I read his political blog a number of years ago, which was highly intelligent - so apart from the perhaps disappointing skimping on ecological issues, he's otherwise very much worth a look.
http://iprd.org.uk/?cat=37

Jeff, can you address this aspect?

FMagyar,

I googled 'UN Millennium Ecological Survey, 2005' with a view to forming my own, independent assesment as to the extend of the delusion. I didn't find the source of this quote. If this really a fair sample of the position of Mr. Ahmed, I would say it is throughly delusional. 12 billion happy, well fed people AFTER the collapse ... really? Happy perhaps, but only if they are all high pot. But even supplying a generous ration of pot to 12 billion seems an physically impossible goal to me. With pundits like this .... But maybe he is a very nice person, and shouldn't be criticised unfairly. So the request for a more specific reference.

In a more general vein, population really is the problem. If there were a way to suddenly have a population the size of what was extant in 1750 (about 750 million), without killing or other gross behavior, then there would not be a peak oil problem, or AGW problem, or clean water problem, or hungar problem, etc. etc. So avoiding talking about it marks, for me, a pundit with a hidden adgenda: The pundit has a plan, but not one he is willing to talk about to the people whose behavior he is trying to modify.

Norman Dyer's / Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's words are really concise. That single paragraph is useful tool. (Forget the composition problems.)
Is such destructiveness unique to humans? Or just to some cultures? The masses are blameless if you treat them as a gas: they expand to fill all inviting spaces, like rats in a silo. Is it the habits and methods? Congregating in great numbers. Adopt and adapt, to replace fur, claws, and decent teeth we don't have, extending to everything around us? Since we are hunters, this is done without pity? And wielding energy. Is this the mechanism? If the beavers followed these ways, would they emerge as being just as much a plague upon this planet and themselves? Or is it that humans contravene some basic contract of nature?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM1-DQ2Wo_w The Matrix

.
from "Princess Mononoke" Ghibli Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFGQUfTCEXI&feature=related
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/3371638 Much better in Japanese
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Princess-Mononoke/28630857?strackid=4765ae0...
http://www.amazon.com/Princess-Mononoke-Animated/dp/B00003CXBK/ref=sr_1_...

Dear Fred Magyar,

Thanks for intellectual honesty and moral courage.

Given the general mind-set, the one driven in our time by economic globalization and the global political economy, it is difficult to believe how change to whatsoever is sustainable could occur.

Gigantic, multinational conglomerates adamantly engaged in the production of goods (both needed and unnecessary), business and finance, the marvelous edifices housing the great religions, large-scale agriculture, the military complexes, these are the actual constructions that drive the process of economic globalization and give the global political economy its leviathan-like structure.

What you are reporting appears correct. It seems to me that two things could happen. First, an internet-driven transformation of global human consciousness will somehow occur in order to bring about necessary changes in the self-serving, destructive behavior of the fossil fools among us. Second, something embodied in this shift in human consciousness will give rise to completely unexpected, somehow interlocking events like the one which occurred at the city of Jericho in ancient times when “the walls fell down”. Even the leviathans of human enterprise in our days could crumble.

Recently we witnessed the near collapse of some of the giants of the automobile industry and the virtual implosion of investment houses and big banks on Wall Street. Are the titans of big business and finance not only “too-big-to-fail” but also “too-big-to-succeed” precisely because they are soon to become patently unsustainable on a planet with size, composition and ecology of Earth?

We have also seen in the past several years the poisonous fruits to be derived from extolling as ‘virtues’ outrageous greed, obscene overconsumption and relentless hoarding of wealth by many too many leaders. Never in the course of human events have so few stolen so much from so many....with a sense of pride. That these people reward each other with medals and awards for their pernicious activities is shameful. I believe we can agree that the unbridled overgrowth activities of the masters of the universe now overspreading the surface of Earth can much longer stand neither the test of time nor the biophysical limitations of the planetary home we are to inhabit and not ruin, I suppose. Following self-proclaimed masters of the universe down a primrose path could be the wrong way to direct the children to go.

