Sustainability

[The Good Reverend Roger]

all I can find about "die back" is that it's some kind of plant disease, but I get the feeling you're using it in a different fashion, what do you mean with it?

The best way to explain it is to google "biology 101 fruit fly experiment".

[Reginald Ret]

all I can find about "die back" is that it's some kind of plant disease, but I get the feeling you're using it in a different fashion, what do you mean with it?

The best way to explain it is to google "biology 101 fruit fly experiment".

population crash: A sudden population decline caused by predation, waste accumulation, or resource depletion; also called a dieback.

direct result of exponential growth in a closed system(earth/biosfere).

[Kai]

I've always bought the Bucky Fuller line:  Malthus wasn't right, what we need is smarter farming, not more.  The failure of the agricultural "green revolution" of the mid-20th Century didn't necessarily vindicate Malthus, it showed that intensive farming isn't sustainable.  Right now we could be sustainably  making enough food to more or less solve world hunger, but there's some dirty business with the agro industry these days that makes it infeasible.  If Monsanto and others hadn't screwed all our farmers, and if there were some kind of program that paid farmers to send their excess crops to 3rd world countries (instead of just farming less), we could feed everybody relatively easily, at least long enough to educate them and allow population growth to naturally decline with gentrification.

That said, sustainability is necessarily limited, due to entropy. 

It's pretty unlimited, given the sun will burn for another 4 billion years or so.

[Jasper]

Is that all it takes, though?  We could easily make the oceans poisonous and deplete the groundwater and effectively destroy most of life on earth.

[Eater of Clowns]

Is that all it takes, though?  We could easily make the oceans poisonous and deplete the groundwater and effectively destroy most of life on earth.

No need!  Jormundgand will poison it for us when he is slain at Ragnarok.

EoC (TOG),
will subscribe to a glorious battle before the sad reality of fucking ourselves into oblivion.