The sad skinsuiting of the environmental movement: turning a blind eye to the effects of unchecked world population growth due to obsession with egalitarianism (Part 1)
Neo-Malthusian overpopulation and the draining of world resources
Humanity is in the midst of what is, by species-historical standards (with modern humans estimated at 300,000-500,000 years old), unprecedentedly radical and fast social, economic, and genetic changes. These ongoing changes are a result of (1) the neolithic agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago after the last glacial age ended (previously discussed here), (2) the industrial revolution starting in the 18th century, and (3) Norman Borlaug’s 20th century Green Revolution.
The Green Revolution is the least popularly understood one. Borlaug dramatically expanded crop yields via genetic crossbreeding and, combined with the widespread use of nitrogen fertilizers (800% increase between 1961 and 2019), parabolically increased the world’s population. Few people know Borlaug’s name, but you should; he is responsible for billions of additional humans on earth.
As Cochran and Harpending wrote in The 10,000 Year Explosion, “natural selection can proceed quite rapidly, and the past consists of long periods of near-stasis (in populations that were well matched to their environments) interspersed with occasional periods of very rapid change.”
Being in the midst of these changes, it is difficult to detach oneself and try to assess the state of the world from a zoomed-out perspective, to see how unique and unusual the situation we find ourselves to be. The previous post on The 10,000 Year Explosion reviewed the genetic changes that are occurring to humans as they continue to adapt to a sedentary, heavy carbohydrate agricultural lifestyle after millions of years as active hunter gatherers eating high protein diets.
This post covers these species-level changes from another angle: the environmental effects caused by this massive population explosion, and whether and to what extent humanity’s population growth and consumption patterns are long-term sustainable. To the extent they are not, what does that mean for the future?
The meaning of “environmentalism”
To set the proper framing let's first discuss what the term “environmentalism” means. There are two uses of the term: the traditional meaning and the modern meaning.
The traditional meaning meant creating a sustainable world for future generations with a focus on clean air, clean water, conservation of natural resources, recycling, long-term protection of animals, biodiversity, etc.
The term was politicized by previous generations into a pro vs. con dialectic: profit-obsessed corporations who willfully disregarded the tragedy of the commons (exemplified by “Club for Growth”-tier Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the Koch Brothers and Mitch McConnell1) versus bleeding-heart hippy conservationists.
The traditional meaning isn’t much in use anymore by the elites, but much of the public is confused by the hidden behind-the-scenes rebranding of the term.
Once the surface layers of feel-good buzzwords and spin are peeled back, the modern meaning is a combination of three ideas. These ideas are as follows:
Limiting CO2 emissions in wealthy countries in the name of “climate change” and “global warming”, in order to redistribute western wealth to browner/blacker communities and third world, low income countries to equalize the quality of life between the two. See here, here, here, here, here and here for examples. Also, this post by
is a great primer on this switch-e-roo. Alex Honnold, an inspiration for his fearless mountain climbing, exemplifies the liberal consensus on this shift in a 2020 Instagram post;Providing justification for an extraordinarily intrusive globohomo control grid where you will have no privacy and your consumption patterns will be monitored and greatly limited, subject to the whims and decisions of your overlords (“you will own nothing and you will be happy”), while
The consumption patterns of the globohomo elite class remain undisturbed.
In other words, “environmentalism” today means the introduction of neoliberal feudalism. It is all about elite control over the masses; to the extent the term today relates to its traditional understanding, those are all now secondary or tertiary considerations. Globohomo and environmental organizations pay lip service to the traditional definition, but their priorities are much more sinister in actual application.
The skin-suiting of environmentalism is a sad thing. Who doesn’t want to create a better world for future generations? But the modern meaning is inherently politicized given the vast majority of people will have much lower qualities of life under neoliberal feudalism.
With that said, let’s review the greatest problem facing traditional environmental sustainability: unchecked, radical population growth.
An overview of humanity’s parabolic population growth
Let’s start by looking at a chart of the world’s population on a species-historical scale:
The 6 billion listed on the chart for 2,000 AD is now 8 billion as of 2022.
Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution, sparked by plentiful and cheap energy in the form of oil, natural gas and coal, has resulted in exponential population growth. Production of the world’s major crops has increased by almost 5x in a 60 year period between 1965-2015:
According to The Atlantic, “In the 1870s—one of the most famous decades in the history of scientific and technological development—142 people per 100,000 died of famine globally. Today’s rate of famine deaths is about 99 percent lower than that of the late 1800s, despite the world’s population being roughly five times larger.”
