The New Land Rush
 

From here.

I'm all for selling off decomissioned military bases in the middle of the desert, but forests? Some of this land is pristine. I thought the government was trying to stop urban sprawl.

No, the government is trying to stop the CONTRACTS for uban sprawl. (from going to anybody not hand-chosen from the pool of their contributors)

These aren't suburban properties, they're out in the boonies. More importantly, they belong to me.....and you. Federal land is owned by the people, not the government and I don't remember them asking me. :eyebrow:

Dammit. So this is how we will pay for this administration's fuck-ups? Hemorrhage money for years and then "fix" it by selling off pieces of our national parks?

Wow, that's great. So they really will be selling off some of the last pristine wilderness in our country. That justifies it right there.

And what the hell happened to:

If the proceeds from the sale will be used to fund projects proximate to the land then the Federal Gov is not to blame. Roads, schools, etc. are the responsibility of the local jurisdictions.

If the locality has asked the Feds to sell the land and give them the money which is what it sounds like then its really not for anyone outside that locality to question.

I just think it's another way the adminstration can say 'fuck you' to its critics, in this case the environmentalists. This is payback for the spotted owl.

I understand the initial reaction - and actually agree with it - initially. But I need to know, in this specific situation, who are the winners and who are the losers?

If the locality is ok with it then of what concern is the opinion of environmental interests who have no stake in how the proceeds are distributed. Why would I give their position in this matter more consideration than the family whose children are being educated in an underfunded school system? Or the family whose breadwinner has to commute to work on a crumbling road system?

I just don't think a blanket response is as on point as a response based upon the readily available specifics of the situation. If those affected aren't howling then who cares what the environmentalists think? If I have to decide between an owl and a person, I think I'll go with the person.

a) It's not their land, it's federal land. b) How do the proceeds from the sale of federal lands get into the hands of local communities?

A few years back, their was an April's Fool joke about the government selling naming rights to the Liberty Bell to Taco Bell. This sale reminds me of that.

Your original post indicated that the proceeds from the sale would be used to fund local roads and local schools. The Federal government does not build local roads and it does not build local schools. The Feds therefore must distribute the sale proceeds to the localities to do so.

This quote by the Sierra club representative doesn't make any sense because local schools and local roads are not included in the Federal budget because its not an obligation of the Federal government.

Now, if you want to back up one level and discuss the prudence of the Feds selling Federal land to loggers which is cited as the source of the problem this idea is being floated to fix then I'll have a lot less to say.

(sigh) Where to begin? Shall we try logic? Oh, what the hell. As least you won't be able to say that you were never exposed to the concept. And I'll let you slide on having the faintest knowledge of science on account of the fact that public schools now seem to teach intelligent (their word, not mine) design in place of actual science.

Federal = national = belonging to the nation ( a nation is made up of ALL its citizens).

Local = local.

Suppose your grandfather had a 1,000 acre farm. He dies and leaves the farm to all the members of the Beestie family. equally. Let's say that at this point the Beestie tribe has 40 direct descendents of Beestie the First. Without consulting you or anyone else, one of your cousins decides to appropriate 100 acres of land, sell it, and keep the proceeds of the sale for himself since he still lives in the same home town your grandfather did, while the rest of the family has moved away. Do you say to him, "Great idea, Cousin! You go right ahead and help yourself to that land, now valued at $1,000/acre. Go ahead and keep all the money, and if you decide to sell some more of the inheritance gramps gave us all, hey, don't even bother telling me or anyone else in the family. You're "local", after all!"

If the Federal government is going to sell Federal land, then, at the very least, the proceeds of the sale must go to benefit the nation as a whole, not some hicks in Bumfuck, Idaho who can't be bothered to go find another job after the sawmill closed down.

Federal land is NOT sold to the big logging outfits. The timber on that land is sold to them. That's it. In the past, the Feds gave in to a short sighted and greedy timber industry and allowed widespread clear cutting of national forests. The forests of the Pacifc Northwest and in the southern part of the US could regenerate to some extent from these massive clear cutting operations because these areas receive a higher amount of rainfall, and it doesn't take as long for a tree to grow maturity in these locations.

In the Rocky Mountain West, the practice of clear cutting was devastating. The soils here are too thin and the rainfall is inadequate. Clearcut 500 acres in Colorado and 100 years later, what you have is 500 eroded acres of land, covered with myrtle spurge or tumble weed plants (the tumble weed originated in Russia, beleive it or not).

