Quotes About Population

As populations grow beyond Dunbar's number, face-to-face contact no longer suffices to maintain political control. At this point, writing supplies the best mechanism for communicating among large numbers of people, and power naturally accrues to the literate. Consequently, societies with high rates of literacy, such as Athens, tend to have more smoothly running republics than those with low rates, such as the late Roman one.

In the Iron Range, an area noted for its independent, unpredictable, and generally cantankerous population

AT LEAST FOR the immediate future, there would be no arenas in Young's life—just the opposite, in fact. Returning to California, he reached out to Mazzeo, who had moved onto a communal farm in Santa Cruz with his guitarist friend Jeff Blackburn. A beach town roughly seventy miles south of San Francisco, Santa Cruz had a population of just over thirty thousand—a size that would have fit into one of the venues on Crosby, Stills and Nash's reunion tour.

typical modern households live in urban environments where they earn incomes through some form of wage work and buy food produced by others. In the more industrialized economies, ca. 65 percent of populations lived in towns in 1980, and globally, ca. 38 percent; it is probable that even global levels of urbanization will cross the symbolic threshold of 50 percent early in the twenty-first century.

Innovation ensured that each cycle normally reached a higher level than its predecessor, but innovation was normally too slow to prevent an eventual collapse within each cycle, as populations outstripped available resources.

The modern era is the briefest but most turbulent of the three main eras of human history. Whereas the era of foragers lasted more than 200,000 years and the agrarian era about 10,000 years, the modern era has lasted just 250 years. Yet during this brief era change has been more rapid and more fundamental than ever before; indeed, populations have grown so fast that 20 percent of all humans may have lived during just these two and a half centuries.

Between 1750 and 2000 the number of human beings increased from approximately 770 million to almost 6 billion, close to an eightfold increase in just 250 years. This increase is the equivalent of a growth rate of about 0.8 percent per annum and represents a doubling time of about eighty-five years. (Compare this with estimated doubling times of fourteen hundred years during the agrarian era and eight thousand to nine thousand years during the era of foragers.)

As the previous chapter showed, mobile communities of foragers have good reasons to limit population growth. But if they settle down, those limits to population growth can be relaxed. Babies do not need to be carried so much; grain-based diets (particularly if foods are cooked) make it possible to wean children earlier; birth intervals will shorten; and females will reach puberty earlier.

there are just 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate for almost three hundred million people.

For among the many things that warfare does is temporarily define the entire enemy population as superfluous, as expendable—a redefinition that must take place before most non-psychopaths can massacre innocent people and remain shielded from self-condemnation. And nothing is more helpful to that political and psychological transformation than the availability of a deep well of national and cultural consciousness that consigns whole categories of people to the distant outback of humanity.

The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism - and far more damaging.

To balance China, the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy, youthful population, and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.

There is a fundamental irony at work. More and more of us keep pouring into the region, in no small part because it seems relatively empty compared to the rest of the country. What attracts us we then ruin.

As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn't have time to do much else.

We have created societies where much of the population, trapped in useless employment, have come to resent and despise equally those who do the most useful work in society, and those who do no paid work at all.

DNA analyses of modern people suggest that the human population declined dramatically, to perhaps only a few hundred. When we talk about all men and women being brothers and sisters, and people of all types being closely related, we are not just being poetic and romantic. Compared to other species, humans exhibit very little genetic diversity, a trait that stems back to that time, not too long ago, when a small band of survivors had to repopulate humanity. We

this way, we've changed the geometry of the planet. Before we came along, the world was discontinuous. Oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges formed impenetrable barriers, breaking Earth into separate regions where populations could evolve independently, and then be isolated or merged by continental drift and climate change. Now we've created pathways around all those borders, and to some degree the planet is one continuous habitat. Some

Capital takes away the autonomy of our time and makes it impossible for large segments of the population to leave the realm of necessity behind. In fact, the largest segment of the population is struggling hard to get access to basic necessities, which means that they have a very restricted capacity and time for freedom of expression.

Like many of his contemporaries, Lincoln was troubled by what he perceived as the rapid rate of change in American life. Canals and railroads were bringing about a transportation revolution; the population was swiftly spreading across the continent; immigration was beginning to seem a threat to American social cohesion; sectionalism was becoming ever more divisive as the controversy over slavery mounted; the political battles of the Jackson era had destroyed the national political consensus.

Mind control of individuals, the general population and even assets of the Web is aimed at ensuring there are no surprises, maverick behaviour or situations and responses the Elite can't predict.

Put another way allowing their perceptions to be programmed to the extent that leads to the population giving their freedom away by giving their perceptions – their mind – away. If this circuit is not broken by humanity ceasing to cooperate with their own enslavement then nothing can change.

If you are one in a million in China, you're one of 1,300 people.

If I am right in saying that thought is the ultimate origin or source, it follows that if we don't do anything about thought, we won't get anywhere. We may momentarily relieve the population problem, the ecological problem, and so on, but they will come back in another way.

At Puuepa he erected the large heiau of Mookini, the stones for which were passed from hand-to-hand from Niulii, a distance of nine miles—a circumstance indicating the presence of a large population on Hawaii at that time. As it was one of the largest