Under Malthusianism population growth is potentially exponential, but the food supply or other resources is linear, therefore population growth eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. This event is called a Malthusian catastrophe:
A Malthusian catastrophe occurs when population growth outpaces agricultural production, causing famine or war, resulting in poverty and depopulation. Such a catastrophe inevitably has the effect of forcing the population to "correct" back to a lower, more easily sustainable level (quite rapidly, due to the potential severity and unpredictable results of the mitigating factors involved, as compared to the relatively slow time scales and well-understood processes governing unchecked growth or growth affected by preventive checks).
The planet has recently experienced the exponential population growth that Thomas Malthus warned about.
According to The 10,000 Year Explosion, “Malthus himself pointed out that factors other than food shortages can also limit population. Any negative factor that intensifies as population density increases can be the limiting factor - starvation and malnutrition are not the only possibilities. The key is which negative factor shows up at the lowest population density. We believe that the nature of the key limiting factor - which is not necessarily the same in all human populations - can have important effects on human evolution…”
We will review the continued growth trends of the world population below, especially centered in Africa, and then analyze what is very likely going to be the key limiting factor for population growth worldwide in the not-so-distant future: the extreme decline in the world’s natural resources, especially the plentiful natural gas necessary to increase yields via synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, the decline in nutrients in topsoil and the decline of biodiversity, all of which are necessary to keep agricultural yields high. This is Neo-Malthusianism in action.
Will hitting up against a potential key limiting factor of declining natural resources result in war, pestilence, famine as Malthus predicts? Would such shocks occur over a longer or shorter timeframe, and how bad could they potentially be? Consider how interconnected the world is, relying on a just-in-time distribution model with long and complicated worldwide supply chains and almost no on-hand reserves in order to boost “efficiency”, which could amplify the effects of systemic shocks.2 Is the world ready to grapple with long-term trends of declining quality of life?
Elon Musk is concerned in the other direction; he wants unlimited population growth. His reasoning is that the world economy is rooted in a model of “forever growth” and social safety nets are based on blatant ponzi schemes that need ever-increasing populations to sustain them. Faltering population growth could result in an economic death spiral. Musk tweeted:
Regardless, there will always be a Malthusian limit to population growth, and we will reach it, whatever it is.
Rates of global population growth and the problem of Africa exceeding projections
The following are projections for global population growth by Scientific American through 2100, which projects worldwide population topping out a little above 10 billion:
Of global population growth, most of it is currently coming from Africa:
African countries with the highest current total fertility rates are as follows:
See the fertility rates per country organized from most to least here. Whites in western countries all have well sub-replacement TFR (replacement is at 2.1).
Per the below chart, Asian population growth was quite rapid since the 1950s but is close to topping out, which will occur around 2050:
Meanwhile, Africa’s population is expected to triple by 2100. The World Economic Forum expects huge numbers of Africans to then emigrate to richer countries in search of better opportunities:
The expected population growth presents tough but obvious policy-making questions for governments on the continent especially given low human capital development. For its part, the United Nations already predicts that larger populations will make it “harder” for African governments to reduce poverty and hunger or boost local access to standard health and education.
Take Nigeria, which will see nearly 300% rise in its population. It ranked 152 (out of 157 countries) on the World Bank’s first ever Human Capital Index and overtook India as the poverty capital of the world in 2018. The failures of successive governments has also resulted in sustained emigration of Nigeria’s middle-class, typically among its best educated citizens, to Europe and North America, often without the intention of returning.
Yet, it’s a trend that will likely become even more pervasive across the continent as population growth results in more pressure on stretched amenities and infrastructure. More Africans, in search of better economic fortunes, standard of living and education, are expected to pursue opportunities for lives and jobs abroad.
As it turns out, these opportunities are increasingly becoming available as countries with aging and shrinking populations, like Japan, are already looking to plug skill and labour force gaps to sustain their economies by reversing strong anti-immigration policy stances.
Bill Gates personally shares significant responsibility for rapidly expanding African population growth via water, agriculture, vaccine and other initiatives, i.e. see here, here, here. On the surface these are kind and noble gestures, meant to elevate a continent out of poverty and disease — but those gestures are only “kind” so long as that population growth will both slow down/stop like other developing regions, and so long as it is sustainable, i.e. not reliant on large-scale foreign aid forever.