You can rave about pinko environmentalists all you like, but the factors of rainfall, soils, geography and plant ecology, as well as climate, will remain indifferent to your rants. Its a bit like the idea of intelligent design. You may beleive in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but the earth still revolves around the sun - not the other way around - the rock you have climbed up on to give your sermon remains far more than 6,000 years old, and viruses continue to mutate happily along, proving that genetic change does occur in living species now just as it did back when.

Now anybody over the age of 6 understands that even under the best of conditions, you are not going to plant a sapling tree and have it grow to a size making it worthwhile for the timber industry to harvest in 5 yerars. It won't happen in 10 years. In our southern forests, its possible to harvest timber after 15 years, but that's under the best possible conditions of rainfall and climate.

So the Feds giving in to the logging companies and the congressman from Bumfuck, authorized the sale of all the timber on the National Forest within a 100 mile radius of town. The yokels in Bumfuck all got logging jobs for a while and then the trees were all gone and the logging company is now down in the Amazon cutting down the rain forest. The logging company didn't bother to replant the acres it harvested since it was Federal land and not their problem. Bushco thinks trees cause forest fires, so why use the taxpayer's dollar to replant forests when that money could be given to Halliburten, instead?

W. and his cronies come up with a bandaid solution for a severed artery. Let's sell Federal lands and give some of the proceeds to the local school district. That's nice for a few years, but what happens when THAT money is all used up? The land around Bumfuck is now in the hands of a private developer who sold out the parcels as ranchettes to folks who come stay on them for two weeks out of the year and spend the rest of their time somewhere else. Now, not only do the youth of Bumfuck have no funding for their schools, their folks still don't have jobs either, and the region has become another Appalachia.

Don't bother to respond, I already know what your well thought out reply will be :right:

Frankly, I don't give a damn. I have no children and I'll be dead. You and your kids get to live with the environemtal/financial nightmare that such policies will cause. I won't.

Very nice argument Mari. Also explains why there are towns in this country with no industry left and polluted soil or mine tailings.

One thing is different. If the logging companies own the land and actually have some foresight, they might replant.

A pure Libertarian would say that anyone who buys land has a right to do whatever they want with it. An environmentalist would explain that systems are connected and that opening a toxic waste dump would have an effect beyond the borders of the property. Also, opening an explosives plant, while not causing environmental risk, would expose the neighbors to physical danger. This is why most people are in favor of zoning laws.

When the federal goverment gets into it's 'free market' and 'pro-business' at all costs mode, it usually ends up costing the taxpayer money for cleanup. If you or I went into a party rental store and rented a helium tank, we would be expected to provide some assurance that it would be returned. The same assurance is rarely required when it comes to land use. It's not just toxic chemicals and Superfund sites that are the result. Deforestation can result in soil erosion, mudslides, silt in streams, and other impacts which affect neighbors, the community, and possibly the region.

Since one of the advantages of being a corporation is the ability to dissolve and dissappear, this leaves the government, the local residents, or in the case of Superfund the next generation of businesses holding the bag.

A pure Libertarian, and here is where I would agree, would say that "free market" and "pro-business" are very different beasts indeed, and 9 times out of 10 when the government gets all "pro-business", it is working against free market forces.

Marichiko cheats. The bulk of Mari's post covers a very different sort of problem than selling public lands. Cutting of timber on Federally owned property is an example of "the tragedy of the commons", which occurs when nobody owns the land they are working.

The tragedy of the commons is usually described as: "When cattle are raised on the public square the farmers let them overgraze it; when cattle are raised on private farms this is never permitted to happen." Ironically, Mari's post is an argument for private ownership of land.

Mari. Where in this thread did you find the quotes that you used? I can't find them. Are my eyes that bad? Perhaps I just don't understand the the topic.

I did mention that. However, assuming that because they purchased the land that they will not clearcut it is also wrong. Mining companies own the land that they strip mine. This does not make them better stewards.

The larger issue is the government using the argument that because the spotted owl protection is costing communities income, federal land should be sold as reparation. There are any number of environmental regulations that have a financial impact. Should we start selling federal land to reimburse utilities for required pollution abatement equipment?

The US government never did give freed slaves their 40 acres, and everyone can agree that the government, through the Fugitive Slave Law was an accomplice to slavery.

