NHV Paper 2
“Response to a Debate”
Caleb Micho
10 October 2014
Nature and Human Values Section A11
Rose Pass
There is no questioning the fact that the world population is increasing without bound, however, there is a debate if this increase is a good thing, or if it will prove catastrophic. In the article “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin. Hardin discusses how the ever-increasing world population will deplete the world of its natural resources, and thus human’s capability of survival. On the other side of the argument though, is Julian L. Simon who wrote the article “More People, Greater Wealth, More Resources, Healthier Environment.” This article proposes the theory that with an increase in population, human’s quality of life is amplified. One particular issue that they both touch on and have drastically different views on is the future of agriculture and human’s ability to sustain it.
Hardin goes into how the world only has so many resources and opportunity for agriculture to be expended. So with enough increase in population, these resources will become extinct. Thus humans, will run out, and eventually starve to death. As he so profoundly put it “a finite world can only support a finite population” (Hardin 98).
Simon goes on to discuss how humans always seem to come up with means to satisfy their needs. When discussing agriculture he goes as far as saying that food becoming a scarcity is a “benign trend” (Simon 24). Benign in this case meaning not harmful or in effect. Thus Simon does not see a worry about population increase and agricultural needs, as he has seen them being taken care of through agricultural advancements throughout the decades.
The main topic in the debate of the escalation...
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...d will be made through the decades. Simon approached the right idea by showing how humans are trending towards agricultural growth, but failed to paint the whole picture with food and survival. While Hardin had a blind view of agricultural engineering and failed to accurately predict what the future can hold for humankind.
Works Cited
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Gul, Hafiza Tahira. "Potential of Nanotechnology in Agriculture and Crop Protection: A
Review." Academia.edu. Bzujournal, 23 Jan. 2014. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.
James, Clive. 2011. Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2011. ISAAA Brief
No. 43. ISAAA: Ithaca, NY.
Perlman, Howard. "Irrigation Techniques." Irrigation: USGS Water-Science School. U.S.
Department of Interior, 17 Mar. 2014. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.
After reading McKibben and Hurst’s articles in the book Food Matters, both authors present arguments on “industrial farming”, and although Hurst provides a realistic sense on farming, McKibben’s suggestions should be what we think about.
"By increasing the fertility of the land, it increases its abundance. The improvements of agriculture too introduce many sorts of vegetable foods, which, requiring less land and not more labor than corn, come cheaply to the market."
“The Tragedy of the Commons” written by Garret Hardin explains how the human population is degrading the environment. When Hardin refers to commons he is talking about a resource that is owned by no one and used by a group of people. Some examples of commons include the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the oceans we fish. The tragedy is that people don’t look at the bigger picture; the over use of commons for our own personal benefit leads to the destruction or extinction of these commons. For example if one fisherman wants to fish the oceans as much as possible that’s fine, but now imagine if every fisherman wants to fish the oceans as much as they can, this is one example of a common being destroyed by the human population. The fishing lab we did the other day is a good example Tragedy of the Commons. Every student was placed into groups of four, each group received a bowl (which represented the ocean,) and 20 M&M’s (which represented 20 fish; salmon.) Ms.Engen told the class it was a competition but what she did not say is that if we catch all our “M&M’s” we will not receiv...
Hardin states that throughout most of history there's been no need for concern about population control. Nature would come along with epidemic diseases and take care of the matter for us. Disease has been the primary population controller in the past. Because widespread disease and famine no longer exist, we have to find other means to stop population increases (Spencer 1992, pp.61-2).
Since the birth of automobiles in 1866, the majority of mankind has relied heavily on this mode of transportation, especially in the United States. According to the California DMV there are 24,290,288 licensed drivers in California (DMV, 2013), which is approximately 63.3% of the population. Ever since the invention of automobiles, gas emission into the atmosphere has become one of the biggest issues for mankind. In Garret Hardin’s essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin defines a common as a resource that is accessible for everyone in society. Clean air became a modern commons in this sense. The quality of air is especially bad in California where there are 31,388,901 registered vehicles for a population of 37,826,160. In 2012, the quality of air hit a record low in California’s Central Valley. If we continue to dismiss the issue of air pollution, we will gravely endanger our health as current air pollution related health effects already include lung diseases and cancer. The solutions to the smog pollution problem are to develop cleaner emission engines, as part of a technical solution, as well as raise awareness among the residents of the Central Valley.