The children deserve the chance of facing the prospect of a future that is good enough. I am no longer thinking of leaving the children a better world than the one that was given to their elders. That appears out of reach now. It remains my hope that the elder generation, with responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, will do better than we doing now by changing our ways for the sake of keeping Earth fit for habitation by children everywhere. As examples, we could pay our debts instead of mortgage the children’s future; we could clean up the ecological messes that have been made in the course of the past 65 years; we could eschew “bigger is better” and “the biggest is the best” in favor of “small is beautiful”, doing more with less, and embracing the spirit of living well by living more simply and sustainably.

Perhaps changes toward sustainable lifestyles and right-sized enterprises are in the offing.

And perhaps we have been travelling down a long road over hundreds upon hundreds of years, a road of growing production and distribution capabilities, of wanton overconsumption and reckless hoarding, and of unbridled overpopulation. These activities have been occurring for a long time on a small scale, but only recently exploded in seemingly uncontrollable ways, within the natural world we inhabit and without sufficient regard being given either to human limits or Earth’s limitations. An improbable combination of narcissism, arrogance, foolhardiness and greed blinded leadership to the practical requirements of living on Earth; to the “rules of the house” in our planetary home. Too many leaders decided to willfully behave like kids who were left alone and given the run of the house by their overseers. All the rules were ‘forgotten’ or simply ignored. Laissez faire, whatever will be will be, living without limits and all that ruled!

The children tore everything up and made a big mess. When they realized what they were doing, they felt stuck as if between a rock and hard place. Do they stop their destructive activities or else choose to keep tearing up the house? This is a tough choice for kids at play. Who knows, perhaps they will not be caught red-handed at what they have been doing. And if they are caught, they could always blame the wreckage on other bad boys. How many times have we seen kids at play and men at work blaming their wrongdoing on others and not ever taking responsibility for their own dishonest, deceitful or destructive behavior?

Either the choice to turn back and begin the clean-up or the choice to keep tearing things up is fraught with danger. From a kid’s (or fossil fool’s) perspective they could face more danger by trying to clean up the mess they made than they would be exposed to by continuing with their rampage. Either choice presents its own challenges and threats. After all, so much damage has already been done. There is no longer any easy way forward, that is for sure, even under the best circumstances.

What to do here? Now what? These are the questions, I suppose.

Sincerely,

Steve

My comments on the remaining points of his program:

On the political front, there should be more real democracy (decentralization of power) through community-lead governance.

The first populist President of US was Andrew Jackson, he ran on a promise to force the Cherokee out of their homeland, so that it could be occupied by white citizens. This was as close to 'real democracy' as we have ever had in USA. For some of the people, namely the Cherokee, real democracy was a really bad deal. And when some of the tribes revolted, that was, I think, community-lead governance, and it didn't really work successfully for the community.

On the social front, there should be new mechanisms for more equal wealth distribution, land reform and widespread private ownership of productive capital.

We, mankind, have a long history of wishing for this. And a long history of the wealthy making sure it doesn't happen. What will make it different this time?

On the financial front, there should be a monetary reform based on interest-free loans (only fees for banks) for productive and innovative investments.

Interest free loans is another way of saying capital is a free good. If this could be done, the banks would already have done it. But they would still charge interest and make pots of money on the capital that they got for free from the magical free capital source.

On the energy front, there should be large-scale investments in decentralized renewable energy technology (solar, tidal, wind, bio-fuels, geothermal, hydro-electric).

No problem with this idea, IMHO. Just use whatever it takes of the free capital, from above.

On the agricultural front, there should be smaller localized organic agricultural enterprises.

No problem, just use free capital to implement. Also have enough gigantic factory farms (with free capital) to actually supply the free food for the 12 billion.

I don't understand how the world really works. But Mr. Ahmed seems to understand even less. I would not vote for him as philosopher-king of the world. If someone could just suggest a way to run society without the use of money ... but that doesn't seem likely.

The problem really does seem to be right-sizing the population. But I have no idea how to decide what the right size is, and no idea how to go about implementing the decision.