If we didn't hand federal land over to former slaves, why should communities affected by spotted owl restrictions be compensated in this fashion?

Of course, if the government does decide to go through with this plan, look for a lawsuit by the descendents of slaves to attach the assets with the justification that the government has started a new precedent and can no longer claim that federal land grants to aggreived parties, even if only in passing along the sale price, are not done.

It would of course help if these descendents registered as Republicans.

The difference is that miners are engaged in a one time extraction of a resource whereas a sensible timber company can count on returning to a tract of land. A local outfit would be most likely to manage for the long term.

We argue about this stuff a lot when we mountain bike because the gov land we sometimes ride on is mixed use and each group is always trying to get the others thrown out. Enviros vs timbermen vs horsey people vs mtn bikers vs atv riders vs enviros. Many of the lands out West were managed for timber for many years, then enviros normally from away with no economic stake come in and for good or ill change the purpose the lands are managed for. Privately held land is easy to manage for a specific purpose.

I don't like the idea that some politician in Boston, Mass. can decide that a working community in Idaho isn't economically viable. What I'd like to see is a competitive bid process. Let groups of people purchase the lands for their stated purpose and manage it accordingly. Land where timbering can be viable would be the focus of timber companies and outfits like the Nature Conservancy could buy up the environmentally important pieces. We know with the Bush administration that open government isn't priority one reducing the likelyhood that sales will be truly open. It would be cool and useful to put together a map of all the lands and have a real time observation of bid prices for sections. Groups could get together and buy ajoining pieces if they have compatible goals say mountain bikers, cc skiers, and campers...

The National Forest Service is chartered to care for federally owned forests in a way that will provide a steady supply of trees for wood products. The words pristene, wild, natural, scenic and biodiversity are not in their mission statement.
Being a federal job, they are suject to the pressures of politics which is always make someone happy right NOW. Often at the expense of the land their supposed to keep productive for the future.

There are many people, especially in the west where large portions of land are federally held, that would like to see much of this federal land move into the tax base.
Part of the global economy is not having to conserve what can be bought elsewhere.

Federal money budgeted for schools is huge. Every school district in the nation gets some. Of course it's usually not enough to cover the federally mandated programs the districts are required to satisfy, but that's another topic. ;)

That's a nice dream. You do know that even with the scandal running around Congress, if the GOP and it's advisers think that the public isn't paying attention, the chances of a transaprent process in all of this are remarkably slim. The official notice for these auctions will be on the back page of smallest newspapers that can be found and they'll be held at midnight on the farthest green of the most exclusive country club in the country, or maybe on top of some desert plateau only accessible by private helicopter.http://www.cellar.org/images/smilies/wink.gif

Maybe they'll just post it in the Skull and Bones Alumni newsletter.

40 acres were made avaiable to every ex-slave. All they had to do was READ the instructions. WRITE the myriad of applications. TRAVEL to several locations to complete the process. BUY livestock and building materials to build a dwelling, fence the entire property and raise a viable crop for 5 years, to get the title/deed.
Remarkably, some actually managed to do it, but of course most didn't because they couldn't read or write and had no money. :(

UT didn't read the OP:

Why are there logging cutbacks on federal land? Because it is the environmentally sound thing to do. If a private timber outfit were to buy those lands, there would still be logging cut backs because the land needs time to recover from past tree harvests. A tree has the same rate of growth on the day after it is sold to a private outfit as it did the day before.

The feds have something called the US Forest Service which is staffed by professionals who have studied forestry for a minimum of 4 years. They know all about conducting reasonable timber sales and replanting afterwards. Unfortunately, politicians jump in the middle and scream free enterprise and at the same time cut funding for care of the land. The reswult is the destruction of forests that you find in many areas out West.

Come out to Colorado and I can show you some forests that ARE being quite well managed by the Forest Service since they were never clear cut in the first place. These forests are carefully harvested for their timber, have good regeneration, and are used by the general public for recreation like hunting and camping, as well.

Private timber concens do maintain vast tree farms. Weyerhauser comes to mind. However, Weyerhauser doesn't allow people to go traipsing around on its tree farms and that's what they are - farms and not ecosystems.

The "tragedy of the commons" is about too many people attempting to use too little land. The problem here is an irresponsible federal land management system where politicians are destroying your and my public lands and then using that destruction as an excuse to sell those federal lands out from under us. I read no where in the OP that the feds will sell these lands to anyone in particular - they most likely will go to the highest bidder. The article mentioned land in California. Depending on WHERE in California, most timber outfits would not be especially interested because California has the same problem as Colorado - a dry climate not conducive to the brisk regeneration of forests.