64-66), author Jared Diamond claims that agriculture as opposed to popular belief, didn’t help civilization bloom, but instead proved detrimental to human lives ever since its introduction. He states that the progressives believe agriculture was adopted due to its efficiency and how it complimented our race. He contradicts this view with multiple studies and expert sources. According to his research, modern day humans are much worse off than their hunter gatherer counterparts due to a variety of lifestyle changes ranging from greatly deteriorated nutritional quality to increased sexual discrimination. He gathers the support from various archaeological research conducted on various remains found in Chile, Greece, Turkey, etc. Archaeologists can further point out the date at which this switch (from Gathering to agriculture) took place. He further establishes that Hunter gatherers may have chosen to change ways with the preconceived idea that the capability to feed more people and reducing the burden on mothers (hence allowing them to bear a child every 2 years instead of 4) would in turn drastically improve quality of life. He concludes the article by emphasizing on how it created disparities between the elite and the commoners and by defending his own kind for having discovered mankind’s biggest mistake and the motive behind
Life before the agricultural revolution was made out to be awful. It was a huge advancement that let us keep up with our population increase. What I did not think about is what agriculture is doing to other species. Agriculture is not our downfall; the extent to which man takes it is our downfall. It is stated that agriculture supports population growth, and that can damage diversity. The more our species expands, the more of a threat it poses to other species. Ishmael states that Takers and Leavers pass down different types of knowledge from generation to generation. Takers pass down knowledge of knowledge and how to grow crops where as the Leavers pass down ways to live a better life. In Takers culture we want to keep advancing so we discard old ideas and keep creating new ones to replace the old ones. In Leavers culture, each generation learns ways to live from the previous and so on. We are taught to believe that technology advancements are great successes and that before it life was not as great, when in fact they could be our downfall. I had a Pre-calculus teacher in high school that believes this as well, he believes technology is our greatest downfall and claims it is dumbing us down. He would always yell at our class and say that back in the day they did not have calculators and everyone was smarter back then because they all had to think for themselves.
Berry does prove his thesis by showing that modernization has a hand in the destruction in the farming culture. He stated that as the society’s technology improves their way of life we seem to forget the significance of the common knowledge about the land. Also he looks down of the competition within the culture who are competing with one another. He despises the fact that some small farmer cannot compete with the bigger farms because small farms lack money, resources and manpower to keep up. All of this replaces the distraction of the farming culture today.
He stated that as the society’s technology improves their way of life we seem to forget the significance of the common knowledge about the land. Also he looks down of the competition within the culture that is competing with one another. He despises the fact that some small farmer cannot compete with the bigger farms because small farms lack money, resources and manpower to keep up. All of this replaces the distraction of the farming culture
Agriculture has been around for hundreds of years. With its negative effects on humanity, agriculture has greatly affected the environment. Many archeologists believe that adoption of Agriculture was not an improvement but a disaster for humans in many ways. Jared Diamond, the author of the article called “The worst mistake in the history of the human race” argues that hunter-gatherers were better off than the farmers. In a way agriculture is believed to cause many problems for humans such as sexual inequality, deep class division, changed their diet which later led to poor health and diseases.
“An Essay on the Principle of Population” is written by Thomas Malthus where he outlines his theory on population growth. He thought that if population continued to grow, food production wouldn’t be able to keep up with demand and he believed that many people would die due to famine. Either people would have to use more contraception to drop the birth rate, or the death rate would increase due to wars, disease or
There are numerous amounts of evidence that supports the claim that agriculture was in fact an immense mistake. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”,
Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, he states “I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” He came up with the Population Principle in which he argued that population, when unregulated, increases geometrically, whereas subsistence increases arithmetically. This then becomes an issue when the population outweigh the amount of food available. Malthus then said that once this level was surpassed, that famine would be the main source of the limit to population growth and that premature death was the most natural way to control the
One of the problems facing our world is population. It began about ten thousand years ago when the humans settled and began farming. The farming provides more food for the people thus making the population grow. Now we are about 6 billion in population and in a few years we will be around 10 to 11 billion. Therefore, our population will almost double in size. This means that we will need more food to support us. A study in 1986 by Peter Vitonesk, a Stanford biologist, showed that the humans are already consuming about 38.8 of what is possible for us to eat. Thus, if the population keeps increasing, the percentage will increase also, making us closer and closer to the biophysical limits. By studying the earth's capacity, Dr. Cornell, another biologist, believes that we are already crowded for this would. He believes that our world can only support two million people. Not only this, but population can cause complicated problems to the countries with very high population. These countries will need more schools to educate its people, they will need more hospitals and public health to take care of their people, and they will need more water and more soil for farming to feed all the people. In order to solve the population growth problem, the people should be educated. Once the people are educated they will be aware of the problems they ca...
This problem of population growth leads to a number of solutions that could have significant implications on the quality of life. Taking no action and allowing population to grow unchecked could possibly risk the entire human species if food or clean water were to become unavailable worldwide. Aiming for zero population growth would in theory maintain the existing quality of life since a stable population would not increase their use of resources. However not all resources are renewable, so scarcities could still occur with a fixed population size. In an extreme case permanent resource depletion under zero population growth could have the same extinction effect that unchecked growth can lead to. Despite the escalating risk of unchecked population growth, technological advances necessitated by the increase in population will at least maintain the quality of life and could possibly improve conditions.