TOD seems to recognize that which Ahmed ignores. The planet will not support more than, perhaps one Billion (Give or take 250 Million) without huge hydrocarbon resources in the form of oil & gas. Electric powered vehicles may help, but cannot fertilize the land. Further, there is a shortage of potable and usable fresh water; the energy cost for sufficient desalinization appears prohibitive.

I would like to see J.Michael Greer's assessment of this tome.

Craig

"On the social front, there should be new mechanisms for more equal wealth distribution, land reform and widespread private ownership of productive capital."

This point doesnt take into acount human nature and status seeking behaviour. As the energy pie decreases everyone will be trying hard to hold onto their slice. This will only result in great inequalities as wealth becomes concentrated to the top of the heirachy. As Donella Meadows pointed out "Success to the successful". For those at the bottom of the socio-trophic chain, the billion people who already live on only a dollar a day or less, this is already resulting in starvation and death.

In one word, there should be a new human model through a cultural reevaluation of the human lifestyle.

One word? "Duh!"

The author assumes that "we" are in control, or implies that we can be.

"We" never were, never will be.

I think not only do all have possibilities, but all (properly defined) are necessary - and all are interrelated. And, to be fair, absent a magic wand, I don't really see much of any of this actually happening.

1. On the political front, there should be more real democracy (decentralization of power) through community-lead governance.

This looks like a no-brainer to me. Once you understand that modern so-called democratic governments are structured to function primarily as arbiters of economic exploitation, and that this goes hand in hand with resource exploitation, you cannot avoid the twin conclusions that 1) to mitigate the latter, you must alter the structure of the State in ways that *actively* (in an ongoing manner) diffuse power away from the center (recognizing that accrual of power over time is the modus operandi of government - a la Higgs' demonstration of the 'ratchet effect'), and 2) the exploiters are so firmly in command of the apparatus of the State that such changes will be perceived (accurately) to be a threat and thus will be resisted violently.

Worth noting: accomplishing #1 is a pre-requisite to accomplishing the rest. The primary impediment to crafting a "new human model" is those who benefit from the old model, and it is by definition those forces which either control or strongly influence modern States.

Personally, I don't think we're going to resolve this (too many people are delusional about the nature and abilities of government), so the rest of this response is more a thought experiment than anything else.

2. On the economic front, there should be sustainable (not unlimited) growth.

This seems oxymoronic, although it depends upon how one defines 'growth' (and the criteria used to determine growth) to some extent. I think it would make sense to reject the notion of growth altogether and use instead 'well being' as the appropriate metric. We have to divest ourselves of the pernicious notion that modern, industrial, high-output, exploitative economies are the economic target for all the others, and that the fraudulent GDP stat is the appropriate metric (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#Limitations_of_GDP_t...).

This ties into the notion of sustainable development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_development

If the word 'growth' were to be replaced with 'development', with 'well-being' as the metric, thus taking into account economic, social, environmental and cultural aspects, then I think this would have legs.

3. On the social front, there should be new mechanisms for more equal wealth distribution, land reform and widespread private ownership of productive capital.

A society in which vast inequities - economic, social, etc - exist is not a stable society, thus not sustainable. So this is a key point being made, IMO. But if you use violence to redistribute wealth, you perpetuate the economic and social inequity due to the political inequities which invariably arise. Resolving #1 above is a pre-requisite.

The only way I could see this being successful is via a civil society, community based approach.

For example, I think it was the Dineh people who had a ritual where richer members of the tribe would regularly engage in public 'giveaways' in which they would give gifts of significant value to other members who had less, which kept inequalities of wealth from accruing over time.

How to make such a thing work for cultures which do not have a legacy of it absent forced redistribution - unsustainable - isn't clear to me.

I do think if #1 above were accomplished, and a vibrant civil society were permitted to arise, there would be more options to address #3. Consider than, prior to the 20th century, there were thousands and thousands of mutual aid and charitable societies operating, many which derived from the guild system of the middle ages. Some were ethnic in nature, some work-based, others religious. This network of social support systems was killed off by State intrusion, so could be built back up after extrusion of same.

