NickBlack.com

I want to talk about a couple of things before I get down to Immigration in Britain and Ghost Acreage.

Last night I saw Avatar, the new James Cameron film. A truly remarkable piece of media. As I sat and watched the blue people in their perfectly realized forest ecology I thought ‘at last, we can do 3D biological reality’. Aside from the obvious impact on the entertainment industry I think it shows that computing got fast enough for us to be able fully implement an intelligent planet program. Just in time. We need to be able to produce and model large complex biologically coherent systems, like our own. We are approaching full neurological/cognitive immersion and it will change us fundamentally as a species. Cameron deserves to be congratulated on making this monster for $250 million. Well done.

The other thing is I’ve been spending the morning looking at the Burtynsky book, Oil. Rather than the rush of Avatar I sat and looked at the photos one at a time and had time to contemplate what the Oil civilization looks like on a global scale. We can’t go on doing this, it looks ridiculous. Do we really need to turn the left hand side of Canada into the world’s largest toxic lake district? We know better now.

Lastly, a quick word about today’s report on the BBC news site about Methane hydrate releases. This is very serious because we have no idea how quickly this quantity of Methane being added to the atmosphere and ocean can push us past some unseen tipping point into a temperature environment we can’t adapt to. I honestly believe we can technologically adapt to a new earth environment, but biological adaptation takes time and an enormous methane exhalation could radically alter the time frame against us.

Immigration in Britain and Ghost Acreage:

Which brings me to the real topic I want to talk about: Ghost Acreage in a world past Carrying Capacity. It’s probably helpful to define some terms here. Carrying Capacity is simply the population of any species that a given environment can support indefinitely. The term comes from shipping, as in ‘how much can she carry without sinking?’ In other words the maximum load. It all depends on what a species is taking from the environment. Populations tend to rise until they reach carrying capacity and then some critical resource, be it food, water, or something else, like oil or uranium, is sufficiently depleted that population is forced to adjust to the new depleted environment. Unfortunately populations tend to ‘overshoot’ the carrying capacity and subsequently crash, rather than adjust gradually over time. For those interested in serious chat about overshoot, William Catton is your man.

But how can a population exceed carrying capacity? In the natural world it doesn’t happen, but in the human world it does. Because of the concept of Ghost Acreage, which means the additional external acreage necessary to support the population. How does that work? Britain is a good example of a discrete ecologically defined habitat. Let’s just look at food. Estimates vary, but 35 million is a reasonable guess at the population that the island could support indefinitely, compared to its current population of 60 million. The UK imports around 40% of its food, so it seems about right. Okay so where is all the rest of the food coming from? Thailand, Brazil, India, Kenya, the US, etc. That’s Ghost Acreage – the land (or some equivalent) that’s not in Britain, but that it’s using to feed itself. Which means the people in those countries aren’t using it to feed themselves. This assumes that the countries supplying Britain with half its food have the spare acreage to do so, while maintaining the health of its own population. Aye, but there’s the rub. Population growth, especially in the developing world, has long since used up what spare capacity there was. Those people aren’t exporting food they have to spare (including the US, which is destroying its topsoil). The elites in those countries are exploiting landless labourers. We are in effect exporting hunger, drought, and ecological degradation to support our current population.

In an ecologically rational world, there can be no argument that we are entitled to run our population at someone else’s expense. It’s ironic that the countries and cultures from which we draw most of our immigration are also those we use for ghost acreage to support our over population. By allowing immigration, and thereby increasing Britain’s population, we are impoverishing another country’s population, which makes it less attractive to live in, and encourages further immigration (legally or illegally) to already over populated Britain (or another part of the developed world). It’s classic positive feedback.

What makes the situation even more bizarre is that as we impoverish people from the countries supplying us with ghost acreage we send aid, which runs to about £9 billion/year in Britain, and when the situation deteriorates to the point where the country fails, we send in the military and/or deal with the mass migration that results.

Britain is just a good example of the developed world. The current political environment in most of the West reflects the utter ecological illiteracy necessary to maintain the dogma that immigration is vital to the nation. On the contrary, it is lethal to the country’s ability to support itself, and lethal to the impoverished countries supplying the ghost acreage. As such it’s hard to see the ethical case for allowing immigration to either Britain, or the rest of Europe, which shares similar population dynamics.

It’s time we stopped the political equivalent of magical realism in thinking about immigration.