You would absolve the federal government of all responsibility and have OUR public lands sold off to what most likely will be private developers. Again, its a short sighted solution to the problem. Once all that land is sold where is the money coming from for the next government boondoggle?

Lands out west here were MIS-managed for timber by your politician from Boston for years until the havoc this caused was apparent to everyone who lives out here. The Forest Service then managed to start a few environmentally sound policies which have been disrupted by the likes of James Watt and now Bushco. Privately held land will be managed to extract the maximum commercial profit. In the Rocky Mountain West, this will not be timber sales, but the parceling out of land into ranchette subdivisions. This practice will NOT generate jobs for the locals. The hypothetical community of Bumfuck was not based on a viable local industry of timber harvesting, but a short sighted desire by logging outfits to extract everything they possibly could for a one time only commercial gain. It can take 50 years or longer to regenerate a forest in the Rockies. The logging town of Bumfuck has no business ever being created as a logging town in the first place.

The cattlemen's association wants to pounce on federal lands here and run sheep and cows on them. They are PO'ed because the Forest Service won't issue the grazing permits that would allow them to re-enact UT's tragedy of the commons.

And if anyone wants to see what great stewards of the land private outfits are, I invite you all to go visit Uravan, Colorado, a mining community on the Colorado-Utah border that no longer exists. The big uranium mining concerns owned quite a bit of land and uranium mines out there in the 50's. Uranium was mined without a second thought as to the consequences of unsound mining procedures. The entire town of Uravan had to be closed down and dismantled thanks to contamination from uranium tailings. The heavy metals from the mines has leached into the rivers making the Dolores River (well-named) one of the spookiest rivers I have ever seen in my life. There are no fish in it, no aquatic insects, not even algae. The Dolores is dead for a good 100 miles. Go look at it and then contrast it with the neighboring San Miguel River Basin which was not subjected to the tender mercies of private land owners. The San Miguel is a vibrant living river and the communities that were built near its banks are still in existance.

Busterb, my quotes were taken after Beestie's habit of making up imaginary quotes in various other threads.

I defined the phrase twice in my post, and yet you re-defined it here... incorrectly.

The feds managed it incorrectly and yet you demand they continue to manage it.

The correct answer is to sell the land under deed restrictions to only permit certain uses by any future owner.

Garrett Hardin, a population biologist, coined the term "the tragedy of the commons" in a rather lengthy article which first appeared in Science Magazine in December, 1968. The term was then taken up by other ecologists and biologists:

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity"--and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

One of the things I love most about Missouri (and it's hard to love sometimes) is that we have a large amount of forest here, primarily in the southern half of the state. Some of that land proposed for sale is here in the state...it's part of the Mark Twain National Forest. I'm not overly familiar with all the details, but I'd hate to see us lose any of this land, as it's beautiful and it's in areas that are not heavily populated.

Wikipedia:
That was the parable to which I was referring. The Wiki entry also notes that
BTW, the overpopulation scientists were kind of humbled when the growth curve started its downtrend in the 1980s. "Oops." Our doomsaying always sounds better when it's semi-scientific.

Please give your cite as to the declining growth curve of the global human population. Also please state what rate of growth is acceptable on a finite planet with finite resources.

Hardin is the one who brought the term "tragedy of the commons" into the popular language where the concept has been largely misunderstood every since. I was first introduced to the term in a class on population biology in 1974 where we were required to read the original sources.

Sorry you don't care for the findings of biologists and other scientists. :p

Wikipedia on overpopulation:

Sorry you only read the ones that agree with you.

Two interesting notes:

Hey, that's not too bad, I guess. I'd feel better if they "sealed up" more of the Ocala National Forest, here, by aquiring some of the more abused areas that are privately owned and permit the areas to return to a healed state.

...and...

Do I read this correctly in that it is not environmental restrictions that are hurting these areas, but rather slow sales?

Hmm.

I believe Canada has been accused of "dumping" timber on the US market.