4. On the financial front, there should be a monetary reform based on interest-free loans (only fees for banks) for productive and innovative investments.

Again, I think this is a key point being made. It's the current monetary regime which underlies the notion of exponential growth, and the fractional-reserve, fiat system which enables it.

Monetary reform, in order to function properly, must constrain the arbitrary fiscal power of any governmental entity. Adopting a gold standard would be the most obvious way to do this, as it has worked for thousands of years. All fiat currency system eventually fail - the verdict of history is unequivocal in this respect. We're seeing this happen in real time. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to grasp the concept. This goes hand in hand with all of the above points.

5. On the energy front, there should be large-scale investments in decentralized renewable energy technology (solar, tidal, wind, bio-fuels, geothermal, hydro-electric).

I'd classify this one as less important (in terms of directing implementation) than the others, only because I think if you accomplish the others, this is a predictable outcome. I also think that lots of small scale investments, which would comprise a large-scale investment in aggregate, would be preferable to some sort of centralization of investment.

6. On the agricultural front, there should be smaller localized organic agricultural enterprises.

Again, like #5, this would be a natural outcome of the resolution of #1 - #4.

This all sounds like a Third World left-wing political agenda that has little to do with Peak Oil.

Smaller localized organic agricultural enterprises? Okay, if you want to hasten a die-off a shift to lower productivity farming is one way to do it.

As for interest-free loans: Is this guy a Muslim? This is right out of the Koran.

Equal wealth distribution: Lenin and Mao tried that. How'd that work out?

When it is used like this, the word "should" is a signal of an attempt at moral coercion to the speaker's point of view. So many uses of "should" in the propositions is a sign that the author is dreaming about the perfectibility of Man, and may be summarily disregarded with no penalty by those who are interested in what actually might happen. I intend to do just that. As I should :-)

I found what may be the original source of this data. It's very similar to a piece by Dr Ahmed in Ceasefire magazine:

http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/arts-culture/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-k...

Here is the original list from that article, for clarity's sake:

"Any vision for ‘another world’, if it is to overcome the deep-rooted structural failures of our current business-as-usual model, will need to explore how we can develop new social, political and economic structures which encourage the following:

1. Widespread distribution of ownership of productive resources so that all members of society have a stake in agricultural, industrial and commercial productive enterprises, rather than a tiny minority monopolising resources for their own interests.

2. More decentralised politico-economic participation through self-managerial producer and consumer councils to facilitate participatory decision-making in economic enterprises.

3. Re-defining the meaning of economic growth to focus less on materially-focused GDP, and more on the capacity to deliver values such as health, education, well-being, longevity, political and cultural freedom.

4. Fostering a new, distributed renewable energy infrastructure based on successful models such as that of the borough of Woking in Surrey, UK.

5. Structural reform of the monetary, banking and financial system including abolition of interest, in particular the cessation of money-creation through government borrowing on compound interest.

6. Elimination of unrestricted lending system based on faulty quantitative risk-assessment models, with mechanisms to facilitate greater regulation of lending practices by bank depositors themselves.

7. Development of parallel grassroots participatory political structures that are both transnational and community-oriented, by which to facilitate community governance as well as greater popular involvement in mainstream political institutions.

8. Development of parallel grassroots participatory economic institutions that are both transnational and community-oriented, to facilitate emergence of alternative equitable media of exchange and loans between North and South.

9. Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ scientific paradigm and worldview which recognizes that the cutting-edge insights of physics and biology undermine traditional, mechanistic conceptions of the natural order, pointing to a more holistic understanding of life and nature.

10. Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ ethic recognizing that progressive values and ideals such as justice, compassion, and generosity are more conducive to the survival of the human species, and thus more in harmony with the natural order, than the conventional ‘materialistic’ behaviours associated with neoliberal consumerism."

ditto

Interesting, you seem to agree with the statement of issues, but merely have a different perspective on causes and solutions (though you don't give details).

