Henry's Emanations
Rewilding
Rewilding is a bit of an illusion. The UK is nowhere near self sufficient in food - we import nearly half of what we consume. This means that every acre of agricultural land rewilded in the UK just means an extra acre of land needed somewhere else to make up for the lost production. Rewilding here is just exporting the problem.
What we should be concentrating on is trying to make our agriculture more nature friendly. We need sustainable and regenerative agriculture more than we need rewilding.
This obsession with tree planting is a problem too. It makes people feel good, like they have helped to fight climate change. But trees planted now will not contribute significantly to the reduction of carbon for at least ten years. We don’t have time for that - far more important to protect every mature tree we already have.
Complexity & Materialism
Talk of the need to move to a ‘simpler’ life always worries me. I think it puts many people off and I’m not even sure its quite correct.
Complexity is good. Nature is incredibly complex, that’s why it works. Humans constantly get into trouble by trying to simplify it. Agriculture is simplified nature. Rain forests are hugely complex and diverse - we cut them down and grow hideously simple monocultures of palm oil, beef etc.
Governments still haven’t learned the lessons of ‘Small is Beautiful’. They’re not interested in spending money improving, upgrading, maintaining existing infrastructure ; they only like big, simple, showey megaprojects like HS2. They’re not interested in the complexity of small scale local energy generation / conservation at the level of towns, neighbourhoods, houses; they only like big impressive prestige megaprojects like Hinkley Point. And of course those mega projects require huge amounts of stone and concrete so they blast massive holes in our beautiful East Mendips landscape.
GDP is a stupidly simplistic way to measure the success of a society. Green politics has always struggled to make an impact because it proposes complex solutions to complex problems.
Talk of ditching materialism worries me too.
Materialism is good. It means valuing material things, looking after them, keeping, sharing, repairing, reusing, recycling them. All of that is complex and satisfying.
It’s consumerism that’s bad: buy - use - show off - throw away - get a new one. This approach is simple and deeply unsatisfying. It gives quick highs which, like with all drugs, are followed by lows and the drive to find the next high.
The P Word (population)
Elon Musk and others have said that falling birth rates around the world are a problem, a crisis even. Emotive words like population collapse are thrown around.
What are they scared of? That there won’t be enough people to supply all the goods and services to everyone? That would only happen if the number of people fell below the number of roles needed in society, and there is no danger of that.
So how low might the numbers get? Probably not very low as there is such a panic about it. Even at a birth rate of 1 which some countries have reached and are panicking about, the decline would be slow. Two kids per couple is replacement level. One kid per couple would mean the population would halve every generation, by which I mean the age at which each generation has children thereby producing the next generation, let’s call it 30 years. If a population of a billion halved every 30 years, it would take 300 years to dwindle to I million. Even before the population halved to 500 million in 30 years all kinds of changes would probably happen to birth rates.
Words like crisis and collapse are utterly misleading.
But, people say, it’s not just the numbers, it’s the demographics. As a population decreases the proportion of older retired people will increase and there will be fewer working people to pay for their care. This will be partly offset by there being fewer children to look after.
The idea that we need to have more children in order to provide a work force to pay for the growing numbers of retired people is madness. There’s not much point having a nice pension if there’s no food because of environmental breakdown or climatic chaos.
What do we need this workforce for anyway?
A certain size of workforce will produce a certain amount of wealth / goods / services which will be spread among the whole population. If there are less working people there will be less goods and services available per person. But would that be so bad? If people are unhappy about it they can provide services voluntarily, which would probably be very rewarding. They can also change from consumers to conservers / recyclers / reusers which would very rewarding and good for the planet.
The world needs people to consume less and recycle more so a smaller workforce would be a good thing. It would mean less resource consumption, less waste and pollution, and more satisfying lives for everyone.
Some people think that population growth problems are restricted to the third world. But Britain can only sustain the population it has by importing food. We tend to have a false sense of food security in the UK - that we don’t need to bother too much about growing food, we can always import it. The fact is, we may not always be able to import it.
Some people point to the fact that ten percent of the population have ninety percent of the impact, and conclude that it’s consumption that’s the problem. In other words, we don’t need to control our numbers, we just need to get all the rich people to cut their consumption and persuade the poor people not to increase theirs. Good luck with that.
The world has never seen a decreasing population (except sudden drops caused by wars and disasters), and we tend to feel un-nerved by the idea, but I suspect it might have some unforeseen benefits.
At the moment we all seem to be obsessed with competition. The relentless growth in population and the resultant loss of space and freedom has put us all on the defensive, or indeed, on the attack. We feel we must get on, get some money, land, property, possessions, before everyone else gets it all.
Maybe a decreasing population would take the pressure off and foster a mood of cooperation; a mood of reaching out to each other and sharing the increasing space and freedom