The following is about the closing of a pulp mill in Port Angeles owned by Rayonier Inc. This is a perfect example of what I was saying earlier in this thread. Its from a story published in The High Country News which contains more information about the economy, people, and the environment out West than anybody east of the Mississippi ever wants to know:



Then the supply of wood abated. The price of pulp plummeted. Some locals said it had nothing to do with the spotted owl and the Endangered Species Act. There just weren’t enough big trees anymore.

The shortage was no surprise. In the 1970s, the government made the unprecedented move of opening federal land to clear-cutting. It was a way of flushing fresh cash through the economy, booming the Northwest. The result was simple to predict: Once the forest is clear-cut, second-growth timber will not make near the profits. Rayonier Inc. knew this. Official predictions of it were published 10 years earlier.

When a Northwest coastal forest starts from leveled ground, the biomass of greenery hits a peak after 50 years. Wood, however, continues expansion for another 600 years. If you cut it before 600 years, you’re only getting scraps. The thing to do was to move to Port Angeles, make as much money as possible off old-growth harvest, then brace for the inevitable crash. But a lot of children were born in that time, mortgages acquired, V-8 extra-cab trucks purchased, loans taken.

When forests thinned, when certain regions were closed to timber harvest due to declining spotted owl populations, the industry faltered. Rayonier went from using 242 million board-feet in 1985 to 13.6 million a decade later.

Sorry you don't read. The world population was around 2.5 billion in 1950. A world population of 9.1 billion is more than triple. I haven't noticed forests tripling or arable land tripling or the size of the earth tripling. Yes, population growth rates have slowed. The growth rate in 1950 was 1.47%. It is expected to be around .5% in 2050. No one is predicting that the population growth rate will then stay at .5% forever after. Scientists simply don't want to make more long term predictions than that. There are simply too many variables involved. A growth rate of .5 % of 9 billion means that about 45 million more people will be added to the world's population every year. Naturally this amount will increase exponentialy if the growth rate remains constant. Do the math UT, all is far from rosey with the world's population growth. From a report on world population growth done by The US Census


The U.S. Census Bureau’s long-term projections indicate that the globe’s population will grow to approximately 9.1 billion in 2050, an increase of over 45 percent compared to its size in 2002. The largest gains in population
between 2002 and 2050 are projected to be in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Near East. In these regions, many countries are expected to more than double in size by 2050, with some more than tripling. More moderate gains are expected in that time period for North Africa, the Americas, Asia, and
Pacific. Although some countries in these regions are expected to more than double in size, the typical country is likely to experience a smaller increase.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a majority of the countries Europe and the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union are expected to experience a decline in population between 2002 and 2050.

Isn't that nice? The first world nations will lose population, while the third world becomes more over-crowded and desperate than ever. Interesting...

I have faith that drought, starvation and machete hacking will moderate those increases. :cool:

They actually take those things into consideration, Bruce. For example, they noted rather sadly that HIV probably will not slow population growth in the countries most heavily impacted by the AIDS epidemic as much as they first thought it would.

According to the study, population growth is all about the fertility rate of adult women (duh!) In the Mid East we all know that Abdul is going to keep Abdulette barefoot and pregnant, absent some massive cultural upheavel.

Harsh.

...but true. :neutral:

They need not. For example, during the same time frame, advances in farming have radically changed how food is produced, massively increasing the amount of food that can be produced in that land.

Pre-industrialization, most civilized countries required 50% of their population to be farmers in order to produce enough food. Now that number is about 1%. Things change.

:lol: If you can find the person who taught you math, sue them for malpractice. :lol:

and keep the lawyers around for the people who taught you spelling and grammar

That's more of a phrasing problem than a math problem, since it's true. "Rate" may not have been the right word, but growth is exponential.

Modern agriculture has not prevented famine in places like parts of Africa, India, and South America. Increasing population also means increasing degredation of the environment. Witness the pollution of the oceans, smog, the hole in the ozone layer, on and on. Technology will only take us so far, and its not nice to fool with Mother Nature.


From your favorite source, Wikipedia (emphasis my own):

In mathematics, a quantity that grows exponentially (or geometrically) is one that grows at a rate proportional to its size. Such growth is said to follow an exponential law. This implies that for any exponentially growing quantity, the larger the quantity gets, the faster it grows. But it also implies that the relationship between the size of the dependent variable and its rate of growth is governed by a strict law, of the simplest kind: direct proportion. It is proved in calculus that this law requires that the quantity is given by the exponential function, if we use the correct time scale. This explains the name. An example of exponential growth is Human population, if the number of births and deaths per person per year were to remain constant

I'll send you the name of my lawyer if you wish to file a math malpractice suit of your own.

