Lines of Flight

Although Jared Diamond didn't have too many illuminating ideas in regards to our topic of population, reading sections of Collapse did help us figure out more narrow questions about population that we are interested in pursuing next fall when we pick the working group back up.

1. Diamond essentially views people as consumers of resources and energy, is this legitimate, or are people able to have more of a positive ecological effects? (Potential further reading in Serres's Parasite)

2. For Diamond, it pretty much all boiled down to population density and food production. Population does need to be looked at in terms of processes, but these seem to basic, what are the isomorphic processes humans use to deal with the issues Diamond presents, as well as other issues, that are more pertinent to human populations.

3. Numbers suggest that the world's population growing at a decreasing rate. Is it possible for human population to level out? What are the factors that allow or disallow this from occurring?

4. It has been suggested the issue of resources is not so much Malthusian as economic. That is, it doesn't matter if population levels out or decreases if the economy grows and uses more resources. Loosely founded on this thought, there has recently been a proposal by French leaders to function as a capitalist economy without actually growing. Is this possible? Is it possible for any society to avoid growth? Is a generation's conception of well-being dependent upon being better off than their parents?

5. In what ways is it useful, or even necessary, to think of population in ecological terms?

6. In a similar vein as population as ecology, to what extent are individuals able to conceptualize themselves as active participants in a population? For example, it is rather easy for individuals to understand thar there is mutually dependence within a family unit, but can a person make the same connection to a larger scale population, and if so, to how large of a population?

7. What are the pluses and minuses of population engineering? Could there be a way to do it without the potential for major negative side effects?

For those who couldn't make it to the first meeting, feel free add any other questions that the reading or these questions bring to mind.