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Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy



On Fri, 22 Nov 1996 13:59:11 GMT, bg364@torfree.net (Yuri Kuchinsky)
wrote:

>Brian Carnell (briand@net-link.net) wrote:
>: On 16 Nov 1996 17:31:49 GMT, yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky) wrote:
>
>[someone else:]
>: >: Over what chosen time interval was the human population ever "stable"?
>
>: >Over 99% of human history it was more or less stable.
>
>: And *that* was a great time to be alive, eh , Yuri?
>


Brian's good point aside, Yuri's claim is bloody unllikely to have
been true.  More plausible is that each encroaching ice-age brought
immense die-backs, to say nothing of horrible wars at the margins
between different human groups.
 
The ordinary vagaries of weather -- seven good years, seven bad --
must have caused large (one child per family, say) variations in the
conditions of life.
 
Our last three hundred years are an idyll of tranquility, it seems to
me.  You get a major genocide roughly every five years, and a
planetary war every now and then -- but then these are pretty ordinary
events, the way humans carry on.
 
                                                   -dlj.



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