As for spelling, Lord knows my teachers tried. I have been spelling challenged since Kindergarten.

If you look at agriculture as it has been practiced in those places you will find that it is not modern. PJ O'Rourke pointed out that in Africa they had not developed the concept of the yoke, the simplest device ever invented to assist in agriculture. All we have to do is explain the yoke and their output increases by a third. I'm optimistic.

Meanwhile,

This is the Wikipedia page on exponential growth, and can you explain why it doesn't contain the last sentence of your quote?

But it does note that the general principle behind exponential growth is that the larger a number gets, the faster it grows. Any exponentially growing number will eventually grow larger than any other number which grows at only a constant rate for the same amount of time (and will also grow larger than any function which grows only subexponentially).

A steady or decreasing rate of growth is not exponential. It is subexponential.

(sigh) We're starting to split hairs, here, UT. In one of your earlier posts you implied that the population growth was supposed to stabalize in the magic year of 2050. The prediction for the population growth at that point is estimated to be .5%. If population growth were to "stabalize" at . 5%, it would still be exponential and still means a heck of a lot of new humans every year.

The page I cited does indeed include the last sentence. I will agree that human population growth is a complex issue, but I was not out of line using the word "exponential", when speaking of a population that increases at the rate of. 5% per year. I omitted the stuff that doesn't pertain to the discussion, but here you go:

Examples of exponential growth

Biology.

Microorganisms in a culture dish will grow exponentially, at first, after the first microorganism appears (but then logistically until the available food is exhausted, when growth stops).

A virus (SARS, West Nile, smallpox) of sufficient infectivity (k > 0) will spread exponentially at first, if no artificial immunization is available. Each infected person can infect multiple new people.

Human population, if the number of births and deaths per person per year were to remain constant (but also see logistic growth).

Many responses of living beings to stimuli, including human perception, are logarithmic responses, which are the inverse of exponential responses; the loudness and frequency of sound are perceived logarithmically, even with very faint stimulus, within the limits of perception. This is the reason that exponentially increasing the brightness of visual stimuli is perceived by humans as a smooth (linear) increase, rather than an exponential increase. This has survival value. Generally it is important for the organisms to respond to stimuli in a wide range of levels, from very low levels, to very high levels, while the accuracy of the estimation of differences at high levels of stimulus is much less important for survival.

Electroengineering

Charging and discharging of capacitors and changes in current in inductors are also exponential growth and decay phenomena. Engineers use a rule of five time constants to estimate when a steady state has been reached.

Computer technology

Processing power of computers. See also Moore's law and technological singularity (under exponential growth, there are no such singularities).

Internet traffic growth.

Investment. The effect of compound interest over many years has a substantial effect on savings and a person's ability to retire. See also rule of 72

Physics

Atmospheric pressure decreases exponentially with increasing height above sea level, at a rate of about 12% per 1000m.

Nuclear chain reaction (the concept behind nuclear weapons). Each uranium nucleus that undergoes fission produces multiple neutrons, each of which can be absorbed by adjacent uranium atoms, causing them to fission in turn. If the probability of neutron absorption exceeds the probability of neutron escape (a function of the shape and mass of the uranium), k > 0 and so the production rate of neutrons and induced uranium fissions increases exponentially, in an uncontrolled reaction.

Newton's law of cooling where T is temperature, t is time, and, A, D, and k > 0 are constants, is an example of exponential decay.

Multi-level marketing

Exponential increases appear in each level of a starting member's downline as each subsequent member recruits more people.

They have plows in South America. Go visit northeast Brazil sometime and see the good it does them.

Ah, ok. You took a paragraph out of the middle of the page.

You still don't understand the meaning of the word "exponential" and are fighting hard against the notion of learning it. That word "if" is the operative word in that whole sentence:

Human population, if the number of births and deaths per person per year were to remain constant (but also see logistic growth).

If. But the number of births and deaths per person per year do not remain constant.

And then there's the last bit of that sentence, the bit you left out. Where it says but also see logistic growth. If you go to that page you find that it is an example of a function where growth appears to be geometric for a while, then slows, then stops. You also learn that it is another model for population growth.

The UN's World Food Programme doesn't consider Brazil to be desperately hungry but what do they know?

