Was
this the post you were referring to:
Hi everybody...water's looking awful hot down there.
Daniel Quinn addresses the subject of population expansion in several books--which is where my two cents come from on this subject.
The obvious answer that everyone always points to is population control, except that there has never been a working model of population control anywhere in all our history. These plans go off the rails in one manner or another.
The part of our brains having this intellectual swordfight is not the part responding to sexual impulse. These decisions are not made in forums but in hotel rooms and apartments and tents and mud huts and teepees and igloos and broom closets the world over.
Since this is a basic human inclination (and this being a Permaculture group after all), and humans with this basic inclination are being born by the second, we are grinding down our teeth giving momentary and intensely intellectual pushback to a problem that flows unbroken out of the pipe of human nature.
More practical, then, we can observe the organism and its associations in its natural environment, in the same way that we might study squirrels or pawpaws or fruit bats.
Quinn ties the subject of population to the larger topic of the distribution of food and what he calls "the food race": our attempt to agriculturally outpace the population growth.
It is no longer an accurate description to talk about a countries' biological behavior, as it certainly would have been in 1800 before the advent of mainstream worldwide distribution. Today Africans are consuming American corn and Japanese are consuming American soybeans, America is consuming Mexican produce and Canadian grain (all on equipment manufactured in China from steel mined and processed in Africa, Indonesia, and Taiwan)... we are tied together with a network of millions of veins stretching hither and yon in an unintelligible tangle.
Taken as whole then, we are producing an astounding quantity of food, and ever increasing in an attempt to "win the food race". Ecology will teach you that nature abhors a vacuum (and so does commerce, as it turns out), and a species will expand to consume a given quantity of food (etc.).
Reflexively, an organism is limited by its food source.
If you put enough food for one hundred mice into a cage with two mice, you will in short order have around 100 mice. If you continue to put enough food for 100 mice, the population will hover around 100 mice. It's just math.
So the population question is inherently a food question. "Population control" in a resource-rich environment is kind of like trying to stuff water back into a pipe.
Population control is easy--nature does it all day long with no help and no questions.
Direct link to post:
https://permies.com/t/80/53917/population-family-planning-adoption#720930