catapult magazine

A good article about an interesting approach being used by the city of Santa Fe to reduce water consumption: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/national/03WATE.html

Thanks for approaching these issues with thoughtfulness and depth. I have been learning a lot just by lurking.

I wanted to jump in on the population growth issue at least as it relates to the US. It seems to me our problem is not so much that there isn’t enough room or resources for more people in the US — there is plenty of both, provided we live in a way that is reasonable. What family needs a four car garage? What couple needs a six bedroom house? Why does anyone on the planet need an automobile that coasts six times what my little toyota does? How can a single family of four that doesn’t farm justify living on nine acres of land? Why does anyone need two summer houses? Why should a corporation require twelve times the land that thier buildings actually occupy? How can we justify the land that golf courses take up?

Okay, maybe I’m revealing my anit-golf bias with that last one, but if you disregard that last question and think of the other ones, it becomes clear that our problem is not so much having too many people, as it is that the ones we already have are too bloody greedy.

True BBC, you can’t talk about population without talking about what the population is consuming. The average North American consumes a lot. So population growth here is a definite concern. If the projections are true that the USA will have doubled its population by the end of the century, we can safely assume that consumption in the USA will follow a similar trajectory. I’m not arguing that there won’t be enough to go around — that’s a different argument I don’t want to get into. I’m talking about unsustainable consumption levels plain and simple.

I may be a responsible non-golfer with composting worms but I still have a gigantic ecological footprint compared with your average Mexican or your average American a hundred years ago. If you double every eco-freak like me and every Ralph Nader in North America, the environmental result will be bad. Maybe not as bad as if you doubled every George W Bush and every Ralph Klein, but bad nonetheless. Is there really room for each one of us to have a similarly behaving twin? Yes there’s room, but what is the cost? The cost is habitat loss, extinction, pollution, urban sprawl, groundwater depletion, etc.

Of course I’m being a bit reductionistic. You could argue that all those extra people will have beneficial effects too, which is true. But I believe the harm outweighs the benefit substantially.