How to (artificially) save the environment9th March 2025
Human extinctionists disguised as environmentalists want our human species to go through a degrowth phase. They believe humans are pests whose needs come at the cost of ecosystems, biodiversity, and balance. But what they fail to understand is that degrowth isn’t the solution. It’s not even a solution. Most of our ancestors lived in poverty and asking us to go back to those living conditions is immoral and evil.Let me outright say something outrageous. The only way to solve the environmental issues is by having more growth, not less.By growth, I don’t mean more pollution through more usage. That’s not the world I want to live in either. I’m talking about the growth that comes from switching out inferior systems for superior systems. In fact, that’s the only way to achieve sustainable growth without destroying everything.Degrowth doesn’t just solve the “pest” problem but also makes it much worse and leave us in a much more vulnerable position—illustrated by the story of why hunter-gatherers failed.I don’t want to bore you with the details. So, long story short, when humans spread to the Polynesian islands, New Zealand, and the Chatham Islands (south to New Zealand) specifically, they faced varied geographical conditions. The group in New Zealand found favorable conditions to continue domesticating crops. Whereas, the Chatham Islands’ geography was hostile to agriculture and this group had to revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Eventually, the Maoris from New Zealand, thanks to the abundance of food through agriculture, built dense and complex societies with a full-time military. The Maoris then conquered and massacred their sister tribe in the Chatham Islands which didn’t have any food surplus and couldn’t afford a military.Let’s now put a systems thinking lens and understand how these two different lifestyles led to the population size differences and their consequences through the food available.Hunter gathers’ food stock is dependent on the animal’s reproduction cycle and population which the more they hunt, the faster the future food stock depletes—a negative reinforcing loop.Let’s run some numbers. Assume each human needs 10 animals of meat each year, human and animal fertilities are 3 and 2 respectively, a third of human and animal females are fertile each year and a tenth of humans and animals die each year. Plotting a phase diagram showing whether the animal population goes extinct or survives, for different initial conditions:
Show codeYou see the green region? That’s the human and animal seed populations that allow harmony without humans driving the animals to extinction. If the human population falls in the red zone, that means we cannot increase our population without starving ourselves after a few generations.This was a simple simulation but you get the point. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle has hard limits that we cannot escape.On the other hand, farming that produces surplus enables more human population which enables even more farming—a positive reinforcing loop. As human population increases, we can sustain that by having more farmers and growing more food. There is no risk of running out of food.Farming essentially allowed humans to break out of an inferior system into a superior one.Just like how we switched from the natural production of food to the ~artificial production of food (farming), we will eventually switch from all-natural sources of resources to artificial ones—primarily not because we want to be environmentally moral towards nature. The driving factor will be an economic one. Pretty soon, artificial sources of resources will be cheaper and more abundant than natural sources.From our observations earlier, natural sources of resources have limits that prevent more usage. We have one natural golden goose. We should and will soon artificially create more golden gooses for every resource imaginable—fuel, meat, and water. All of these will be artificial and abundant.We produce artificial fuel by mining carbon in the air not underground. We produce artificial water by desalinating seawater.This is also how we bypass and escape the Tragedy of the commons.We save our environment and our planet not by using less of these natural resources and forcing horrible lives onto people but by artificially producing more of the resources—much more of them. We want every human to enjoy a rich life.This is what environmentalists fail to see. Pursuing growth didn’t and doesn’t always lead to the extinction of resources but offers us an opportunity to tap into a superior source. Such a source and system is what we should look to as a solution for our growing needs, not degrowth and depopulation.
Show codeYou see the green region? That’s the human and animal seed populations that allow harmony without humans driving the animals to extinction. If the human population falls in the red zone, that means we cannot increase our population without starving ourselves after a few generations.This was a simple simulation but you get the point. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle has hard limits that we cannot escape.On the other hand, farming that produces surplus enables more human population which enables even more farming—a positive reinforcing loop. As human population increases, we can sustain that by having more farmers and growing more food. There is no risk of running out of food.Farming essentially allowed humans to break out of an inferior system into a superior one.Just like how we switched from the natural production of food to the ~artificial production of food (farming), we will eventually switch from all-natural sources of resources to artificial ones—primarily not because we want to be environmentally moral towards nature. The driving factor will be an economic one. Pretty soon, artificial sources of resources will be cheaper and more abundant than natural sources.From our observations earlier, natural sources of resources have limits that prevent more usage. We have one natural golden goose. We should and will soon artificially create more golden gooses for every resource imaginable—fuel, meat, and water. All of these will be artificial and abundant.We produce artificial fuel by mining carbon in the air not underground. We produce artificial water by desalinating seawater.This is also how we bypass and escape the Tragedy of the commons.We save our environment and our planet not by using less of these natural resources and forcing horrible lives onto people but by artificially producing more of the resources—much more of them. We want every human to enjoy a rich life.This is what environmentalists fail to see. Pursuing growth didn’t and doesn’t always lead to the extinction of resources but offers us an opportunity to tap into a superior source. Such a source and system is what we should look to as a solution for our growing needs, not degrowth and depopulation.