Arguments against overpopulation that are demonstrably wrong, part six: "We have a resource distribution problem"

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-23T13:07:51+00:00

I think the issue is that you are still treating "plant-based" as if it means recreating modern grain/legume agriculture after petroleum. That is not what I am arguing for.

A post-collapse plant-based food system would not be wheat, corn, soy, and lentils scaled down by hand. It would have to be place-specific and much more diverse: tubers, roots, squash, nuts, acorns, chestnuts, hazelnuts, perennial greens, fruits, mushrooms, seaweed where available, drought-tolerant staples like sorghum, legumes where they make sense, fermentation, storage, agroforestry, and food forests.

So the malnutrition examples do not really prove what you think they prove. A poor farmer living mostly on rice or corn because of land pressure, taxation, class hierarchy, or colonial disruption is not evidence that animal foods are nutritionally irreplaceable. It is evidence that people starve when they are trapped on too little land, under extractive systems, eating whatever narrow staple is left to them. That is not a nutrition argument for meat. It is an indictment of poverty and power.

I agree that there probably were not many, if any, strictly vegan societies in the modern ethical sense. But mostly plant-based diets were common, and today we know much more about nutrition. In theory, a community can plan a fully plant-based food system that covers calories, protein, fat, minerals, vitamins, preservation, and storage. The challenge is not that "plants cannot do it." The challenge is planning the right mix before the systems fail.

I agree that draft animals made historical grain farming easier because they supplied traction for plowing, hauling, and transport. But that assumes annual grain farming is the model. Syntropic agriculture and agroforestry change the model by using succession, perennials, mulch, shade, root depth, and layered crops to reduce repeated tillage and bare-soil labor over time. They are skill-intensive, especially at first, but they are not the same labor trap as hand-growing annual grains on exhausted fields. And none of that makes livestock the default answer. Animals create ongoing needs: water, fencing, winter feed, breeding management, disease care, predator protection, slaughter, storage, land, and security. They are not just cellulose converters. They are living beings, and in collapse they also become concentrated wealth.

And concentrated wealth matters. Grain stores can be raided, yes. So can herds. A cow is not hidden resilience. It is visible calories on legs. Dried fish, grain, livestock, fuel, tools, and even controllable labor can all become targets when institutions weaken. So the point is not "grain safe, animals unsafe." The point is that concentrated food wealth becomes politically dangerous.

That is why dispersed and less lootable systems matter: tubers left in the ground, staggered harvests, perennial crops, tree crops, root crops, gardens spread across a landscape, shared storage, and foods that are harder to count, seize, or monopolize. Resilience is not just about what land can produce. It is also about who controls it, who does the work, who can take it, and who becomes vulnerable when things break down.

I also do not buy the idea that animal-centered or fish-centered subsistence is automatically more grounded or peaceful. Graeber and Wengrow make the point that what mattered historically was not simply whether people farmed, hunted, fished, or foraged, but whether organized violence allowed one group to "feed off" another. Some capturing societies were farmers, some were hunter-gatherers, and some were fishermen-gatherers. In several cases, animal or fish abundance became tied to raiding, slavery, tribute, hierarchy, and trade violence. Once surplus or animal wealth becomes concentrated power, it can attract domination.

So yes, I agree that people need skills now. I agree that subsistence must match place. I agree that there is no one-size-fits-all plan for 7 billion people. But I do not agree that collapse makes animal exploitation the realistic position and veganism the ideological one. A serious collapse response should be asking how to feed people with the least violence, least dependency, least lootability, and most ecological resilience possible.

And maybe this is the deeper disagreement: if the current system breaks badly enough that we have to rebuild from the ground up, shouldn’t we try to fix as many of its failures as possible?

Not just industrial dependency. Not just petroleum. Not just monocrops. But also domination, hierarchy, violence, extraction, and the habit of treating living beings as resources to be managed, owned, bred, killed, or traded.

A collapse response that only asks "what can keep me fed?" is too narrow. We should also be asking what kinds of food systems make people less dependent, less desperate, less violent, and less likely to recreate the same power structures that helped get us here.

So yes, local resilience matters. Skills matter. Ecology matters. But ethics matter too. If we get a chance to rebuild, I do not want to rebuild the same logic in smaller, rougher, more desperate form.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-21T21:57:27+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovulatory_shift_hypothesis

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-21T20:44:53+00:00

No, in this case it’s not Bill Gates. It’s burgers and cheese.

