Population Density Quotes

The first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides.

The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice.

I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Papperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to makes me wonder if I am a book too.

I hear Montana is nice.” “Population density is good. Still more cows than people.

WHY DID THE rise of agriculture launch the evolution of our crowd infectious diseases? One reason just mentioned is that agriculture sustains much higher human population densities than does the hunting-gathering lifestyle—on the average, 10 to 100 times higher. In addition, hunter-gatherers frequently shift camp and leave behind their own piles of feces with accumulated microbes and worm larvae. But farmers are sedentary and live amid their own sewage, thus providing microbes with a short path from one person’s body into another’s drinking water.

A hunter-gatherer mother who is shifting camp can carry only one child, along with her few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe and not hold it back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstrained by problems of carrying young children on treks, can bear and raise as many children as they can feed. The birth interval for many farm peoples is around two years, half that of hunter-gatherers. That higher birthrate of food producers, together with their ability to feed more people per acre, lets them achieve much higher population densities than hunter-gatherers.

I emerge into a library-study with the highest book-population density I have seen in my life. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side-streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Paperback books, hardcover books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in, and then to hide the igloo. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to make me wonder if I am a book too. Light

I search for a capital I know that I don't think anyone else does. "Rhode Island." She claps her hands. "The boy knows how to play! Now, Rhode Island is the smallest US state in land area, but did you know it ranks number two in population density per square mile? That means that are a lot of people in each others' space. Oh, and the capital is Providence.

With excess population you can't stabilise the economy of society, can't save the environment for society and can't subdue the evil in society.

By comparison with high population densities in Japan and Java and China, Australia looked empty and attractive to Asian invasion—so thought the prime minister, but Asians themselves did not think that way.

Even at relatively low population densities, sprawl tends not to pay for itself financially and consumes land at an alarming rate, while producing insurmountable traffic problems and exacerbating social inequity and isolation.

In the United States, the average numbers of animals on chicken, pig, and cattle operations approximately doubled between 1978 and 1992.1112 This increasing population density seems to be playing a key role in triggering emerging epidemics.

On the average, one thousand people settle on or near the San Andreas Fault each day. Nowhere in the United States is the density of population greater than in San Francisco and its environs. Nowhere is disregard of the danger more apparent.

It is often thought that the life of the hunter-gatherer was one of feast and famine. But most available data suggest that they were surprisingly healthy and had a fairly stable diet and lifestyle. Not so the primitive farmers. In years when the crops failed, in settlements where the population density was high and where disease weakened the ability to cope even further, life would have been very hard indeed. The settled population could not migrate to follow the food supply as could hunter-gatherers. They were trapped.

The different shades of crowd, buildings and density amazed her. Hailing from a much less populated town, New York appeared like a fire cracker, a show stopper; as if mocking those who didn’t believe in carnivals, forcing people who lived on streets to dream of the sky rises and simply finding excuses to celebrate and shriek! This was New York, the home to beggars and billionaires, to actors and artisans, to werewolves and humans…

human population densities were gradually rising throughout the late Pleistocene anyway, thanks to improvements in human technology for collecting and processing wild foods. As population densities rose, food production became increasingly favored because it provided the increased food outputs needed to feed all those people.

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We’re nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won’t snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others

If your work is worthy enough to carry your name, you may not need a child to carry your name.

The human population density of the world when we lived in hunter-gatherer communities was about 1 person for every 6 square miles. Compare that to Manhattan, which jams about 417,000 people into the same 6-square-mile space. Even midsize cities like Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Oregon, have 58,000 and 26,000 people per 6 square miles, respectively.

Culture leaves long-lasting residues—Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.

This bidirectional link between food production and population density explains the paradox that food production, while increasing the quantity of edible calories per acre, left the food producers less well nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded. That paradox developed because human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food.

Many forces conspire to make for uniformity in modern communities—schools, newspapers, cinema, radio, drill, etc. Density of population has the same effect. The position of momentary equilibrium between the sentiment of independence and the love of power tends, therefore, under modern conditions, to shift further and further in the direction of power, thus facilitating the creation and success of totalitarian States.