Which reminds me, I have some Chilean grapes in the fridge, and it's lunchtime.

Lastly, a plow is not a yoke.

The problem with logistic growth is that it is exponential growth that gets modified by resource factors which push the curve back down. While in graph form that looks nice, what exactly are those resource factors? Wars? Famines? Disease? An across-the-board decision to stop having large families?

When people say that population growth is exponential, they are not saying that in the year 2500 there will be quadrillions of people on Earth - the Earth just can't support an infinite population. An exponential growth (in the colloquial sense, obviously a fixed exponent can't apply to a chaotic system) has to hit a wall at some point. The warnings about exponential growth are about what happens when we hit that wall, at which point the logistic curve kindly curves in the right direction - but why? At what cost?

Economics, modern culture, availability of birth control, availability of abortion, and secular approaches to life are probably more effective variables.

Much of Europe's birth rate has gone negative - concurrent with a general lack of wars, famines, or disease. Go figure.

Two words: Peak Oil.

Or something like that.

So "an across-the-board decision to stop having large families". That's the most hopeful possibility. But it has to be across the board.

You mean the stop reproducing when they run out of lubrication? :o

There are also pie in the sky hopes.

Maybe all of modern physics has got it wrong. After all, the grand unifying theory still hasn't been invented yet. There are holes.

Hopeful hell. Europe faces a lot of problems due to its demographic change. If the US has problems meeting medicare and social security now, imagine if the birth rate was declining.

Problems we would have to face without immigration. The SS pyramid scheme is predicated on a growing population. We have to get young folks from somewhere. I think the leftists need to get it together on this population thing. Zero population growth = deficits. I'll make a trade-off, you guys stop growing government programs and I'll stop growing the population. Oh and Mari, words have meanings.

It's the most hopeful reason for a leveling-off of population. Leveling off is a given. Infinite population is not possible. If the reason for leveling-off was instead war, famine, or disease, social security might not be at the top of the list of problems but I bet we would wish it were.

And you took a sentence out of context which started this all. In citing the wisom of Wikipedia, here was your cut 'n paste:

You neglected to address or even quote the very next sentences in your Wikipedia article:



The feeling is mutual.

I will learn nothing of the sort. Any biological species will experience exponential growth until the ecosystem upon which it depends reaches carrying capacity. Usually, carrying capacity is determined by one or more limiting factors such as food supply, water, availability of certain key nutrients, etc.

From your Wikipedia article:

Neither Wikipedia nor any ecologist who doesn't want to be laughed out of the profession would make the statement that logistic function is an alternative model for population growth. Logistic function is a set of variables and equations which are components in the study of population dynamics, NOT an alternative model to exponential growth.

Not much.

Maybe they should start talking to other departments within their own outfit, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations I have traveled extensively in Northeastern Brazul and if forced to choose between one UN group versus the other, I can tell you from personal observation that the World Food Programme cheats and lies if that's what they think. Here is what I observed and what the FAO reports:

In Brazil poverty affects more than a quarter of the population - some 44 million people. In the nine states in north eastern Brazil, the poorest parts of the country, almost half of all families live on approximately a dollar a day.

The first priority of the new President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is to ensure that every Brazilian eats three times a day. He has launched an ambitious programme called Zero Hunger, with the support of FAO.

Hunger is the most extreme manifestation of the huge problem of poverty in Brazil. Few people die of starvation, but there is widespread chronic food insecurity and malnutrition. This means that people are unable to produce or gain access to enough food of an adequate quality for a healthy life. It is the hunger of the missed meal, and it is very debilitating.

The current situation needs urgent interventions and President Lula has given himself just the four years of his mandate to solve the problem. Will Brazil need emergency interventions?

In many countries, the very success of agriculture has been disastrous for poor rural people. Advanced countries have absorbed their surplus rural population in other sectors, allowing farm size to increase and economies of scale to take effect. But in most developing countries, small farmers have either had to remain on the land, often with a diminishing size of plot as families have grown, or tomigrate to the cities with no job in sight. Most chronically food insecure people are, therefore, small farmers or recent urban migrants who have fled rural destitution.

- The number of people who suffer from chronic undernourishment is not known accurately and is a subject of much debate. According to FAO's estimates, using methodology applied internationally, in 1998-2000, some 16.7 million Brazilians ( about 10 percent of the population) were chronically undernourished.

No comment.



Not if you hang out with UT, they don't. :right: