rash at 9:14 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
Definitely the last two but I somehow missed that stylish timeline where houndstooth cardigans and especially Hawaiian print shirtdresses were hip. 1973 was just a few years after the Dress Code was abolished and everybody was wearing blue jeans and denim ONLY.
posted by Rash at 9:14 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
Metafilter: I'd rather eat a dead man than steal a meal from a living one.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 9:27 AM on January 10, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by armoir from antproof case at 9:27 AM on January 10, 2022 [7 favorites]
Call me a naive optimist, but I think people should be cautious about overrotating on visions of the future that have emerged from a generation of people who've spent their lives cradle to grave huffing cold war ideologies and aerosolized lead.
posted by mhoye at 9:46 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 9:46 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
Honestly once I'm dead I wouldn't care if I was eaten?
Me either, but it's the 'kill living me to make me meat' part that I'd find problematic.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:54 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
Me either, but it's the 'kill living me to make me meat' part that I'd find problematic.
posted by LooseFilter at 9:54 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
If you haven't seen the movie and only know it from reference or parody, it's worth a watch. It's not a great movie, but it's much better than than the parodies make it seem. The final scenes especially aren't nearly as hammy as you'd think.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:59 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:59 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
The final scenes especially aren't nearly as hammy as you'd think.
I do agree that it ends well. Not Chuck Heston's histrionics so much as Sol's euthanasia scene, which has stuck with me as an entirely humane way to go. Though I do worry about some of the soundtrack choices people might make. I recall being at a memorial service (a friend of a friend -- I sort of got dragged along) and the slideshow they showed (all the snapshots of the departed's life) was soundtracked by a terribly inappropriate Phil Collins song.
I remember thinking (and then being immediately sorry that I thought it). "Man, it's not bad enough that you're in hell, you had to drag all of us along with you."
posted by philip-random at 10:07 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
I do agree that it ends well. Not Chuck Heston's histrionics so much as Sol's euthanasia scene, which has stuck with me as an entirely humane way to go. Though I do worry about some of the soundtrack choices people might make. I recall being at a memorial service (a friend of a friend -- I sort of got dragged along) and the slideshow they showed (all the snapshots of the departed's life) was soundtracked by a terribly inappropriate Phil Collins song.
I remember thinking (and then being immediately sorry that I thought it). "Man, it's not bad enough that you're in hell, you had to drag all of us along with you."
posted by philip-random at 10:07 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
The Green Revolution and a growing realization that birth rates actually decline due to urbanization has made the Malthusian Catastrophe less salient these days.
I am uncomfortable with the way the "Green Revolution" gets used as a sort of showstopper anti-Malthusian argument in discussions like these. At the very least, it seems very short-sighted.
The "Green Revolution" basically consisted of a package of technologies, including high-yield seeds to replace traditional/heirloom varieties, heavy use of synthetic chemical fertilizer, replacement of human and animal labor with machinery, use of artificial irrigation, and consolidation of small farms into very large ones.
Each aspect is—and I think this is putting it charitably—a double-edged sword. Using "high-yield seeds" is a polite way of talking about monoculture farming, with an attendant reduction in biological diversity, damage to soil, pest and disease problems necessitating synthetic pesticides and herbicides, and possible long-term deleterious effects on humans from eating a monoculture diet. Synthetic fertilizers are great for improving crop yields, but aside from the obvious sustainability problems of "eating" fossil fuels as human food, it also contributes to water pollution and hides the damage done to soils which have lost their ability to naturally fix nitrogen. There are similar downsides to the other aspects of the Green Revolution technology package, including over-reliance on "fossil water" for irrigation, loss of traditional / locally-evolved agricultural knowledge and practices, and literal alienation of human populations from food production occupations and the land they may have worked since time immemorial.
All of this was the cost of staving off what might have otherwise been a series of unthinkably horrific famines in the 20th century. So go us, I guess.
But all we really did was kick the can down the road. We swapped an immediate unsustainability for a longer-term one.
We've got enough food to go around at the moment, but only because we're burning through fossil fuels and geologic water at a frightening pace. And those things, particularly the former, are causing an ongoing biodiversity collapse that we don't really understand and can't predict the effects of.
I am not at all convinced that ol' Tom Malthus won't have the last laugh at our expense.
But if he does, it won't be because the problem is intractable, but rather because we seem to have a species-wide habit of refusing to acknowledge collective problems until they're too late to usefully mitigate. We know that there is a long-term, steady state, sustainable "carrying capacity" of the planet for some population of humans, with no reliance on artificial nitrogen fixation, fossil fuels, unsustainable water drilling, etc., since we know that humans existed before those things were developed. Exactly what that number is, isn't clear (at least, not to me). But it's not zero. It's certainly not 7+ billion, either.
The development of reliable birth control towards the end of the Industrial Revolution (which we probably could have developed at least a few decades before we actually did, were it not for a couple of wars and a lot of social squeamishness about the topic), had been widely distributed as soon as it became available, might have provided a path back towards a more sustainable population level without megadeath, and probably even without much coercion on an individual level. (It turns out, most people with the ability to do so really only want to have a small number of children, if they want to at all.) But we didn't do that, and the lag of birth control behind lifesaving medical technology produced a demographic boom that rolled across the planet in waves.
So now, we're in a race: do we run hit the end of the fossil-fuel runway before we manage to reverse the population tide? Or can we keep things ticking along for a few more decades, buying time with one unsustainable technological trick after another, crossing our fingers that nothing too important in the biosphere collapses, until access to birth control allows our species to start to reliably control its own reproduction for the first time ever?
There's a lot riding on the outcome of that race. The outcome is very much in doubt.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:08 AM on January 10, 2022 [19 favorites]
I am uncomfortable with the way the "Green Revolution" gets used as a sort of showstopper anti-Malthusian argument in discussions like these. At the very least, it seems very short-sighted.
The "Green Revolution" basically consisted of a package of technologies, including high-yield seeds to replace traditional/heirloom varieties, heavy use of synthetic chemical fertilizer, replacement of human and animal labor with machinery, use of artificial irrigation, and consolidation of small farms into very large ones.
Each aspect is—and I think this is putting it charitably—a double-edged sword. Using "high-yield seeds" is a polite way of talking about monoculture farming, with an attendant reduction in biological diversity, damage to soil, pest and disease problems necessitating synthetic pesticides and herbicides, and possible long-term deleterious effects on humans from eating a monoculture diet. Synthetic fertilizers are great for improving crop yields, but aside from the obvious sustainability problems of "eating" fossil fuels as human food, it also contributes to water pollution and hides the damage done to soils which have lost their ability to naturally fix nitrogen. There are similar downsides to the other aspects of the Green Revolution technology package, including over-reliance on "fossil water" for irrigation, loss of traditional / locally-evolved agricultural knowledge and practices, and literal alienation of human populations from food production occupations and the land they may have worked since time immemorial.
All of this was the cost of staving off what might have otherwise been a series of unthinkably horrific famines in the 20th century. So go us, I guess.
But all we really did was kick the can down the road. We swapped an immediate unsustainability for a longer-term one.
We've got enough food to go around at the moment, but only because we're burning through fossil fuels and geologic water at a frightening pace. And those things, particularly the former, are causing an ongoing biodiversity collapse that we don't really understand and can't predict the effects of.
I am not at all convinced that ol' Tom Malthus won't have the last laugh at our expense.
But if he does, it won't be because the problem is intractable, but rather because we seem to have a species-wide habit of refusing to acknowledge collective problems until they're too late to usefully mitigate. We know that there is a long-term, steady state, sustainable "carrying capacity" of the planet for some population of humans, with no reliance on artificial nitrogen fixation, fossil fuels, unsustainable water drilling, etc., since we know that humans existed before those things were developed. Exactly what that number is, isn't clear (at least, not to me). But it's not zero. It's certainly not 7+ billion, either.
The development of reliable birth control towards the end of the Industrial Revolution (which we probably could have developed at least a few decades before we actually did, were it not for a couple of wars and a lot of social squeamishness about the topic), had been widely distributed as soon as it became available, might have provided a path back towards a more sustainable population level without megadeath, and probably even without much coercion on an individual level. (It turns out, most people with the ability to do so really only want to have a small number of children, if they want to at all.) But we didn't do that, and the lag of birth control behind lifesaving medical technology produced a demographic boom that rolled across the planet in waves.
So now, we're in a race: do we run hit the end of the fossil-fuel runway before we manage to reverse the population tide? Or can we keep things ticking along for a few more decades, buying time with one unsustainable technological trick after another, crossing our fingers that nothing too important in the biosphere collapses, until access to birth control allows our species to start to reliably control its own reproduction for the first time ever?
There's a lot riding on the outcome of that race. The outcome is very much in doubt.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:08 AM on January 10, 2022 [19 favorites]
The author of the book it was based on was a vocal proponent of the "overpopulation" narrative - I hope this has received enough critical analysis not to need to be rehashed here, but it's interesting to note how TFA glosses over its toxic history, subbing in the less inflammatory "overcrowding" at one point...
This is a point on which religious fundamentalists, some techno-billionaires, and the Pope agree. Yet it remains an aesthetic question on how to live, such as whether or not we want a world with personal gardens, open space, drinking fresh water, along with a habitat for billions of animals, including threatened ones like gorillas and polar bears. The alternative is to calculate that the problem is based on human system error, that we only need to ration everything and live by grace of expensive and continuous technological improvement, because we feel it is our duty to see how many people we can fit on the planet (for no apparent reason to anyone who doesn't profit from it). It is also more than an ethical question when we choose to increase anxiety, famine and war danger for future generations, because those happen spontaneously from complexity.
Beyond aesthetics and ethics, someone forgot to tell ecologists about the problem being solved, while they were overwhelmed defending theories of global warming. It should also be noted that the architects of the waning green revolution were explicit in saying we were only buying time, as a short term fertilizer and energy-dependent fix. And there remains the dilemma of technology prolonging life for everyone, amplifying the issue by way of the solution. Proponents of maximum population often suggest the idea of overpopulation was all a sci-fi dystopia or unrealized prophecy, but in fact they lean heavily in improved education and projections that take into account people reacting to the pressure, then suggest it is proof there are no worries except pollution and poverty and uneven distributions that lag behind their laissez-faire suggestions. That's having their cake and eating it to. They do nothing to discourage population, then pin the fears on a few people who proposed radical solutions, and then say we instead need to innovate in overdrive by way of sci-fi technology to keep up with the problem.
posted by Brian B. at 10:12 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
This is a point on which religious fundamentalists, some techno-billionaires, and the Pope agree. Yet it remains an aesthetic question on how to live, such as whether or not we want a world with personal gardens, open space, drinking fresh water, along with a habitat for billions of animals, including threatened ones like gorillas and polar bears. The alternative is to calculate that the problem is based on human system error, that we only need to ration everything and live by grace of expensive and continuous technological improvement, because we feel it is our duty to see how many people we can fit on the planet (for no apparent reason to anyone who doesn't profit from it). It is also more than an ethical question when we choose to increase anxiety, famine and war danger for future generations, because those happen spontaneously from complexity.
Beyond aesthetics and ethics, someone forgot to tell ecologists about the problem being solved, while they were overwhelmed defending theories of global warming. It should also be noted that the architects of the waning green revolution were explicit in saying we were only buying time, as a short term fertilizer and energy-dependent fix. And there remains the dilemma of technology prolonging life for everyone, amplifying the issue by way of the solution. Proponents of maximum population often suggest the idea of overpopulation was all a sci-fi dystopia or unrealized prophecy, but in fact they lean heavily in improved education and projections that take into account people reacting to the pressure, then suggest it is proof there are no worries except pollution and poverty and uneven distributions that lag behind their laissez-faire suggestions. That's having their cake and eating it to. They do nothing to discourage population, then pin the fears on a few people who proposed radical solutions, and then say we instead need to innovate in overdrive by way of sci-fi technology to keep up with the problem.
posted by Brian B. at 10:12 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
Halloween Jack: "It's interesting to revisit Star Trek (TOS) and see how its real innovation is blending the giddy optimism of the early 60s American space race with some of the concerns that were popping up later in the decade; "The Mark of Gideon" is its overpopulation episode, and very effective and haunting in its own way."
