“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibres, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
— Herman Melville
Secondly, we grow it very inefficiently. We could very easily increase the food yield of a given area of land by building a greenhouse on it (which also reduces water loss) and using poly-cultures instead of mono-cultures; the reason our preferred method is open-air mono-culture farms, which are susceptible to erosion and blight and requires a god-awful amount of water to stay hydrated, is that labor is expensive and land is cheap.
In fact, if we took it even further–growing our food in carbon dioxide-rich environments lit with artificial lighting 24 hours a day (or at least at night)–you only need 1-2000 square feet of farmland per person. Admittedly, you pretty much have to have fusion power for this to be an environmentally and economically viable option, but still; the point is, we could easily condense our environmental footprint by a shit-ton (and even more options will be available in the future) without decreasing our population one iota.
“There is still a maximum carrying capacity the planet has.”
Indeed there is. And do you know what that carrying capacity is? It’s ten trillion. And the cut off isn’t space or resources–it’s waste heat. The things we’d have to do to get there aren’t exactly the sort of things we could do overnight–hell, we don’t actually know how to fusion yet–but they’re all well within the realm of the physically possible.
We have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as “normal.” Prisons are constituted as “normal.” It takes a lot of work to persuade people to think beyond the bars, and to be able to imagine a world without prisons and to struggle for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment.
— Angela Davis, Feminism and Abolition: Theories and Practices for the Twenty-First Century
