- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
It's time to stop trying to see how many rats we can fit into one cage.
We won't agree, but I do want to point out the common logical fallacy used to support your common point of of view. Often, it's scientists themselves who make this error, variously citing studies of rats in cages, or organisms in a petri dish, or deer without predators, etc etc. All of these studies point toward rapidly reproducing species stripping available resources and then suffering sharp population declines.
There analogies do not adequately describe the resource problem humans face because human beings are the only species in which individuals can consume exponentially more resources than what they need to survive and reproduce. Humans also compete in abstracted economic markets in which basics like food (cooking oil or grain) and non-survival luxuries (like most uses of fuel) affect the cost of the other.
Let's modify your analogy to make it more real. You'd like to get rid of some of the "rats" so the remaining rats could consume much more and lead "richer" lives, by which you mean more consumption. Can you see why ten super-rats who consume ten times as many resources as they need to survive will have the same problems with resource depletion as one hundred regular rats who eat enough to get by?
To you, the amount of consumption is a confounding variable that I've introduced as a rhetorical slight of hand. But, to me, I don't think the environment cares whether three billion humans burn X amount of fuel or if two billion humans burn the same X amount of fuel. The emissions released by that same amount of fuel will impact the global climate just as much. I find your arguments magically anthropocentric.
