Now, here we go: The more questions you ask, the smarter I get. I have learned more in the past 20 years from people asking serious questions than I did in eight years of school, so pile it on! There is possibly no cooler activity on this earth than learning new stuff, so help me out and ask a LOT of questions!

Let’s find out a couple of hard data points together that might make adapting a solid Paleo lifestyle to the zone. Please share some stats with me? Height, weight, est. bodyfat percentage, basic training schedule, are you doing the WODs as RX’d? Have you just recently started or have you been doing CF for some time? … and the most important question of all, by far, WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS? What do you want from this new phase in your eating? By having a real answer to that last question you can eliminate a lot of false starts and really focus on the targets, both long and short term.

Hit me with the facts and we’ll whoop it’s ass from there…

Kevin

Personally, as somebody who entered a career of trying to protect the environment, its deeply depressing, because it makes me wonder about the meaning of my work. Since nothing is sustainable given a high enough population, am I just trying to make sure that a couple more generations can live in a healthy environment? Am I trying to put enough protections in place so that when that catastrophe of biblical proportions happens the survivors still have enough of a functioning ecosystem to start over? Am I just trying to protect the US, so that we can live in relatively good health while the rest of the world goes to $hit around us? None of those things really keep me going as a mission in life.

And the really frustrating thing about it is that I had to come to my realization myself, because even though its common sense, talking about overpopulation is a politically and religiously charged issue, so we collectively avoid talking about it.

But people who are educated and have information about family planning have fewer babies. Education, especially educations of women, works. Of course, there are the religions and politician of the world standing in the way of that happening, but at least it’s something to work for.

You hit many nails on the head. If you look at a long term graph of human population, our ability to sustain growth in a given enviroment has determined our population. Almost all explosions in population, local and global, are brought about by ‘energy’. Very early on it was wood/peet for fuel and material for building structures, available water sources, etc that predicated where we lived and how comunities expanded, but more importantly it was ‘machinery’ that produced the work for those efforts that determined if we stay or migrate. That machinery we human hands. Run out of hands to do the labor? It’s time to go conquer the Hittites and enslave more ‘energy’ to get the work done. Then pack animals, beasts of burden, horses, what have you.

The OFF THE CHART explosions in expansion were brought about by discoveries of fuels. The use of coal to generate steam, then the mother of all big bangs: the discovery of oil in little ol’ pensylvania was followed up by a level of productivity that just removed human hands from the equation almost entirely and population went apeshit.

As a nation we surpassed both the ability to survive off local ‘energy’ and resources just prior to the Spanish American War (many suggest that conflict was brought about simply to keep the pathways to the far east open and keep the philipines ‘ours’). Now we neither can survive on our own resources, so we must ‘pilfer’ them from abroad and MUST sell the product we create with those resources overseas or the entire house of cards goes flat.

I am, sadly, absolutely convinced that only a catastrophe of biblical proportions will supply either the impetus for change or the solution in and of itself.

… and this selfish f*cker writing this wants to be clear of all that excrement bouncing off the global fan. Not entirely tongue in cheek: what’s a mensch to do? start becoming a survivalist and begin burrying fuel/supplies in the north woods in my armed to the hilt compount? Me thinks not, but I am absolutely without answer to the most pressing problem that faces us all.

To me, it comes down to how we define our carrying capacity. In ecology, a population of a species has a carrying capacity, i.e. the number of the species that can live within that area. That’s common sense; a certain area only has a limited amount of resources, so the population tends to grow exponentially until it reaches that capacity. A growing population (for example a population in a newly discovered area) generally overshoots the carrying capacity. They overuse their resources, many of them die (and hopefully they breed less), and the population drops back down below the carrying capacity. The steeper the rise, the steeper the fall. If that population drop doesn’t cause extinction, the population increases again until it goes over the carrying capacity again, but not as much as last time. Either birth rate decreases and/or death rate increases so that it falls again, but not as far as the first crash, et cetera, until it settles into equilibrium in a kind of gentle sine curve on the carrying capacity.

Human ingenuity has allowed us to change our carrying capacity. We spread out through the planet a while ago and reached an steady population for a long time. Agriculture allowed a few more of us to survive at the same time within close proximity to one another, albeit at the expense of our health. Incrementally, we got more efficient at getting calories out of the soil, and population of the earth rose slowly over the centuries (with the exception of the Black Plaque).

Then the industrial revolution happened, along with all of the other technological advances of the past couple hundred years. We managed to reset our carrying capacity by orders of magnitude, and our population began the exponential growth spurt that we’re still riding today. Without conscious effort (i.e. family planning /birth control), we are bound to overshoot that capacity, and the steeper the decline, the steeper the fall. That means a lot of death, and not a good life for those people who live through it. Better medicine only makes the people who have enough food and water live survive disease long enough to eat more resources, so somebody dies. Agricultural “progress” (a la Monsanto) might inch that carrying capacity up even further, rewarded us with a steeper decline just a few more years down the road.

You probably already know all of this. The point is, population growth ends somewhere. Any talk of sustainability without talk about population control pushing our problems back, not solving them However, we (as human beings) can make conscious decisions about how many babies we have. We don’t have to ever reach that carrying capacity at all, and we don’t have to keep stretching that carrying capacity out further and further at the expense of quality of life.

Here’s the crux of this: I don’t think we have a moral obligation to try to max out the number of living human beings on this planet. We have already passed the point where the current population could all live as if they were Western middle class. Our population will pass the carrying point where could live if we all ate broccoli instead of rice, if it hasn’t already. Our population will also one day pass the point where we can all live off of even rice. Should your ancestors some day feel guilty because they have a full bowl of starch, which isn’t a “sustainable” meal for the whole population?

We have to draw the line somewhere before we reach that point or the world won’t be pretty place. So why not draw that line where we can all eat the way we were meant to eat? That’s our healthy carrying capacity. It may mean that we reach the population crash a little bit sooner than if we all started living off of porridge right now, but its coming either way.

If we want to lessen the catastrophes that are coming from overpopulation (and I think everyone should), we need to get serious about the things that cut down on population, rather than each generation getting a smaller piece of the of the pie. And that’s a whole different politically and religiously charged problem that eating rice isn’t going to solve.