The fact that the malthusian catastrophe has not yet occured does not discredit it. In fact this can be explained by agricultural yield gains that were substantial in the first half of the 20th century, thanks to using hybridized cultivars and industrial fertilizers and pesticides. Where will the gains be in the future when we approach another resource limit? We will have to continue to use genetic modification to improve our crop yields, and these days marketing executives have poisoned that word in the minds of many who now seek out gmo free foods specifically. This is also to say nothing about the state of the environment, how we take out elemental resources from the land that took a very long time to deposit in this place, bring them to a distant market and never replace them, diminishing the fertility of the area. Or how we do the opposite to our aquatic environments through eutrophication.
The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.
>The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.
Your assumption that technology may not be capable of helping us enormously down the road is much more of an assumption than the pro-technology argument. Because unlike the anti-growth malthusian argument, the reality so far for centuries has been that technology did indeed make life easier and better for people despite an ever growing population.
There's actual, consistent precedent contradicting all malthusian predictions across several centuries of human development, with entirely artificial political disasters mostly being responsible for any failures. On the other hand, we've not yet seen any concrete examples of human development failing in the face of hard natural limits to growth. Wherever it has failed has been because of mismanagement in some form or another, not lack of possible solutions.
It did indeed make life better but thats because we never considered the externalities, then we would realized we erred too hard on the side of environmental exploitation. What takes millions of years of give and take to produce is squandered in a fortnight.
In biology, balanced relationships, mutually symbiotic relationships take orders of magnitude longer to evolve than parasitic relationships. We do not have a balanced relationship with this planet, we have a parasitic one. We are speaking the same things when you say that whenever we have failed was because of mismanagement, in other words being to parasitic to our hosts. To not mismanage something would be to understand all the latent variables affecting the system before we act. We never do that, we act, then only react after the system is so obviously affected by our actions.
Thank you, I could not have stated it better myself. When there are many real-life examples that contradict an idea, and only theories and logic that stem from certain questionable assumptions to support that idea, then at very least it is a very poor idea on which to base public policy
The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.