"The Trouble With Tribbles," you mean
posted by chavenet at 10:32 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
"The Trouble With Tribbles," you mean
posted by chavenet at 10:32 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
I am not at all convinced that ol' Tom Malthus won't have the last laugh at our expense.
I think this is essentially right. The argument didn't play out quite as Malthus set it out (with exponential population growth outstripping linear resource growth) but population growth has been immense, and the technology (and capitalist economy) which has allowed resource growth to keep pace has in fact resulted in generalized pollution, strip-mining the planet, cutting down the forests, burning fossil fuels, trashing the planet with plastics, destructive agricultural practices, destroying biomes, destroying aquifers, species extinction, and so on.
Certainly ancient civilizations faced catastrophe after overusing their resource bases, perhaps with the help of resulting local climate change. But can anyone seriously doubt that the current crisis of technological society wouldn't be far more manageable if the world population weren't less than 1 billion rather than approaching 10 billion? The reductions in birthrates are coming far too late, and the realization of the oncoming fiasco also seemingly too late to effect the required revolutions in human culture and society.
posted by lathrop at 10:40 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
I think this is essentially right. The argument didn't play out quite as Malthus set it out (with exponential population growth outstripping linear resource growth) but population growth has been immense, and the technology (and capitalist economy) which has allowed resource growth to keep pace has in fact resulted in generalized pollution, strip-mining the planet, cutting down the forests, burning fossil fuels, trashing the planet with plastics, destructive agricultural practices, destroying biomes, destroying aquifers, species extinction, and so on.
Certainly ancient civilizations faced catastrophe after overusing their resource bases, perhaps with the help of resulting local climate change. But can anyone seriously doubt that the current crisis of technological society wouldn't be far more manageable if the world population weren't less than 1 billion rather than approaching 10 billion? The reductions in birthrates are coming far too late, and the realization of the oncoming fiasco also seemingly too late to effect the required revolutions in human culture and society.
posted by lathrop at 10:40 AM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
"The Trouble With Tribbles," you mean
...in which the MacGuffin is a shipment of high-yield grain.
posted by Gelatin at 10:44 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
...in which the MacGuffin is a shipment of high-yield grain.
posted by Gelatin at 10:44 AM on January 10, 2022 [6 favorites]
The dystopian SF wave largely abandoned the space opera trappings in favor of more serious speculation, and while some of it was quite good ... some of it just swapped one set of tropes for another
For example, rape and sex slavery. In Soylent Green, the 'hero' leads the 'furniture' into the bedroom as an entitlement of the situation. Rollerball has a sex slavery theme that very similarly isn't portrayed as a reason to dislike the hero. If there isn't an essay out there somewhere (the closest thing I can find is a 2001 sociology doctoral thesis) discussing sexual malevolence in A Boy and His Dog, Zardoz, No Blade of Grass, A Clockwork Orange, Death Race 2000, etc. as a general feature of 70s film dystopias, I'd suppose it's because it's obvious and not fun to contemplate, but the fact that they are dystopias doesn't explain why they have this particular dystopian trait in common. I suspect it was a convergence in cultural trends: the overall dystopian sexism of the 70s, the introduction of a voluntary movie rating system / first "R" rating in 1968, the prevalence of male writers/directors who handle the topic with less consideration than crime films directed by women around the same time, an implicit you-don't-know-how-good-you-have-it message to women at a moment when second wave feminism was becoming mainstream, etc. Anyway, if we look at Soylent Green as an allegory for 1973 instead of a prediction about 2022, it got even more 'right' about an average white guy's perspective: the hero feels entitled to the use of women for sex, he thinks cops are the good guys, he's irritated by crowds of poor people getting handouts, his world romanticizes a lost connection to 'nature' only shown on TV screens, and ultimately his biggest concern is processed foods.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:46 AM on January 10, 2022 [12 favorites]
For example, rape and sex slavery. In Soylent Green, the 'hero' leads the 'furniture' into the bedroom as an entitlement of the situation. Rollerball has a sex slavery theme that very similarly isn't portrayed as a reason to dislike the hero. If there isn't an essay out there somewhere (the closest thing I can find is a 2001 sociology doctoral thesis) discussing sexual malevolence in A Boy and His Dog, Zardoz, No Blade of Grass, A Clockwork Orange, Death Race 2000, etc. as a general feature of 70s film dystopias, I'd suppose it's because it's obvious and not fun to contemplate, but the fact that they are dystopias doesn't explain why they have this particular dystopian trait in common. I suspect it was a convergence in cultural trends: the overall dystopian sexism of the 70s, the introduction of a voluntary movie rating system / first "R" rating in 1968, the prevalence of male writers/directors who handle the topic with less consideration than crime films directed by women around the same time, an implicit you-don't-know-how-good-you-have-it message to women at a moment when second wave feminism was becoming mainstream, etc. Anyway, if we look at Soylent Green as an allegory for 1973 instead of a prediction about 2022, it got even more 'right' about an average white guy's perspective: the hero feels entitled to the use of women for sex, he thinks cops are the good guys, he's irritated by crowds of poor people getting handouts, his world romanticizes a lost connection to 'nature' only shown on TV screens, and ultimately his biggest concern is processed foods.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:46 AM on January 10, 2022 [12 favorites]
So now, we're in a race: do we run hit the end of the fossil-fuel runway before we manage to reverse the population tide?
Kadin2048
Except we're not. The "population tide" has reversed. Population projections today show that growth is slowing and will likely stop or even decline by the end of the century.
Proponents of maximum population often suggest the idea of overpopulation was all a sci-fi dystopia or unrealized prophecy...They do nothing to discourage population
Brian B.
"Proponents of maximum population"? What are you even talking about? We don't need to "discourage population" or...okay, you mean eugenics, just say eugenics.
Malthus is, was, and always will be wrong, and it's creepy to see him revived here. People aren't just baby machines having the maxim number of possible kids to consume available resources. We know this as an observable, actual fact. People have kids in reaction to their economic and social situations. We know for a fact that when kids aren't as useful or are more expensive to have, people have less kids.