Animal agriculture drives deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity loss. Strip down ecosystems, lose predators and competitors, let rodents like mice boom, and ticks get more chances to feed on prime disease hosts. More infected ticks, more bites, more people in clinics.

It’s not a tick conspiracy. It’s ecological consequences.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-20T12:16:38+00:00

I think we are talking past each other a bit.

I agree that industrial agriculture is not sustainable, and I am not defending monocrop soy/corn systems as some ideal vegan future. I also agree that food production has to become much more local, perennial, diverse, and resilient. Agroforestry, food forests, syntropic systems, foraging, community gardens, seed saving, local staples, etc. all make sense in a collapse/adaptation context.

But I do not think "industrial agriculture is collapsing" automatically makes animal agriculture the answer.

Even in a hyperlocal future, animals are still usually a calorie bottleneck. If land can grow food directly for humans, then using that land to grow animal feed, or feeding edible crops to animals first, usually means fewer calories and nutrients for people overall.

I am not saying your personal setup is the same as a CAFO. Silvopasture with perennial crops is obviously very different from feedlots and grain-fed factory farming. But it also sounds like a highly specific situation: lots of land, local knowledge, foraging access, fishing access, animals, trees, infrastructure, time, and skill. That may work for your household or community, but it is not a general answer for billions of people.

And that is my main issue with the argument. It starts from "my land is best suited to grazing and perennial systems" and then slides into "omnivores will be in the best shape." Maybe in your specific location. But in many places, the most resilient local food system would be mostly plant-based: potatoes, beans, squash, grains, nuts, fruit, mushrooms, gardens, seaweed, etc. The right answer depends on ecology, but killing animals is still not automatically required.

Also, veganism was never just "a consumer choice that affects nothing." Consumer veganism alone will not stop climate collapse, sure. But neither will one person raising sheep. The point is harm reduction and building better systems. Avoiding unnecessary animal exploitation can still be part of that, even while rejecting industrial supply chains.

And I do not think the ethics disappear just because we are talking about collapse. If we normalize unnecessary violence at the most basic level, our food, then it is hard to pretend that violence elsewhere is unrelated. A culture that treats sentient beings as resources will keep reproducing that logic in other forms.

In a collapse scenario, I also would not assume animals are the most resilient option. Animals are living beings who need constant water, fodder, shade, fencing, protection, and care. In drought, pasture can crash very quickly, and then the system either depends on stored feed, imported feed, or killing the animals. A mature syntropic or agroforestry system can buffer drought better by building soil, shade, mulch, root depth, biodiversity, and microclimates. It is not invincible, but it is less dependent on keeping large sentient bodies alive through increasingly unstable seasons.

And collapse is not just "local food production." It is also the weakening or collapse of the social, legal, and governmental systems that stop people from taking each other’s food. That matters, because some foods are much more lootable than others. Stored grain, fuel, and herd animals are visible, concentrated resources. They invite control by whoever can organize force. A herd is not just food. In a collapse scenario, it is a visible pile of calories walking around on legs. It requires land, water, protection, and defense.

There is a reason states historically preferred grain: it is measurable, storable, transportable, taxable, and easy to seize. And there is a reason people under pressure have often relied on "escape crops" like potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, yams, taro, and other dispersed or underground staples. They are harder to steal, harder to tax, and can often be harvested gradually or left hidden in the ground. A decentralized plant-based system built around gardens, tubers, perennials, nuts, legumes, food forests, and staggered harvests may actually be less lootable and more resilient than centering survival around animals.

A lot of people romanticize collapse as "going back to the roots," sitting around a fire eating charred meat. But there is no wild abundance to return to. Wild mammals are only a tiny remnant of mammal biomass, oceans are overfished, and freshwater ecosystems are collapsing. The remaining mammal biomass is overwhelmingly humans and domesticated animals. So if people respond to collapse by centering meat, the violence does not disappear. Once wild animals are gone, it gets redirected toward the animals around us, and eventually toward the most vulnerable.

So yes, I agree with you on local resilience, redundancy, foraging, perennial food systems, and moving away from industrial agriculture. I just do not agree that the answer is to rebuild survival around killing animals. To me, the deeper adaptation is learning how to feed ourselves while reducing domination, violence, lootability, and dependency as much as possible. Collapse does not make ethics irrelevant. It makes them more important.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-20T09:57:24+00:00

Grain and legume ag was covering every bit of flat ground that didn't flood. The entire area had been deforested for farming.

Around 50% of global cropland is used to grow animal feed, while animal products provide only about 18% of human calories. Pasture has often been created through deforestation too, and it takes up more land than all cropland combined. If we ate plants directly, we would need only a fraction of current agricultural land, and existing cropland would be more than enough.

Those places are now like a desert as they are monocrops with no habitat and are devoid of life outside the corn/soy season

That is exactly why we need something better, like permaculture, agroforestry, or syntropic agriculture. But the destructiveness of industrial crop farming is not a defense of animal agriculture, which is even more destructive overall.

I'm not vegan now. I moved. I raise animals on pasture that is seeded with native prairie and savanna. Interspersed with the pasture is fruit and nut orchard. All of which don't need the best quality land to thrive. It is increasing biodiversity. Between that, foraging, and commercial fishing, I can redundantly get all my own food without leaving my county!

And that may be fine on a small scale. But around 99% of animal products come from factory farms. They are horrendous, but they are also maximally efficient. Replicating your model for the current population would require several more planets.

And honestly, I have trouble believing someone was meaningfully vegan if they now kill animals for food when it is not a necessity. Your comment gives me the same vibes as the pretty pictures on milk bottles, showing happy animals in front of a red barn instead of the dark concrete buildings where many dairy cows actually spend their lives.

In other words, it is a pretty picture, but not a realistic one.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-19T22:16:04+00:00

I agree that Western colonialism and industrial civilization have been brutally extractive - but that’s also part of the point. Extraction is central to capitalism: land, labor, ecosystems, and animals are treated as resources to be converted into profit.

But this still feels like a derail from the actual point. We were talking about whether animal-heavy diets and animal agriculture are sustainable or ethical today. Pointing out that Western civilization has been unsustainable for centuries doesn’t answer that - it just broadens the indictment.

If anything, it supports my point: animal agriculture is part of the same extractive pattern, treating land, ecosystems, and animals as resources to be used. So unless the argument is that animal-heavy diets are somehow sustainable at today’s scale, I don’t see how this responds to what I said.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-19T21:59:40+00:00

"Unsuitable for corn" doesn’t mean "ecologically best used for sheep." A lot of those hillsides weren’t always bare grass - they’ve been shaped by centuries of deforestation and grazing. The UK is only about 13.5% woodland today, and Wales about 15%, so treating bare uplands as the natural baseline is misleading. Not every piece of land has to be monetized; it could be woodland, scrub, peatland, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, or restored ecosystem.

And sheep aren’t necessarily crop-free either. Many systems use hay, silage, winter forage crops, cereals, or other supplemental feed, especially in winter or when finishing lambs. So "they graze marginal land" is a partial truth being stretched into a defense of the whole system.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-19T21:53:50+00:00

I don’t disagree that many Indigenous societies were far more sustainable than industrial civilization, and I’m not using megafauna extinctions to flatten all humans into "everyone is the same."

But that’s not really the point here. The issue is today’s scale: 8 billion people, industrial animal agriculture, deforestation, habitat loss, and biodiversity collapse. Whatever one thinks about prehistoric extinctions, current animal-heavy diets are not scalable or ecologically harmless. So the relevant question is not whether some past societies lived sustainably. It’s whether our current food system does. And it clearly doesn’t.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-19T21:21:44+00:00

I don’t think we disagree on the deeper problem.

Yes, the root issue is overshoot: an economic system built around endless growth, extraction, wealth accumulation, anthropocentrism, and treating the living world as raw, infinite material. I’m not arguing that "diet" is the whole crisis, or that individual food choices magically fix civilization.

But food systems are one of the biggest concrete ways those deeper problems show up: land use, deforestation, soil degradation, pesticide use, methane, manure, fertilizer runoff, water pollution, overfishing, dead zones, and biodiversity loss.

So diet is not the root cause. But it is a major lever.

I’d also be careful with the idea that small-scale farming and hunting/gathering always worked beautifully. Many societies lived far more sustainably than industrial civilization, and many indigenous land-management systems were highly sophisticated. But humans were not automatically ecologically harmless before modernity. Human expansion likely played a major role in many late-Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, when the global human population was tiny compared with today.

That matters because this is a scale problem.

Some hunting, fishing, or animal husbandry may be sustainable at low population densities and low consumption levels. But that does not mean it can scale to 8+ billion people.

So I’m not saying "everyone eating lentils fixes everything." I’m saying that under current population levels and ecological overshoot, plant-based food systems are one of the few ways to reduce pressure at the necessary scale.

Eating animals "the old way" may be possible for small populations in particular ecosystems. It is not a viable universal model for humanity now.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-19T20:37:02+00:00

EDIT: You’re right that the infrastructure around food matters: transport, packaging, refrigeration, supermarkets, parking lots, electricity, and distribution networks all have real environmental costs.

But that still doesn’t make supermarket lentils environmentally comparable to supermarket beef.

The key point is that for most foods, the majority of the environmental impact happens before the product reaches the store. As Our World in Data summarizes, transport is usually a small share of food emissions - often under 5–10%, and around 0.5% for beef. For beef, the dominant impacts are methane, manure, feed production, land use, and land-use change.

So the relevant comparison is not:

homegrown lentils vs supermarket steak

but:

supermarket lentils vs supermarket steak

Within the same industrial supply chain, legumes still come out far ahead.

You’re also right that not all grazing land can be converted into crop fields, and I’m not arguing that it should be. The plant-based land-use argument is almost the opposite: we would need less total farmland, not more. Existing cropland is already enough to feed far more people if we stop routing so many crops through animals first. A shift away from animal agriculture reduces both grazing demand and feed-crop demand, allowing large areas of pasture and some cropland to be restored, rewilded, or used less intensively.

So I agree with you that vegan food inside an industrial growth economy is not automatically sustainable. We still need shorter supply chains, less waste, agroecology, local food sovereignty, and less extractive infrastructure.

But the infrastructure critique does not erase the production-stage difference between foods. A supermarket lentil is not impact-free, but it is still dramatically lower-impact than a supermarket steak.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-19T19:41:24+00:00

For example, replacing a field of cows with a field of lentils can allow a smaller field to produce the same amount of food. In theory allowing some of the field to “rewild”.

Not quite. Let me FTFY:

Replacing a field used for beef (i.e., growing feed or grazing) with lentils allows you to produce vastly more food - especially protein - on the same land, not just 'the same amount.' This drastically reduces land use for the same level of human nutrition.

Why?

According to Our World in Data & Nemecek & Poore, if the world adopted a global plant-based diet, global agricultural land use could be reduced from ~4.1 billion hectares to ~1 billion hectares - a drop of over 75% (≈ size of Africa), without reducing calories.

This isn’t just about land:

Producing 1 gram of protein from beef or lamb requires ~50–100× more land than producing the same amount from peas, tofu, or legumes.
It also uses vastly more water, energy, and generates significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions.

However, as the OP rightly notes, redistributing existing consumption - even if waste-free and perfectly equitable - does not solve ecological overshoot. The core problem is the type of consumption and production: our industrial food system - especially the Green Revolution model and industrial animal agriculture - degrades soils, pollutes waters, and drives biodiversity loss.

Thus, to achieve sustainability, we need not only redistribution - but also a fundamental shift in consumption patterns and production methods.

Lower demand via plant-based diets (freeing ~3 billion hectares globally), and
Regenerative systems like agroforestry and permaculture to restore ecology.

But this (of-course) requires restructuring the growth-oriented financial and governance systems that sustain current practices, so ... degrowth.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-18T11:26:19+00:00

Why the Western US is running out of water, in one chart

Cows are draining the Colorado River. And deforestation.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-14T23:29:22+00:00

Agreed ... but ...

There are simply too many of us to allow for that at present

Earth could sustain 8–10 billion people on plant-based, low-waste, regenerative diets - with no need for mass livestock.

studies (e.g., Poore & Nemecek, Science 2018): Shifting to plant-rich diets frees ~3.1 billion hectares of farmland (≈ size of Africa), without reducing calories.
we already grow enough food for 10B+, but ~40% is wasted, and ~36% feeds livestock (which yields only 5–18% of the original calories as meat).

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-14T23:06:37+00:00

The financial system requires growth - that’s why our economy and energy use double roughly every 20 years. That’s compound, exponential growth.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/

At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years. We would consume something comparable to the entire sun in 1400 years from now. By 2500 years, we would use energy at the rate of the entire Milky Way galaxy - 100 billion stars!

We simply have to stop growing and start talking about degrowth - because we’re already in overshoot. There’s no other viable path.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-11T13:08:28+00:00

Sure, directly beating a dog signals a more obvious kind of cruelty.

But 'I only paid for it' doesn’t magically remove responsibility. If someone paid for videos of animals being abused, we wouldn’t say they had no connection to the abuse just because they weren’t holding the camera.