If population growth neither slows down/stops nor becomes sustainable, his surface act of kindness will only result in extraordinary misery down the road — “killing with kindness” — literally.
Is Africa’s growth slowing down? Gates is worried about it: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge,” Gates told reporters in a telephone briefing. “The biggest things are the modern tools of contraception,” Gates said. “If you have those things available then people have more control over being able to space their children.”
But Africans don’t want to use contraceptives. According to a 2021 study, in sub-Saharan Africa, about 80% of young women either use a traditional method or do not use any form of contraception at all.
And Africa’s population growth is not slowing nearly as fast as UN forecasts had predicted:
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are adding people more rapidly than expected, said John Wilmoth, director of the United Nations’ Population Division and a co-author of the paper. The U.N. has been using the new probability model in its most recent projections.
“Fertility levels turn out to be higher today than was expected 10 years ago,” he said. “There’s been a worldwide reduction in fertility, even in sub-Saharan Africa over the last two decades. It’s falling, but slower than expected and more slowly than in other countries in Asia and Latin America.”
Earlier projections “took what happened in other countries, where birth rates came down and applied that across the board,” said Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C. “The big issue is with Africa. It had not gone down very fast.”
So basically it looks like UN, Gates and other elite policies are structured around data projections that are based on the same types of arrogant, faulty assumptions by the “smartest” and “brightest” (utterly politicized) “scientists” that led Al Gore to conclude that the ice caps would be melted by 2013.
What are you going to do, Bill, when African population growth doesn’t slow down enough according to your pie-in-the-sky “models”? What effect will your arrogant megalomania have on the world then? Will you be around to be responsible for the effects of your actions? Is this whole thing just some kind of reckless experiment for you?
Perhaps this wouldn’t be an issue if Africa was self-sustaining. But Africa is utterly reliant on agricultural imports for its survival: it imported $35 billion of food per year in 2020, $55 billion worth in 2022 which is expected to rise to $110 billion by 2025, the cost of which is rapidly rising in a highly inflationary environment.
The result of the Ukraine war on grain exportation to the continent raises the immediate risk of acute food insecurity. Gates is also worried about Africa’s import reliance:
There’s no better example of that than looking at the African continent. Given the cost of labor and the availability of land, Africa should be a net food exporter. But because of low productivity, it’s a net food importer. The urgency of the innovation pipeline comes both from the need to get African productivity up, but also the fact that the closer you are to the equator, the more damaging climate change is for agriculture. And Africa is the last place in the world where you have significant population growth. So it’s a huge challenge.
Some have recently claimed that Gates’s agricultural initiatives in Africa have failed. See here for critiques of Gates Foundation agricultural interventions in Africa.
Failure of Africa’s ability to sustain itself should be viewed in the context of measured African IQs being the lowest in the world:
Gates acknowledges sub-Sahara Africa’s low average IQs, which he states is entirely due to disease and poverty: "The average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa is about 82," Gates said, "and that's nothing to do with genetics or race or anything like that -- that's disease and that's what disease does to you, and that's why these things are such an extreme poverty trap."
But IQ is highly heritable, the science of which is overwhelming:
Also see the famous book The Bell Curve, which discusses consistent and sustained IQ differences between population groups and how measurable IQ is the best predictor we have for an individual’s success in the modern world. And see IQ and the Wealth of Nations and its follow up IQ and Global Inequality (you can see how politicized globohomo has made scientific findings based on how transparently biased the Wiki links are).
Gates and the rest of the globohomo elite are basing their policies on blindly religious egalitarianism, tabula rasa “blank slate-ism”, which traces its roots back to Pauline Christianty (regardless of whether its proponents claim to be secular or atheist). Under this perspective all human group IQ differences, to the extent they exist, are due entirely due to poverty, racism and environmental reasons and not genetics, and they have based all of their modeling and policies around this religious belief.
Which brings us to another point: the complete devastation and destruction that African population growth (and the rapid removal of colonialism) has had on the native plants and animals of Africa.