We don't need "radical solutions" or shiny new tech toys, we already know the solutions to reducing population growth: education, reproductive rights for women, reduction of poverty, etc. That's all it takes. Those are the solutions so radical that many people prefer to turn to dystopian repression or far-out scifi instead.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:47 AM on January 10, 2022 [11 favorites]
Kadin2048
Except we're not. The "population tide" has reversed. Population projections today show that growth is slowing and will likely stop or even decline by the end of the century.
Proponents of maximum population often suggest the idea of overpopulation was all a sci-fi dystopia or unrealized prophecy...They do nothing to discourage population
Brian B.
"Proponents of maximum population"? What are you even talking about? We don't need to "discourage population" or...okay, you mean eugenics, just say eugenics.
Malthus is, was, and always will be wrong, and it's creepy to see him revived here. People aren't just baby machines having the maxim number of possible kids to consume available resources. We know this as an observable, actual fact. People have kids in reaction to their economic and social situations. We know for a fact that when kids aren't as useful or are more expensive to have, people have less kids.
We don't need "radical solutions" or shiny new tech toys, we already know the solutions to reducing population growth: education, reproductive rights for women, reduction of poverty, etc. That's all it takes. Those are the solutions so radical that many people prefer to turn to dystopian repression or far-out scifi instead.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:47 AM on January 10, 2022 [11 favorites]
The "population tide" has reversed. Population projections today show that growth is slowing and will likely stop or even decline by the end of the century.
Then the population tide certainly hasn't reversed, has it? It's still going up, right now. And in fact the rate of increase is very close to an all-time high.
It is projected that the human population may "nearly stop growing" somewhere around 2100. And if that is true—which seems like a pretty big "if", given the stakes—the tide would actually reverse, globally, sometime in the 22nd century. And it would do so, only after hitting a high-water mark in excess of 10 billion people, a significant increase from today.
That does not look like a solved problem to me.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:16 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
Then the population tide certainly hasn't reversed, has it? It's still going up, right now. And in fact the rate of increase is very close to an all-time high.
It is projected that the human population may "nearly stop growing" somewhere around 2100. And if that is true—which seems like a pretty big "if", given the stakes—the tide would actually reverse, globally, sometime in the 22nd century. And it would do so, only after hitting a high-water mark in excess of 10 billion people, a significant increase from today.
That does not look like a solved problem to me.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:16 AM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]
Malthus is, was, and always will be wrong, and it's creepy to see him revived here.
JFC. With all the old innuendo (not-Catholic, here, bullshit ad personam though the insinuation is), and tired catchphrases (been waiting decades for that “obvious” carrying capacity figure to be calculated, what’s taking y’all?). Are we just doing reruns now, or what? Pfff
posted by progosk at 11:22 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
JFC. With all the old innuendo (not-Catholic, here, bullshit ad personam though the insinuation is), and tired catchphrases (been waiting decades for that “obvious” carrying capacity figure to be calculated, what’s taking y’all?). Are we just doing reruns now, or what? Pfff
posted by progosk at 11:22 AM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
Me either, but it's the 'kill living me to make me meat' part that I'd find problematic.
A lot of this is perspective. As a person who's been ill and in pain most of my life, under the American "healthcare" "system," who's watched relatives die slow, painful deaths like the one I have every reason to believe I will have someday... if I could have a beautiful death like the one Sol has in the movie PLUS know that my remains will be useful to those left behind? Yeah, I'd probably vote for Governor Santini.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:42 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
A lot of this is perspective. As a person who's been ill and in pain most of my life, under the American "healthcare" "system," who's watched relatives die slow, painful deaths like the one I have every reason to believe I will have someday... if I could have a beautiful death like the one Sol has in the movie PLUS know that my remains will be useful to those left behind? Yeah, I'd probably vote for Governor Santini.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:42 AM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
Most people would take exception towards having to eat other people- at the very least, they wouldn't enjoy the resulting prion diseases.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:44 AM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Apocryphon at 11:44 AM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
for sheer horror, I always found that part in The Road.. those captives locked in the cellar, awaiting slaughter.. to be about as bad as I'd like to imagine
posted by elkevelvet at 11:46 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by elkevelvet at 11:46 AM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
I took it as read that the processing of the human remains into the green wafers removed the health risks that would be associated with simple morgue-to-table cannibalism, but it's possible that I assumed too much.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:00 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:00 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
Cannibalism doesn't really solve any long term food shortages. You're still not bringing more energy into the system.
posted by octothorpe at 12:46 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 12:46 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think that was kind of the point, though? So many traditional resources had been used up that they were desperate for anything (short of rich people sharing) to stave off the problem, if only temporarily.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:31 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:31 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
Oh good! An excuse to talk about Mark of Gideon.
When I was a Star Trek obsessed kid, I considered this the worst episode of Star Trek. (Not Spock’s Brain, not And The Children Shall Lead, not Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. This one.)
But older now, it’s more effective than I gave it credit for. Despite the question that’s not answered (How do they have room and knowledge to create a replica Enterprise?) the idea of introducing a new disease is solid. And the few scenes of overpopulation are eerily effective.
Sorry for the derail.
posted by wittgenstein at 2:46 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
When I was a Star Trek obsessed kid, I considered this the worst episode of Star Trek. (Not Spock’s Brain, not And The Children Shall Lead, not Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. This one.)
But older now, it’s more effective than I gave it credit for. Despite the question that’s not answered (How do they have room and knowledge to create a replica Enterprise?) the idea of introducing a new disease is solid. And the few scenes of overpopulation are eerily effective.
Sorry for the derail.
posted by wittgenstein at 2:46 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
I am not at all convinced that ol' Tom Malthus won't have the last laugh at our expense.
This is the kind of position that's always right even if it never comes to pass. Because it always depends on extrapolating upon what is being done wrong now, and assuming things will not change. Therefore: catastrophe. In that sense, he is right. Almost no practice from his time would sustain humanity, 50, 100, or almost 200 years after his death. Just like hunter gatherer societies of many millennia before he was born couldn't sustain the population of his day.
