Two thoughts on this meme - self-reliance is necessary, and self-reliance is not sufficient, because if capitalism destroys the climate your homestead goes with it.
Two thoughts on this meme - self-reliance is necessary, and self-reliance is not sufficient, because if capitalism destroys the climate your homestead goes with it.
According to Google, there’s
5.34 million miles of arable land on earth
8 billion population
8 billion / 5.34 million = 1489 miles per person
Have I done something wrong? Seems like enough space, no?
Edit: lol I’m dumb
You divided backwards. It should be land divided by population. 5.34m / 8b = 0.0006675 miles^2 per person.
That math makes it 1,489 people per mile of arable land.
Edit: don’t forget that not everyone lives on arable land. We also have apartments and skyscrapers that house people, thus packing in many more people per mile than individual.
Arable just means it’s possible to turn it into farmland, not that it would actually be useful to grow crops.
The largest problem is that the global population has exceeded the natural limitations of the nitrogen cycle. Meaning we are utilizing more nitrogen from the soil than it can naturally fixate.
Without petroleum based fertilizers we wouldn’t be able to sustain the global population we have today. Without the Haber-Bosch process our population would likely be hovering around 4 billion instead of 8 billion.
My math came out to one 41 meter square of land per person. 1.34b hectares/8b people*(100m*100m/hectare)=1675m^2/person which is a square of 41m per side.