What is your 'solution' to the above issues?

Are you in your mid 30's?

Please don't scream at the sleepers. They don't even know they sleep. It all seems so real.
They, the them, are waiting at birth. The games are all in place, elaborated upon, the arguments... airtight... to a neonate.

Yes, everything they know is wrong. From within their self-consistent world model, shouting this invites only fear of a frightening madness.
Someone has to right at the brink of realizing something before they can hear your words, before you can just tell them the thing.
It is an art to illuminate.

Jerry,

Perhaps Jeff should stick with staying in his room and toying with his "Rhizomes".

Perhaps you should read more closely before you get snarky. Jeff didn't write the book but rather just posted information about it.

Todd

I'd really like to engage with some of the other issues raised here, but unfortunately have to run as the food in the oven is getting burnt!

Thank you Dr. Ahmed, for your comment. I probably would have read your book regardless of the reviewer's comment but now I will definitely seek it out!

BTW, I agree with this statement:

So I should say from the outset that I believe that unsustainable population growth is a symptom and secondary cause, not a fundamental cause, of our current predicament.

Fred Magyar

Dr Ahmed
Much appreciate your comment.

With regard to how many people organic agriculture might feed, in my guest post on ToD a while back, (posted by Gail, March 2009), I quoted a similar academic claim about "feeding the world". An article by the authors, Badgely and Perfecto from the University of Nebraska can be found here http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=a...
The authors make a good point: “Food security depends on policies and prices as much as on yields”.
My personal take on the different kinds of organic or biological farming, is that they could not supply enough food on their own in many regions. For example here in 'temperate' Britain we have not much more than 6M arable, plowable, hectares for a 60M population, or about 4 persons per acre to grow staple food stuffs. (There is more grass, but that still would not suffice.) Even in a favorable two-crops a year area like the Yangtze basin that has supported high density populations for 2 millennia, they now need supplementary nitrogen fertilizer, even with a large measure of nutrient re-cycling.

Best wishes for your book

phil

After many years of lurking on the Oil Drum, I am finally motivated to actually post a comment.

My comment:

In October, 2006 Algora Publishing published my book entitled: “Infinity’s Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization.” This work uses a formal systems theoretical approach to provide an integrated analysis of the problems of peak oil and resource depletion, climate change, food production and disease, corporatism and capture of media by corporations, religious fanaticism and more.

Algora’s web site states: “Exploring the links between politics and economics, globalization, peak oil, global warming, and disastrous weather, the author shows how human values and human activity have set us on a course to calamity and calls for a profound change in how we exploit the earth’s resources…” (Reference: http://www.algora.com/132/book/details.html#introduction )

Per the World Catalog, this book is in 240 libraries around the world. These libraries include Harvard, Yale, Princeton MIT, UCLA, UC Berkley etc. (Reference: http://www.worldcat.org/title/infinitys-rainbow-the-politics-of-energy-c... )

Jeff Vail’s book review for Nafeez Ahmed’s just released book “A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It” states in part:

“Perhaps for purposes of marketing, simplicity, or simple ignorance, we are awash in commentary on how climate change will spell disaster, or how peak oil will spell disaster, or famine or disease, etc. But these analysts have failed to advance a comprehensive systems-theory approach to our civilization’s troubles. Enter Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.”

I note that Mr. Vail is also mentioned in the “Preface and Acknowledgements” section of Ahmed’s book.

I object to this statement by Mr. Vail, and to the claim on Dr. Ahmed’s book that it is: “The FIRST book to systematically explore [the interconnections between] climate change, peak oil, the cost of food and overpopulation, the global financial crisis, the rise of violent extremism, and the containment of the so called war on terror..”

I object to all of this because it is factually untrue, since my book using systems theory to explain these multiple crises was published over four years ago. Further, I am not the only person prior to Ahmed to attempt a systems theoretical integrated analysis. Many others have contributed to this effort before my book was published. This list includes the researchers involved with the Club of Rome project, through Will Catton, to Joseph Tainter, John Michael Greer, and many others.

