Surviving Progress Page #3

great boom in human numbers.

Overpopulation, which no one

really wants talk about

because it cuts that things like religious believes and the

freedom of individual and autonomy of family and so on

is something that we

will have to deal with.

We probably have to work towards a much smaller

worldwide population then 6 or 7 billion.

We probably need to go down to a half

of that or possibly even third of that

if everybody is going to live

comfortably and decently.

The other side of this problem

and perhaps the more dangerous side is

the footprint of the individuals

at the top of the social pyramids

who are consuming the most.

Somebody in the U.S. or Europe is

consuming about 50 times more resources

then a person in a place like Bangladesh.

If China is going to reach

the level of consumption

of the U.S. or Europe it's very unlikely that the world could

support the addition of billion consumers at that level

I'd say in China, maybe 200, 300

million people are affluent

they could afford a lot, all

that we can in the west

in India ca. 200 million, so you add up

this affluent segments of population

in these developing countries

but still what you come up with is no more

then one and half, maybe two billion people.

So there is still five billion people

waiting to tap into these bonanzas

of plentiful food, cars, decent housing,

right education for their children.

So the potential demand

for resources is immense.

For thousands of years, you know,

China has the longest continuous

civilization in the world.

And it is only in the recent period of time

when the European countries

started to industrialize

that China started to lag

behind and therefore, you know,

between the First Opium War in

around 1840 all the way to 1978

China went through a roller coaster of great

humiliation, wars, aggression of foreign nations

Japanese aggression against China, Civil War, collapse of

Qing Dynasty, great cultural revolution, chaos in China

that's when Deng Xiaoping reemerged in 1978

he basically pointed out

the only correct path.

We need to go out to the path of growth

and China needs to

modernize and insutrialize.

NATURAL CAPITAL:

Some people have written about, ehm,

natural capital, the capital

that nature provides

which is the clean air and clean water

the uncut forest, the rich farmland and

the minerals, the oil, the metals,

all these things are the capital

the nature has provided

and until about 1980 human

civilization was able to live on

what we might term interest of that capital

or surplus that nature was able to produce

the fruit that farmland can grow without

actually degrading the farmland

or the number of fish you can put out of sea

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