Things may actually change, and his conclusion is just kicked down the road, saved for a rainy day. Or you can say he's just wrong. Because he was, in very key areas regarding population growth. There is no Malthusian explanation for today's population, and it's enjoying the highest standard of living for the greatest amount of people than in the history of the world.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:27 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
This is the kind of position that's always right even if it never comes to pass. Because it always depends on extrapolating upon what is being done wrong now, and assuming things will not change. Therefore: catastrophe. In that sense, he is right. Almost no practice from his time would sustain humanity, 50, 100, or almost 200 years after his death. Just like hunter gatherer societies of many millennia before he was born couldn't sustain the population of his day.
Things may actually change, and his conclusion is just kicked down the road, saved for a rainy day. Or you can say he's just wrong. Because he was, in very key areas regarding population growth. There is no Malthusian explanation for today's population, and it's enjoying the highest standard of living for the greatest amount of people than in the history of the world.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:27 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
I haven't seen the film, only read the book, which is one of the more depressing things I've ever read. Having read the book, and that the darkest, worst possible out come is spelled out by the blind preacher saying "You mean we have to keep living like this?" imprinted on Young Ghidorah pretty strongly.
After that, the idea of Soylent Green is people just sort of seemed tame by comparison to the world Harrison created, with nuclear submarines are converted to catch krill for subsistence level foodstuffs.
Of the group of speculative fiction writers reacting (or overreacting) to The Population Bomb, though, I'd still argue John Brunner was the most eerily prescient with aspects of "the way we live now" that seem torn directly from his novels. The Sheep Look Up almost seems like a historical text of things we've already passed by, and meanwhile America seems to be the setting for Jagged Orbit. From Stand on Zanzibar, we've got our utterly shattered span of attention to go along with, sadly, muckers, and their random acts of mass murder and brutal violence.
And, of course, me sitting here typing this on the internet feels like it came from a page in Shockwave Rider. I'm convinced Brunner had a time machine, and was just writing dispatches from the future.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:39 PM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]
After that, the idea of Soylent Green is people just sort of seemed tame by comparison to the world Harrison created, with nuclear submarines are converted to catch krill for subsistence level foodstuffs.
Of the group of speculative fiction writers reacting (or overreacting) to The Population Bomb, though, I'd still argue John Brunner was the most eerily prescient with aspects of "the way we live now" that seem torn directly from his novels. The Sheep Look Up almost seems like a historical text of things we've already passed by, and meanwhile America seems to be the setting for Jagged Orbit. From Stand on Zanzibar, we've got our utterly shattered span of attention to go along with, sadly, muckers, and their random acts of mass murder and brutal violence.
And, of course, me sitting here typing this on the internet feels like it came from a page in Shockwave Rider. I'm convinced Brunner had a time machine, and was just writing dispatches from the future.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:39 PM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]
Seems a bit premature and a bit myopic to declare victory; Malthus only seems to be wrong if you zoom right in on the Industrial Revolution and try to ignore the much longer span of history leading up to it. (Also, we should factor in a significant selection bias: by virtue of being here today, we are by definition the descendants of a long chain of very lucky humans and proto-humans, the ones who didn't starve to death before getting laid. Our ancestors may never have been on the wrong side of that coin toss, but it doesn't mean we're going to be so lucky ourselves.)
It's not like famines were historically rare or anything. For the great bulk of its history, the human species has lived with its population locally bounded by resource availability, basically pegged at the Malthusian limit. For most people, living at most times: if there were a couple of bad harvest seasons in a row, you were very likely looking at starvation (and if not that, then migration and hoping you could find somewhere better). That's the default scenario, under which most humans and proto-humans have lived.
Since somewhere around 1800, the population has been growing at rate that probably only has historic precedents where humans moved into previously-uninhabited regions for the first time. And it's not like the underlying reason is a mystery: we discovered fossil fuels and then artificial nitrogen fixation on one hand, and we eliminated most of the major causes of infant mortality, on the other. Great stuff! Except we now know the fossil fuel party is definitely going to stop in the not-too-distant future. (Hopefully that won't also mean the end of modern medicine.)
Even if we manage to solve the immediate problem of fossil fuels being used to boost food production (which seems like an unsafe assumption, but we'll be optimists for a moment), if nothing else changes we just buy some more time—not much, really, in the scheme of things—until we hit another resource constraint. (Maybe clean water, maybe temperate arable land, maybe lithium or something else unpredictable.) Then we just find ourselves in a Malthusian trap that's larger, but still fundamentally the same trap. And the behavior of humans in resource-constrained conditions is generally not pleasant.
This is why I think the scientific understanding of human reproduction, and the development of reliable birth control, is possibly one of the most significant developments of human civilization. Up there with agriculture, at least. As a result, our era has the opportunity—unique, as far as I know—to consciously reduce our population without resorting to killing each other. We could have, if we really took advantage, a global society where the steady-state population wasn't hard-up against a Malthusian maximum. (And might be subjectively a nice place to live, even for someone who grew up in the crazy unconstrained-growth funtimes of the 20th century.)
It would be really unfortunate if, having produced this potential game-changer, our civilization collapsed before we could really make complete use of it. I mean, that'd be an embarrassing epitaph for the Holocene: "they almost pulled it off, but in the end, lol no".
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:50 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
It's not like famines were historically rare or anything. For the great bulk of its history, the human species has lived with its population locally bounded by resource availability, basically pegged at the Malthusian limit. For most people, living at most times: if there were a couple of bad harvest seasons in a row, you were very likely looking at starvation (and if not that, then migration and hoping you could find somewhere better). That's the default scenario, under which most humans and proto-humans have lived.
Since somewhere around 1800, the population has been growing at rate that probably only has historic precedents where humans moved into previously-uninhabited regions for the first time. And it's not like the underlying reason is a mystery: we discovered fossil fuels and then artificial nitrogen fixation on one hand, and we eliminated most of the major causes of infant mortality, on the other. Great stuff! Except we now know the fossil fuel party is definitely going to stop in the not-too-distant future. (Hopefully that won't also mean the end of modern medicine.)
Even if we manage to solve the immediate problem of fossil fuels being used to boost food production (which seems like an unsafe assumption, but we'll be optimists for a moment), if nothing else changes we just buy some more time—not much, really, in the scheme of things—until we hit another resource constraint. (Maybe clean water, maybe temperate arable land, maybe lithium or something else unpredictable.) Then we just find ourselves in a Malthusian trap that's larger, but still fundamentally the same trap. And the behavior of humans in resource-constrained conditions is generally not pleasant.