Dr. Ahmed may, possibly, have contributed to this approach (I am just beginning to read his book), however, his work is certainly not the first to use systems theory to relate multiple existential variables.

Dr. Mike Byron

I Look forward to your elaboration that unsustainable population growth is a symptom and secondary cause, not a fundamental cause, of our current predicament.

Since mitigating population growth directly as a source of a problem at this point in time seems an impossibility because of the moral, ethical, religious, cultural constraints I am intrigued to consider a scenario where it solves itself when the secondary cause you elude to could be addressed and cause this unsustainable population "symptom" to thus indirectly be corrected.

"Civilizations fail when the quality of its people becomes too low to sustain it."

How would you go about defining the 'quality' of a people - that is, what are the criteria that would establish this? Would it change over time? Seems like a daunting task. Furthermore, how would you then quantify such a seemingly ethereal quality, and how would you establish the quantitative threshold for 'too low', 'just right', etc?

"My suggestion is a Bill of Rights for children, which would guarantee every child a top quality education and at least one decent parent."

How exactly would you go about doing this? How would you account for the 'quality' and reliability of the social structures needed to sustain and enforce such rights? Would these be setup by some central authority, or would you create conditions wherein such things would spontaneously arise?

What if a child is born to two lousy parents? Would you take the child away? How would you determine what makes a 'decent' parent? Would there be a test of some sort? Administered by whom?

How can you declare a 'right' to something which someone else must provide via the fruits of their labors (in this case, the fruits of a lot of teacher's labors)? Wouldn't that make it a privilege, and not a right? Would you use violence and the threat of violence to tax others and redistribute their wealth to, in this case, teachers? This sounds like slavery, or at best forced servitude, and I don't think that's a good start.

Who would enforce the Bill of Rights you seek? What if someone wanted to opt out - could you use violence to force them to pay for its implementation? Could you force it on their children if they objected? If they never voted for the 'right', would they be bound by it nevertheless? Would it be imposed upon them?

There is also a major difference between a 'legal right' - after all, slaveowners had the legal right to own people, which we pretty much agree now is a 'wrong' - and a right arising from something like natural law, which is an artifact of human cognition, and asserted as universal. Are you asserting that children have a natural right to an education? Similar to the right to life and liberty arising from natural law doctrine? What's the philosophical underpinning of the doctrine which you would see as giving rise to this right?

Do we even as a society know what a 'top quality education' is? Looking around, I doubt it.

Dont get me wrong, Bill, I sympathize with your aim, and I'd love to see every child on the planet have two awesome parents, and a top quality education. I'd also like for them to have warm clothes in the winter, quality medical care, nutritious and tasty food sufficient to their needs, and a bunch of other stuff. But the devil, as always, is in the details. And I'm not sure the type of society that would arise in response to 'rights' which must per force coerce the efforts of others to fulfill, would be capable of providing any of these things reliably.

I also think that imagining that humans can devise "substitutes" for what are simply natural mechanisms of population control is probably biting off a bit more than we can reasonably be expected to chew. The idea, IMO, is to craft a society which can live in harmony with nature and its ways, not seek to master or 'outsmart' it. I kinda think that's how we got into this mess in the first place.

Yes
Living in a group that has capital, including technique, is safer than facing nature without these resources. It is, perhaps, the next level of adaptation to out weak animal form; one without strength, fur, or claws. But when animals quit dying, their numbers skyrocket, the environment is outpaced. No-one wants to die.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXoWwonpQto

Your book? Like many things in the Price System offers no viable ideas, also it seems a non science approach.
It is a rehash of the status quo.

''In view of this, I’m deeply sceptical of any proposal to ‘engineer’ populations through any artificial means.''

Really? Thats nice. Not sure what that means. Conspiracy? Are you against birth control?
If an area is over populated to resources does it not make sense to limit the population?
Sounds like you and Jeff Vail also are scratching each others backs... if as another comment further up indicates... you mention him in your book..?. so he is just promoting his internet presence also as an editor here.
He is an anarcho-primitivist at base... correct?

