China is covered within the first ten mins, but it’s all fascinating, so you might wish to watch all thirty mins.
(And the whole series is fascinating, so you might like to watch the other episodes.)
After the China and Peru segments, the VO says that the global over-population crisis is a false alarm. I hear this constantly from people who - for some reason - are wedded to this flat-earthist delusion. I also hear often that it’s all a scam to enforce eugenicist policies on the world. Both of these views seem to me to be irrational idees fixes. I don’t get why people are so wedded to them. They seem palpably false to me.
I have nothing but steady contempt for the eugenicists and their herrenvolk attitudes. I want no part of them. I am, though, aware of the ecological commonplace that random species may sometimes find themselves in situations that trigger a population explosion amongst them. If not stopped early by the intervention of changed conditions which stop the explosion naturally, the pattern of the whole episode seems always to be the same:
The numbers ramp up until they exceed the long-term carrying capacity of the species’ survival niche within the whole ecology. The spare ‘savings’ of life-support within that niche are then used up rapidly, until gone, and the sustenance-deprived population then goes into a deep dive - often down to below the original sustainable carrying capacity. Then, the life-support means and the species’ numbers recover in tandem, back up to the original balanced equilibrium that obtained before the overshoot episode.
These bloom-starve-crash-rebuild episodes are nasty to behold and - presumably - hell to live and die through. But they happen. They’re part of the Gaian homeostasis systems that keep the planet habitable for life. So far as I can see, humankind have never produced a way to abolish them, in any species. The horrific stories about China and Peru - if honestly balanced and objectively accurate; big proviso! - show brutal approaches which, as well as being deeply disgusting, obviously make no dent on the problem; just much dreadful abuse and misery for no good outcome.
I have never seen any convincing reason to believe that homo sapiens sapiens is in any way immune to overshoot episodes. Indeed, it seems self-evident to me - despite all the bigot-denials - that we’re in one right now.
Mournfully, I’ve come to the unwilling conclusion that humankind are no more able to make prudent, humane solutions to these episodes than is any other species. The horrible attempts cited in the vid show just how helpless we really are. They fail, they’re appallingly inhumane, and they never change the basic fate of the overshoot process.
I expect our numbers-growth to begin slowing down soon - if not already - and finally to turn down absolutely in the middle decades of this century; in fact the fertility decline has already begun. We won’t be doing anything humane OR effective about our current ramp. But Mam Gaia has it in hand, and will have us down to balance again - will-we, nil-we - some time in the next century, or maybe towards the end of this one.
In the mean time I should say two things:
First, the tone of this video seems to me partisan against China, and about as suspect as all the agenda-serving, so-deeply-felt concerns of Western ‘humanitarians’ about the human rights of the Uyghurs. There’s a lot of quoting of some USAmerican congressional committee which purports to concern itself about China’s population-control policies. Yeah sure! Crocodiles understand your tears!
And secondly, two friends of mine who found themselves unable to conceive children adopted over time four abandoned girl babies from orphanages in China; now my much-loved British-Chinese foster-grand-daughters, blooming and thriving wonderfully in their late teens and twenties here. The early-months life stories of my dear girls are horrendous, and their Brit foster-parents are not at all naive about the situation in China. But I doubt whether they’d be too convinced by the picture offered in this video.
The girls have been back to China as young adults, and discovered a lot of nitty-gritty information from people in the provinces of their births. One piece being that the parents who have to abandon their girl-infants are usually just as scarred-for-life by the dreadful forced choice as are their children.
The bottom-line conclusion is that Gaian homeostatic processes are not always necessarily kind and agreeable. But, dammit!, they keep the life-system stable and persisting. What are we to do? Attempts to interfere by humans are dreadful, and don’t work. Attempts to control our numbers humanely never even seem to get off the ground. Fate; just fate…
Is China particularly beastly in this matter? Can’t say the case has been made conclusively. They’re still in deep shit about their huge population; like many other places, including a horrendously over-populated small green island off the coast of Europe. If we look back a hundred years from now, without any holierthanthou pretensions, who’s approach will seem most laudable? At least China acknowledged the quandary and tried - for a time - to do something about it. Are the forced-abortion horror stories true? I don’t know. Maybe. Haven’t been there, armed with fluent Mandarin, and investigated extensively. Know anyone who has, and who will speak honestly about it?