This is why I think the scientific understanding of human reproduction, and the development of reliable birth control, is possibly one of the most significant developments of human civilization. Up there with agriculture, at least. As a result, our era has the opportunity—unique, as far as I know—to consciously reduce our population without resorting to killing each other. We could have, if we really took advantage, a global society where the steady-state population wasn't hard-up against a Malthusian maximum. (And might be subjectively a nice place to live, even for someone who grew up in the crazy unconstrained-growth funtimes of the 20th century.)
It would be really unfortunate if, having produced this potential game-changer, our civilization collapsed before we could really make complete use of it. I mean, that'd be an embarrassing epitaph for the Holocene: "they almost pulled it off, but in the end, lol no".
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:50 PM on January 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
Ghidorah: I was a Summer of Love fella, and continued to hold onto every tie-dyed fraying denim-edged thread of that world view even unto the Nixonian Darkness. Reading Brunner was my anti-psychotic, leaving me oh so VERY unhappy but, in retrospect, not cynical, in which way too many of confreres indulged themselves.
posted by Chitownfats at 11:55 PM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Chitownfats at 11:55 PM on January 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
Yes. I heard Robert Evans - a journalist I greatly respect - make a similar statement in a Behind The Bastards episode I listened to recently:
I wanted to throw my phone across the room. Dude, really? Can you name a single large, modern complex society that has ever voluntarily redistributed its resources en mass to the global poor?
It's simply never happened. Remove the "voluntary" and "global" conditions and you can find a lot of local matches, and accompanying mass death.
In the meantime, we have safe, 98% effective birth control, which has been repeatedly shown to effectively reduce or maintain population sizes. Between the two solutions - one that's proven, and another that's never happened in human history - I know which one I'd place bets on.
Furthermore, capitalism depends on constant growth. It's the reason countries with declining birth rates, sustained senescence and low immigration are utterly panicked: they need positive population growth in order to maintain traditional economic metrics. I wish Evans and others who broadly promote "de-growth" (as I do) would understand that in order to be effective the policy needs to be applied to us as well as our economic systems.
We're already well past population overshoot, and have been since before I was born. Estimates vary, but the human population using modern technology required to keep Earth's ecological systems in balance is anywhere from 100 million to 1 billion people. Anything over that and we're eating our home and making species extinct, just as a consequence of being alive.
I get it: the left has an issue with population control due to its association with the right, racists, and authoritarians. But to me this is an argument from antiquity: "bad people with bad intentions tried to act on X in the past, therefore X is bad". X itself - the need to limit population growth - isn't actually debated, other than with hand-wavey statements like Robert Evan's.
Anyway. Solyent Green. Good movie, more people should see it.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 12:42 AM on January 11, 2022 [3 favorites]
It's not overpopulation that's the problem, it's the unequal distribution of resources that's the issue.
I wanted to throw my phone across the room. Dude, really? Can you name a single large, modern complex society that has ever voluntarily redistributed its resources en mass to the global poor?
It's simply never happened. Remove the "voluntary" and "global" conditions and you can find a lot of local matches, and accompanying mass death.
In the meantime, we have safe, 98% effective birth control, which has been repeatedly shown to effectively reduce or maintain population sizes. Between the two solutions - one that's proven, and another that's never happened in human history - I know which one I'd place bets on.
Furthermore, capitalism depends on constant growth. It's the reason countries with declining birth rates, sustained senescence and low immigration are utterly panicked: they need positive population growth in order to maintain traditional economic metrics. I wish Evans and others who broadly promote "de-growth" (as I do) would understand that in order to be effective the policy needs to be applied to us as well as our economic systems.
We're already well past population overshoot, and have been since before I was born. Estimates vary, but the human population using modern technology required to keep Earth's ecological systems in balance is anywhere from 100 million to 1 billion people. Anything over that and we're eating our home and making species extinct, just as a consequence of being alive.
I get it: the left has an issue with population control due to its association with the right, racists, and authoritarians. But to me this is an argument from antiquity: "bad people with bad intentions tried to act on X in the past, therefore X is bad". X itself - the need to limit population growth - isn't actually debated, other than with hand-wavey statements like Robert Evan's.
Anyway. Solyent Green. Good movie, more people should see it.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 12:42 AM on January 11, 2022 [3 favorites]
I get it: the left has an issue
Yeah, by that very token, I'm not sure you do, though.
It's not a question of stain by association, it's that this type of technical discussion of "birth control" always, ALWAYS, comes down to implicit/unspoken beliefs about who gets to choose who gets "controlled", and how. And the way that cookie crumbles is that - whaddaya know: it's all those the wrong people "choosing" "uncontrolled" lives! (Sorry about all the inverted commas, but it's a known rhethorical minefield.)
The facts do not support your convictions on this. The only evidentially supported and equitable "strategy" that has made any dent in population numbers anywhere is supporting autonomy, education and empowerment of (young) women. If you're hitching your cart (be it degrowth or whichever) to this wagon, great - but why is this never, ever the focus of your rhethoric?
It's a sign of the times we're back discussing old "Malthusian maximum" tropes ("Estimates vary...", Kadin2048? Cite one peer-reviewed number that has held up to scrutiny, ever. You know you can't, because there is none.), decades on from Ehrlich & Co., a kind of "neutral calculus" approach that hopes to elide the iniquity it embodies. Hopefully, the rest of the world has by now figured out what's really the root and aim of this kind of thinking: "we got ours, fuck yours". Yeah, no, sorry.
posted by progosk at 5:57 AM on January 11, 2022 [3 favorites]
Yeah, by that very token, I'm not sure you do, though.
It's not a question of stain by association, it's that this type of technical discussion of "birth control" always, ALWAYS, comes down to implicit/unspoken beliefs about who gets to choose who gets "controlled", and how. And the way that cookie crumbles is that - whaddaya know: it's all those the wrong people "choosing" "uncontrolled" lives! (Sorry about all the inverted commas, but it's a known rhethorical minefield.)