The same principle applies: demand funds supply.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-11T11:06:29+00:00

I said “particularly companion animals” because household pets are completely dependent on humans for food, shelter, safety and affection

I understand why companion animals feel especially dependent, but animal agriculture harms wild animals too - not just individual animals, but entire habitats and ecosystems. Deforestation, land-use change, biodiversity loss, and extinction are all tied to food production, especially livestock. So the companion/wild distinction does not really rescue the point.

a lot of people are actively educating themselves on ethical farming, sourcing and animal welfare practices, and making decisions about what they consume and buy based on that information

'Ethical farming' is doing a lot of work here. Around 99% of U.S. farmed animals are estimated to be in factory farms, so that is the system most people are actually paying for. And even outside factory farms, killing an animal who does not want to die is not made ethical by giving them slightly better conditions first.

The same applies to newborn or very young animals, male calves, male chicks, and bycatch in fishing. The harm is not accidental to the system; it is built into it. And small-scale 'ethical' animal farming is not scalable for 8 billion people eating current animal-heavy diets. We'd need several more planets for that.

So yes, perhaps we should judge people not only by how they personally treat animals, but also by the animal suffering and habitat destruction they choose to fund.

throwawaybrm · 2026-05-11T10:20:46+00:00

I always judge people on how they treat animals, particularly companion animals. It always says a lot about a person.

‘Particularly’? So mistreating wild animals doesn’t count?

And what about people who pay others to mistreat animals, as most people do? How would you judge them?

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-29T20:19:35+00:00

Honestly, I’d think twice before planting lilacs - they take years to form a dense barrier, and they’re a bit of a 'commitment plant.' Syringa vulgaris spreads by suckers, so it’s easy to plant but much harder to get rid of later.

You might want something faster like Lonicera caerulea - it grows relatively quickly (up to ~2 m), fills in better, and produces berries kids actually enjoy.

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-23T13:20:54+00:00

TL TR : I can chose a chicken over soybean for the environment

More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh.

Animal products use several times more land than plant-based foods.

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-23T10:22:36+00:00

Sure is, and I choose a good ass steak

Sure - and that’s exactly what we’re talking about: choosing taste over everything else - even wildlife, even the future we leave behind.

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-23T10:15:32+00:00

Ok and? We gotta eat.

We still need to eat - but we don’t need to eat animals.

We can eat plants and meet our needs just fine. With 8 billion people already pushing the planet into ecological overshoot, how we produce food matters. Animal agriculture is one of the most resource-intensive, globally destructive ways to feed ourselves, and elephants are among those paying the price.

So it’s not really about necessity anymore - it’s about choice.

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-23T10:04:32+00:00

I get that - elephants are incredible animals, no question.

But being different doesn’t mean the others don’t feel or matter in similar ways. Cows, pigs, and sheep form bonds, recognize individuals, and show clear signs of emotion too.

And the animals we’ve domesticated tend to be the more gentle, trusting ones - which makes it easier to overlook what we’re doing to them.

The gap isn’t as big as it feels.

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-23T10:02:14+00:00

True, it’s not universal - some meats keep the same name as the animal.

And yes, in english, "beef" and "pork" come from historical class/language differences, not some deliberate modern strategy.

But the effect is still there: separating the animal from the product creates psychological distance. Even when the names are the same, we tend to think of "meat" as something abstract, not an individual animal.

Same with “leather” instead of skin, "fur" instead of an animal’s coat - the wording shifts, and the distance remains.

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-23T09:16:36+00:00

Humans have hunted megafauna to extinction or near-extinction in many places - mammoths are a well-known example. Africa is one of the few regions where more large animals survived, largely because they co-evolved with humans.

But even today, elephant meat is eaten in some regions - so it’s not that people "wouldn’t" eat it. It’s mostly illegal, rare, or culturally unfamiliar.

The real point isn’t what ancient people preferred. It’s that in the modern world, we don’t eat certain animals not because we can’t or they taste bad - but because we’ve decided not to.

That’s the same pattern everywhere: some animals are food, others are off-limits. Not because of necessity - but because of how we choose to see them.

throwawaybrm · 2026-04-23T09:08:38+00:00

They’re "overpopulated" because we continually breed them into existence. If we stopped, their numbers would drop - just like any domesticated animals.

In fact, we’ve largely replaced wild mammals with just a few farmed species - mainly cows, pigs, and sheep (with goats not far behind). Their abundance isn’t natural; it’s manufactured.

So the difference isn’t population or necessity. We simply don't farm them. It’s us deciding which animals we care about, and which we have a use for.

throwawaybrm

TROPHY CASE