Your book does not advocate energy economics or biophysical economics in a non market economic system.. sometimes known as thermoeconomics http://www.eoearth.org/article/Biophysical_economics

So I guess you are another reformist of the current system or agitator of those old well worn and dysfunctional ideas.
People have been trying to reform the present contract society civil society since shortly after it was invented http://history-world.org/reforms_of_urukagina.htm and so far that is not working.
Maybe a different approach is in order?

Dr. Ahmed, thank you for addressing the Amazon reviewer's concerns that now have been shown to be non-applicable.

We certainly do need to look at the affinity between separate issues such as climate disruption, energy security, food insecurity, economic instability, international terrorism, and the militarization tendency. For the amount of money we spent on the Iraq war, we could have installed high speed rail between several dozen cities across the country. Yet, as Frank Gaffney (Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense) has said, through our importing of vast amounts of oil "we are paying terrorists to kill us". Massive numbers of suburban yards are devoid of the gardens and the fruit and nut trees that could help sustain the occupants. Growth economics is dead, but the PTB haven't thought to look for a pulse yet.

I look forward to reading your book, and helping to correct the misunderstanding in the review.

populations can only be effectively stabilized in parity with the environment through deeper structural factors linked to the nature of our economic and cultural systems

Please list the “deeper structural factors linked to the nature of our economic and cultural systems” you have in mind in order of their importance.

What evidence do you see indicating they will work?

"He also dismissed population growth out-of-hand as an "us vs. them" ideology. He did not acknowledge that per capita oil usage has average approximately 3.6 barrels per person per year since 1970. Given that he acknowledged Peak Oil, if population growth continues unchecked then the math requires that that average fall."

I haven't read the book yet, so can't respond directly, and I may be out on the weeds on this, but this seems odd to me in light of what Dr Ahmed himself said a couple of days ago in one of his posts upthread from yours (did you read that post?), with respect to population, which strikes me not as dismissive, but as rather nuanced:

"So what is my view of the link between population growth and our current crises? Well as I mentioned in my first comment, I definitely don’t see it as a fundamental or primary cause – hence the reason why it is not discussed in detail in the book as a ‘crisis’ of its own (however it is mentioned).

To explain the complexity of the population issue as a causation factor, here’s an example. Over the last decades population growth in much of the less developed South has been fairly rapid. Their populations are projected to continue growing rapidly over coming decades. If we compare population sizes and rates of growth, the South is far ahead of the industrialized North, experiencing a disproportionately high proportion of child population, and high overall population growth rates. In contrast, the North is characterized by continuous population aging, declining fertility and birth rates, a declining rate of population growth, with projections of eventual population decline.

Despite this demographic imbalance between North and South, with the South seeming ‘overpopulated’ relative to the North, it is the industrialized North that is responsible for overconsumption of the vast bulk of global natural resources. The US for instance has about 5 per cent of the world’s population, yet consumes about 24 per cent of the world’s energy. China of course this year, with a much huger population, has overtaken the US. Then of course we find that actually the vast majority of the ‘overpopulated’ South is barely contributing to world energy consumption levels. There’s a nice graphic on this here, btw: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption

So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that there is not a simple correlation between population growth and energy consumption/depletion levels. Again, I’m explicitly not denying that population is a significant factor, of course it is. But the real question here, is about *consumption*.

What is it that is driving unsustainable levels of consumption in industrialized, richer countries? Why is it that populations in poorer countries are growing so fast compared to ours, yet consuming far less? (and yes I do try to answer these questions in the book!)

Generally, there is a consensus emerging among the more ‘progressive’ segments of the literature on demographics that populations tend to stabilize when people’s basic needs are met – hence the disparity in population trends between north and south."

I guess I need to get moving and read the book. I don't mind people asserting a political agenda, provided they back it up with logic and data. My political views have shifted over time, as I've encountered solid arguments which proved I was wrong about this or that. Remaining open minded is the key to growth, IMO.