The facts do not support your convictions on this. The only evidentially supported and equitable "strategy" that has made any dent in population numbers anywhere is supporting autonomy, education and empowerment of (young) women. If you're hitching your cart (be it degrowth or whichever) to this wagon, great - but why is this never, ever the focus of your rhethoric?
It's a sign of the times we're back discussing old "Malthusian maximum" tropes ("Estimates vary...", Kadin2048? Cite one peer-reviewed number that has held up to scrutiny, ever. You know you can't, because there is none.), decades on from Ehrlich & Co., a kind of "neutral calculus" approach that hopes to elide the iniquity it embodies. Hopefully, the rest of the world has by now figured out what's really the root and aim of this kind of thinking: "we got ours, fuck yours". Yeah, no, sorry.
posted by progosk at 5:57 AM on January 11, 2022 [3 favorites]
"Estimates vary...", Kadin2048?
oops sorry, confusing Malthusians there, my bad.
posted by progosk at 6:06 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
oops sorry, confusing Malthusians there, my bad.
posted by progosk at 6:06 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think it's the first movie to feature an arcade game.
I saw it in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, many years ago. It wasn't operational, however; and I don't know if they still have it.
posted by Rash at 9:24 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
I saw it in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, many years ago. It wasn't operational, however; and I don't know if they still have it.
posted by Rash at 9:24 AM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]
The author of the book it was based on was a vocal proponent of the "overpopulation" narrative
Harry Harrison was also a vocal proponent of Esperanto. The Stainless Steel Rat spoke Esperanto and supposedly there was an Esperanto edition of The Stainless Steel Rat is Born.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:40 PM on January 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
Harry Harrison was also a vocal proponent of Esperanto. The Stainless Steel Rat spoke Esperanto and supposedly there was an Esperanto edition of The Stainless Steel Rat is Born.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:40 PM on January 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
The idea that the Earth (or some subset thereof) has a finite "Malthusian limit", or "carrying capacity", or whatever you want to term it, doesn't seem especially controversial. (I mean, the existence of a limit seems obvious—at some point, things get all Stand on Zanzibar and you run out of room—and with that settled, we're just haggling on the price. But the price is important.)
The seminal work seems to be De Wit, from 1967: Photosynthesis: its relationship to overpopulation. I can't find the text of it online–onscihub–cough, unfortunately. But based on quotations, it's a high-upper-bound "Daisyworld" scenario, where the earth's landmass is completely devoted to high-efficiency monoculture farms and we eat nutrient paste. (And, it's sorta implied, have zero other problems except that of converting enough sunlight to food to feed ourselves.) With this sort of paperclip-maximizer reasoning, you get an upper bound of about 1T people on Earth. Though that drops quite precipitously to 146B if you let everyone have some space for "urban and recreational needs", and down to around 30B if you don't want to clearcut the planet's forests. (Franck et al (2011), who quote De Wit pretty extensively, call this the "extreme Genghis-Khan-scenario", although their description as "a situation where humankind can only vegetate" doesn't sound very Khan to me.)
Anyway, that's the upper bound. Everything we might want to add to human society besides "vegetating" (pleasant as that sounded a few years ago) results in that number decreasing.
Another frequently-cited estimate is in Population Growth and Earth's Human Carrying Capacity (PDF), which takes a statistical approach, building on the more-naive models of Malthus and Condorcet. (See p.343 eq. 5 if you want to play along at home.) The key to the model is the so-called "Condorcet parameter", which represents the impact—positive or negative—that the average person has on the system's overall carrying capacity. (Someone who spends their life digging irrigation ditches probably has a Condorcet parameter 1+; someone like this shitbag is plumbing the depths of small values.) They then suggest that, rather than a fixed value, "[i]f an additional person can increase human carrying capacity by an amount that depends on the resources available to make her hands productive, and if these resources must be shared among more people as the population increases, then the constant c should be replaced by a variable c(t) that declines as population size increases."
This strikes me as a lot of "what if common sense, but with math", since it seems unsurprising that it takes progressively more effort to squeeze additional efficiency out of a steady-state system, but it does produce some nice charts. You basically get two sigmoid curves, one representing carrying capacity and the other representing population. Fig 4 shows what you get if you align the population curve to that of the Earth's over the last two thousand years, and they start to look pretty close—meaning back into a resource-limited state of affairs—somewhere in the neighborhood of 13B people. This is, intriguingly, not all that far off from the estimate given by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (yeah, the microscope guy) in 1679, which used the novel "Planet Holland" model to come to an estimated maximum also ~13B.
Anyway, I haven't read it, but apparently the author of Population Growth liked the topic so much he wrote an entire book on the subject in 1995 called How Many People Can the Earth Support? where he basically compiled all the various methodologies and estimates that various people have made over the years. The tl;dr, looking through the data, seems to be that most reasonably-made estimates are clustered in the neighborhood of 4 to 16 billion.
From a systems engineering perspective, it seems like a poor idea to intentionally run the planet at 75+% of redline if we can possibly avoid it, given that the consequences of systemic failure look pretty dire. From a perspective that looks at human organizations, getting closer to the planet's carrying capacity seems to give us less time to respond to and mitigate external shocks (volcanoes, magnetic pole reversals, the odd errant space rock, whatever) on the ecosystem. And from a quality-of-life perspective, I think J.S. Mill summed things up well in 1848:
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:49 PM on January 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
The seminal work seems to be De Wit, from 1967: Photosynthesis: its relationship to overpopulation. I can't find the text of it online–onscihub–cough, unfortunately. But based on quotations, it's a high-upper-bound "Daisyworld" scenario, where the earth's landmass is completely devoted to high-efficiency monoculture farms and we eat nutrient paste. (And, it's sorta implied, have zero other problems except that of converting enough sunlight to food to feed ourselves.) With this sort of paperclip-maximizer reasoning, you get an upper bound of about 1T people on Earth. Though that drops quite precipitously to 146B if you let everyone have some space for "urban and recreational needs", and down to around 30B if you don't want to clearcut the planet's forests. (Franck et al (2011), who quote De Wit pretty extensively, call this the "extreme Genghis-Khan-scenario", although their description as "a situation where humankind can only vegetate" doesn't sound very Khan to me.)
