Complex Numbers

Gummint

I went to a county Planning Commission meeting this evening. I have to do that sometimes for my work.

Before they got to my part of the agenda, though, they had to hear a report from this group who claims to be putting together a report about what a "sustainable" population number is for the city/county area. This report is partly funded by our local tax dollars, and presumably the localities (in Virginia, city and county are separate entities) will take it seriously as a public policy tool.

Leaving aside for the moment the definition of "sustainable" - I've been in this business nearly 20 years and nobody's been able to give me one I can understand - let's think about the BASIC PREMISE here.

The basic premise is that you can take an arbitrary unit of geography - in this case, a county containing a city - and determine whether it's biologically sustainable, given the natural resources, waste absorption capacity, and human population. And THEN that you can take the sustainability population number and make public policy to limit, restrict, and/or reverse growth based on that number.

Do you see the fallacy here?

Let's draw an arbitrary box around some geographical area. In fact, let's extend this to every region in the country, or the world, and draw a LOT of arbitrary boxes. Within each of those boxes, create public policy to say: X is the biological capacity, N is the current population, and we need to make N <= X.

If one of those arbitrary boxes contains the five boroughs of New York... is there anyone who thinks that N<=X there? Doubt it. How about the arbitrary box that contains 640 acres of farmland in Kansas somewhere - is N>X there? Um, no.

The whole POINT of our civilization - a word meaning "the art of living in cities" - is that x acres of farmland SOMEWHERE ELSE support n people in a CITY, people who then respond by sending the farmers money and heaps of scorn. Scorn for corn - hey, I like that.

So, MY tax dollars are going to fund a study whose premise is fundamentally flawed.

I love government.