The below video is a two hour famous documentary called Africa Addio. Read the Wiki entry. It’s a really special film; the filmmakers raced around Africa in a gonzo style as colonialism was ending and documented the complete chaos and destruction that the European withdrawal left in its wake, including huge massacres and destruction of wildlife. The filmmakers were almost murdered during filming; you would never see anything like this made today. It shows a side of Africa and the end of colonialism that you will have never seen or heard elsewhere. If you have the time, I give it my highest recommendation (but brace yourself for some extreme horrors):
Let’s sum this section up. The worldwide population is set to expand from 8 billion today (from 2.5 billion in the 1950s) to over 10 billion by 2100 if not higher. Africa’s population, which has the lowest continental IQ in the world, cannot sustain itself and relies on ever-increasing agricultural imports to survive; if those imports ever stop Africa will experience an immediate mass starvation event. The rapid population expansion is resulting in the complete destruction of wildlife in Africa, and putting enormous strains on infrastructure, water supplies, and natural resources in unsustainable ways. Spillover population is likely to emigrate to other countries for better opportunities. Globohomo megalomaniacal lackeys like Bill Gates rely on unscientific, unsound model projections for their actions, which are about as accurate as Al Gore’s proclamation that the ice caps would melt by 2013. The world elites are high on their own supply and lack the intelligence, cognitive honesty or accurate worldview to act as proper stewards for the future generations of the world, given the central bank owners that rule everything are driven by noblesse malice and other elites are blinded by their belief in the egalitarian cult.
Only a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism has any hope of slowing this process down, if it’s even possible at this point (doubtful).
But Africa isn’t the only problem — the west and China are also using tremendous amounts of natural resources. The UN claimed in 2019 that humanity is gobbling up natural resources at an unsustainable pace. How unsustainable is this, what are our globohomo overlords doing about it, and how effective will their chosen policies be?
This is where we will turn to in Part 2…
Kaczynski was biting in his criticism of these types in Industrial Society and Its Future. Paragraph 50: “The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
And Note 13 to Paragraph 66: “Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, 31 exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.”
The fragility of the just-in-time distribution system may be covered in a future post, but basically world trade is so complicated and interconnected that disruptions may have long-lasting, far-reaching and potentially extremely deadly consequences. For example, a repeat of the Carrington Event or an EMP attack could result in a total system collapse and mass starvation. Also per this comment, the U.S. has no strategic transformer reserves. A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report suggests that if just 9 of 55,000 substations in key locations were destroyed and one transformer manufacturer was disabled, the entire U.S. grid “would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.” And in 2013, an anonymous attack on a Silicon Valley substation knocked out the facility for 27 days — a PG&E official called it a "dress rehearsal."
I think I get the good intentions behind trying "to solve" this "problem". People fear a sudden massacre-like disaster if population growth goes unchecked. But I have a few concerns with this "top-down" approach - egalitarian inspired or not. With "top-down" I mean that an extremly small group of brainy people, no matter what their political opinion or approach, will use their brains and computer models to find solutions.
I think this is not possible. The problem is too complex. There will never be a solution that works for most people. There will always be winners and losers. It will always come back to greed and power. And no matter who and what they do, they will fuck shit up even more with big programs. We are simply not iintelligent enough and there are too many variables. More importantly, on the body-mind level, where most of us live exclusively, we are not programmed to save others but maybe next of kin. On that level we are, like probably all animals, programmed to survive, thrive and reproduce. This is not negotiable. As soon this gets threatened the friendly masks and gloves come off and people will kill to ensure this programming. Always did, always will. That's why there are 8 Billion of us.
The interesting facts are that we don't stop when our survival and reproduction is secured. Most of us live way above that threshold but keep on consuming and accumulating and exploiting resources. This is fuelled by desires and fears, not based in our bodies but in the mind. While our bodily needs are more than satisfied, our mind's needs seem to be boundless and the true cause of the obsession is fear and desire.
Of course, at the core of all this is the felt sense of "I". Almost everybody on this planet feels they are seperate and alianated from the rest of the planet and this is extremly alarming and scary. On one side there is this very fragile me - on the other side a big hostile world with 8 billion people I can't trust because they are programmed to kill me if they feel this is necessary to survive. So each of us - mostly unconsciously - tries to somehow prepare for that, tries to plug this existential safety hole with all sorts of actions and things in an attempt to feel a little bit safer. But it is a bottomless hole and a lost cause. As long we firmly believe that all we are is this seperate body-mind, we will always feel alienated and threatened by this world and as a result be scared, exploit, and kill if needed. And be exploited and killed. Just look at our history.
No mind-born "practical" solution will ever solve this behaviour. Especially not on a social or political level where solutions are imposed on billions of people.
What might help is a spiritual awakening on a global scale. Just to make sure: To me, spiritual is not related to religious based belief systems involving a human-like god figure. That's just wishful thinking and stupid fantasies. They are anti-spiritual imo.