Anyway, that's the upper bound. Everything we might want to add to human society besides "vegetating" (pleasant as that sounded a few years ago) results in that number decreasing.
Another frequently-cited estimate is in Population Growth and Earth's Human Carrying Capacity (PDF), which takes a statistical approach, building on the more-naive models of Malthus and Condorcet. (See p.343 eq. 5 if you want to play along at home.) The key to the model is the so-called "Condorcet parameter", which represents the impact—positive or negative—that the average person has on the system's overall carrying capacity. (Someone who spends their life digging irrigation ditches probably has a Condorcet parameter 1+; someone like this shitbag is plumbing the depths of small values.) They then suggest that, rather than a fixed value, "[i]f an additional person can increase human carrying capacity by an amount that depends on the resources available to make her hands productive, and if these resources must be shared among more people as the population increases, then the constant c should be replaced by a variable c(t) that declines as population size increases."
This strikes me as a lot of "what if common sense, but with math", since it seems unsurprising that it takes progressively more effort to squeeze additional efficiency out of a steady-state system, but it does produce some nice charts. You basically get two sigmoid curves, one representing carrying capacity and the other representing population. Fig 4 shows what you get if you align the population curve to that of the Earth's over the last two thousand years, and they start to look pretty close—meaning back into a resource-limited state of affairs—somewhere in the neighborhood of 13B people. This is, intriguingly, not all that far off from the estimate given by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (yeah, the microscope guy) in 1679, which used the novel "Planet Holland" model to come to an estimated maximum also ~13B.
Anyway, I haven't read it, but apparently the author of Population Growth liked the topic so much he wrote an entire book on the subject in 1995 called How Many People Can the Earth Support? where he basically compiled all the various methodologies and estimates that various people have made over the years. The tl;dr, looking through the data, seems to be that most reasonably-made estimates are clustered in the neighborhood of 4 to 16 billion.
From a systems engineering perspective, it seems like a poor idea to intentionally run the planet at 75+% of redline if we can possibly avoid it, given that the consequences of systemic failure look pretty dire. From a perspective that looks at human organizations, getting closer to the planet's carrying capacity seems to give us less time to respond to and mitigate external shocks (volcanoes, magnetic pole reversals, the odd errant space rock, whatever) on the ecosystem. And from a quality-of-life perspective, I think J.S. Mill summed things up well in 1848:
A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. [...] If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.What Mill didn't know, but we should be celebrating today, is the fact that—based on all available evidence—it doesn't really even look like it takes a lot of coercion to achieve negative replacement rates, either. Given unfettered access to reliable birth control, education, and low infant and childhood mortality, in almost every instance, most gestationally-capable individuals appear to choose to have fewer children than simple resource access (e.g. de Wit's natalist paperclip-maximizers) would suggest.
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:49 PM on January 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
As the most recent study you cite poignantly underlines, theorising about human earth population limits is still at the "academic game" level, despite decades of research, and especially despite multiple panics that have been triggered by those choosing to co-opt the concept. So anyone nowadays jockeying back to "population control" being "obviously" necessary is just engaging in bad (faith) reasoning, and not in anything evidence-based.
The point is - and you seem to be taking steps to come around to this yourself, though you're still loath to name the principal actors of human birth as the actual essential focus of the whole issue - if we are on a side to empower self-determination and autonomy of young women, starting with those most affected by the stratified devastation that colonial industrialisation and empire has caused around the globe for a couple of centuries, then we're on the same team. As should be obvious, on that team there is no place for the chimerical, false flag of "overpopulation".
posted by progosk at 3:48 AM on January 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
The point is - and you seem to be taking steps to come around to this yourself, though you're still loath to name the principal actors of human birth as the actual essential focus of the whole issue - if we are on a side to empower self-determination and autonomy of young women, starting with those most affected by the stratified devastation that colonial industrialisation and empire has caused around the globe for a couple of centuries, then we're on the same team. As should be obvious, on that team there is no place for the chimerical, false flag of "overpopulation".
posted by progosk at 3:48 AM on January 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think progosk has it; we've been very lucky with regards to human nature, and over the last 50 years we've seen in one nation after another that once people hit a moderate level of development, the birth rate levels off at/below the replacement rate. Or to put it another way:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=usa+birth+rate
The people who are still concerned about a population bomb are people who haven't done 5 minutes of research into sustainability. The concern now is A) spreading a moderate level of development to the places in the world that do not have it yet and B) lessening the environmental impact of the population we do have.
posted by Balna Watya at 6:19 AM on January 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=usa+birth+rate
The people who are still concerned about a population bomb are people who haven't done 5 minutes of research into sustainability. The concern now is A) spreading a moderate level of development to the places in the world that do not have it yet and B) lessening the environmental impact of the population we do have.
posted by Balna Watya at 6:19 AM on January 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
The people who are still concerned about a population bomb are people who haven't done 5 minutes of research into sustainability.
I'm seeing a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy here. Apparently the trees, birds, bees, and any other living thing except humans is not being counted. Jared Diamond famously changed the Malthusian equation to consumption instead of population, and likely has a point. (He also blamed population pressure for the Rwandan genocide, describing it as a Malthusian trap.) The problem with arguing about population is that people claim success at high numbers without accounting for the depletion that is coming faster as a result. The common explanation is that something will done to offset it, and in the case of fresh water it means owning and selling it. This results in causing most people to think twice about having too many kids after the fact, but not before then.
posted by Brian B. at 9:48 AM on January 18, 2022
I'm seeing a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy here. Apparently the trees, birds, bees, and any other living thing except humans is not being counted. Jared Diamond famously changed the Malthusian equation to consumption instead of population, and likely has a point. (He also blamed population pressure for the Rwandan genocide, describing it as a Malthusian trap.) The problem with arguing about population is that people claim success at high numbers without accounting for the depletion that is coming faster as a result. The common explanation is that something will done to offset it, and in the case of fresh water it means owning and selling it. This results in causing most people to think twice about having too many kids after the fact, but not before then.
posted by Brian B. at 9:48 AM on January 18, 2022
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posted by progosk at 2:36 AM on January 10, 2022 [10 favorites]