You are apparently sure that the size of the human population is a problem.
How?
Maybe your thinking is that the planet cannot sustain a population of, say, ten billion. If that is indeed your thinking, then surely the problem is human lifestyles rather than numbers. For example, the carbon footprint of ten billion humans might be fine if the overwhelming majority always travelled on foot, bike, bus and train, i.e. hardly any private car use.
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How. R? As I said above, population-overshoot episodes are a commonplace of ecological observation. Sheer prudence says don’t kid yourself that it can’t happen to humans. As to what makes a balanced human population in this planetary ecosystem, well maybe something that doesn’t seem to be causing such global damage to the life-support systems - of all the life-web, that is. Not just holy humans.
One ecologists’ rule of thumb is that total global numbers of a species correlate with their body size. More mice than blue whales, for example. For our body size, our numbers should be closer to those of dolphins than they are - and that’s using a comparator species that - unlike us - has the majority of the Earth’s surface as its range. I could go on. But it just seems self-evident to me that we - hom sap - are already well into overshoot. Mam Gaia has a growth, but she’s already treating it with her ancient curatives.
It really isn’t difficult: nothing can keep growing forever in a finite container. Sooner or later our number-growth will stop, because it must. But do we really want to go through the whole ramp-starve-crash routine to convince ourselves? Do we need to put the Earth through a Sixth Extinction event just to prove it? Well, it seems we’re going to find out…
I find myself getting considerable comfort from observing what the ‘Limits To Growth’ projection graphs had to say about our population. It’s that curve which suggests to me that the downturn will happen spontaneously in the middle decades of this century. TLTG has proven very accurate in its projections so far. Perhaps because it assumes that all the trends are automatic, self-creating geophysical processes, not really under any conscious human control at all. And its precisely those so-far pretty accurate projection curves, for their several factors such as population, food, pollution, etc., which suggest that human population is already well past long-term stable viability, too many for the planet. Moreover they suggest that it’s our overshoot which is pushing all the other perturbations to happen.
I don’t bother arguing about it much these days, though, since it seems past question that it’s happening; and that it will organise its own resolution, about which we can do little beyond planting lots of trees, and embracing permaculture techniques in the process. I’m sure you understand by now, R, that I have nothing but contempt for the self-inflated, guzzling, ‘entitled’ lifestyle of we of the Pampered Twenty Percent. But so large and powerful are the Earth’s natural processes that I doubt if the disgusting gap between the idiot lifestyle of the PTP and the scrabbling deprivation of the Abused and Deprived Eighty Percent has any very significant influence on them. Sure, too many New Yorkers are more destructive than an equal number of Mumbai street-dwellers. But neither type will have any hugely significant effect on the overall correction process. All we can manage is to trigger off the crisis.
What I think will happen is that this whole episode will go through the already-commenced era of the Long Descent, and the survivors, some centuries hence, will still be accepting gross differences in wealth and lifestyle, because human psychology seems to be unable to abolish them. But we will all be living at a much lower rate of demand, because we shall have no option; something that might be called a new Dark Age.
It will be our exhaustion of all the practically-recoverable endowments of the natural mineral resources of the Earth which will put paid to hitech industrial society. And that ending will bring down automatically the inflated numbers which it has - very briefly - enabled. Moreover, I don’t see the smallest glimmer of us being able to restart hitechindust society sometime in the future, precisely because we’re squandering and scattering beyond recovery the once-only endowments that made it possible this time.
Seem to have wandered off discussion of China’s degree of social nastiness, don’t I? But that’s mainly because - unlike so many in the West - I know just how little I really know about China, beyond the entirely untrustworthy gavagings of the Western propaganda system, for which I don’t give a fart. 