Many wise sages have identified an unchecked unobserved free-roaming mind as the source of all suffering. There are a range of excellent techniques, teachings and exercises widely availabme for free.
But they involve work and discipline, of course, and without proper motivation no-one will do them. What induces such motivation in these things?
1. Some just have a natural curiosity for it. It is strongly linked to an ability to see reality as it is, not through the wishful and fearful fantasies of our minds. Anyone that has that ability, will sooner or later realize that our individual egoic life form has no happy end. At best, you get old, sick and die. And this is earned with a lot of sweat, tears and striving. So exhausting. My life is conditioned by habits, mostly to survive, accumulate and reproduce - to what end? True moments of bliss and joy are extremly rare. Why bother?
When we come to that point we maybe start looking elsewhere for something that is more rewarding. Now. Because it can be over the next minute.
Happiness, bliss, joy only happens in the now. With practise we can also observe that the mind is never in the now. It is never here either.
2. Spontaneous Awakening Experience
They come in all forms and shapes and are much more common than talked about. They are mostly tabu. They have a great potential to set people free, make them desire-and-fearless. And those that rule us don't want that. They need people that are scared and people that consume endlessly. To consume you have to earn. The people who rule us earn on both - our work and our shopping.
Therefore, what used to be spiritual awakenings are no often classified as psychotic episodes or other diagnosis. These experience can be profoundly mind-shattering and we used to have shamans, sages, masters and so on to help us to process and integrate them. Now they get squashed by medications and people stay stuck and disabled for years.
But even manageable "lighter" spiritual awakenings are tabu and not talked about anymore for fear of being judged a "loony".
Sometimes they are not even recognized as spiritual awakenings. This often happens with drug induced awakenings. (I come to that below).
Sometimes they get "commercialised" and rebranded as "flow-states" and seen as a performance tool feeding tbe ego rather than the spirit.
But if processed and integrated these awakenings
3. Induced awakening experience
This includes all forms of meditations, self-enquiry and other spiritual practices. There is no guarantee, of course. The world is littered with old mediators still hoping for one. It's usually the hope that denies them. Hope is a useless egoic emotion.
It also includes intentional spiritual drug use. This has been done for thousands of years. Mostly with psychedelic drugs. The translated indigenous name of magic mushrooms is "flesh of the gods"
The war on drugs has several reasons but to me, cutting many people off from drug induced spiritual experiences is the least talked about but most important one.
In summary, if we ever want to leave the ultimately meaningless, animal-like, body-mind based, vastly conditioned and automatic state of ever repeating cycles of creation and destruction - as an individual or a culture - we need to learn to go beyond this body-mind. There is no doubt that this is possible. We wouldn't still talk about the Buddha or Jesus or many other srlf-realized masters if they were fake. But we have to understand that institutionalising spirituality is not possible. It can't be taught. It is not of the mind. It is also not a belief. It is a personal awakening experience that starts it off. The rest is practise. With practise desire and fear diminishes. This causes a change in life-style with a much much smaller egoic footprint.
Don't try to save the world. That's proposterous. The biggest ego trip and distraction. Save yourself first. The rest will take of itself.
"the key limiting factor for population growth worldwide in the not-so-distant future: the extreme decline in the world’s natural resources." Nope. We've been hearing this for centuries and it is always wrong. I recommend reading Superabundance. There are many great books on the topic but this is recent and extremely detailed.
The projections by Scientific American are likely too high. They are even higher than the UN's. And the UN's are higher than more sophisticated projects such as those from The Wittgenstein Centre (global population peaks in the 2070s at 9.8 billion then falls to 9.5 billion by 2100), and the IMHE (peak at 9.73 billion in 2064, and declining to 8.76 billion by 2100).
We should stop giving foreign aid to Africa. Only then will they have to shape up economically and do something about their immensely corrupt governments.
"Whites in western countries all have well sub-replacement TFR (replacement is at 2.1)." Yes, but doesn't this contradiction what you say about unchecked population growth?
"The UN claimed in 2019 that humanity is gobbling up natural resources at an unsustainable pace." You just accept the UN's claims while quoting this as authoritative right after criticizing Gates for using unsound model projections.
I go into some detail on the population issue (from a life extension perspective) here:
https://maxmore.substack.com/p/overcoming-population-arguments-to
On resource availability, I also recommend reading Superabundance. There are now many good books on the topic but this is very recent and very detailed.