From the Hive Manual. The relationship between ecology and evolution is extremely close, deeply implicated in organic changes among a given animal population, and profoundly sensitive to the density of numbers within a given habitat. Our adaptations aim to increase the population tolerance, to permit a human density ten to twelve times greater than is currently considered possible. Out of this, we will get our survival variations.

You were in the city," Rice explained, "High concentraition of Floraes, hardly any post-aps. In other areas, where there was less population density, children were the ones more likely to survive. Adults probably kept them concealed, took extra measures to protect them. And of course children are good at hiding. Once their instinctual survival skills kick in, they know how to be quiet." "They believed in monsters before the monsters showed up," I wispered.

Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead. The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons - because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobility was compromised or a relative was debilitated, crutched, too young. Because it was too impossible, the enormity of the thought: This is the end. He knew them all from their absences.

Taken together, these four factors help us understand why the transition to food production in the Fertile Crescent began around 8500 B.C., not around 18,500 or 28,500 B.C. At the latter two dates hunting-gathering was still much more rewarding than incipient food production, because wild mammals were still abundant; wild cereals were not yet abundant; people had not yet developed the inventions necessary for collecting, processing, and storing cereals efficiently; and human population densities were not yet high enough for a large premium to be placed on extracting more calories per acre.

The history of epidemics in human populations has always been closely connected to cities. From the Great Plague of Athens (430 BC) to the COVID-19 pandemic, cities have played a unique role in the lives of epidemics that affect human populations. The increased population density provides the pathogen with a vastly increased likelihood that during a given infectious period, an infected individual will make contact with a susceptible individual. Overcrowding and urban poverty also directly affect other epidemic processes, e.g. attracting vectors who thrive on the byproducts of urban human existence.

(On producer/consumer relationship in subsistence farming) This is the sort of interconnectedness that once defined every outpost across our emerging nation. But outposts grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and cities grew into metropolises, necessitating a push into resource bases far beyond these population centers. Even as this occurred, the conveniences of modern life--electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile--took hold, further eroding any sense of shared responsibility for the community's survival. From the standpoint of our most basic needs, we became islands unto ourselves, despite the ever-increasing population density.

To increase density in a rat population and maintain healthy specimens, put them in boxes so they can't see each other, clean their cages, and give them enough to eat. You can pile the boxes up as many stories as you wish. Unfortunately, caged animals become stupid, which is a very heavy price to pay for a super filing system!

Researchers studying emerging viruses have noticed an interesting phenomenon. As more human beings are born, there is a consistent spread of human habitation into once undeveloped ecoranges. The previously existing environment is removed, houses are built, people move in. The former populations of plants and animals are displaced. However, one of the major things that has been overlooked is that viruses have also lived in those regions for a very long time—in a healthy symbiotic balance with their hosts, both plant and animal. It is possible to think of them as an invisible herd or pack species, spread with the same kind of density throughout those ecoranges just as deer or birds are.

the great majority of people worldwide remain in the thrall of tribal organized religions, led by men who claim supernatural power in order to compete for the obedience and resources of the faithful. We are addicted to tribal conflict, which is harmless and entertaining if sublimated into team sports, but deadly when expressed as real-world ethnic, religious, and ideological struggles. There are other hereditary biases. Too paralyzed with self-absorption to protect the rest of life, we continue to tear down the natural environment, our species’ irreplaceable and most precious heritage. And it is still taboo to bring up population policies aiming for an optimum people density, geographic distribution, and age distribution.

This is not just a matter of how much the Russian population suffered during the war. As is always true, victory legitimized and consolidated the existing regime, which in Russia was rooted in autocracy and serfdom. The sense that Russia was victorious and secure removed an incentive for radical domestic reform. The conservative regime of Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 until 1855, was partly rooted in an assumption of Russian power and security. This assumption was only undermined by defeat in the Crimean War of 1854–6, which unleashed a swath of modernizing reforms under Nicholas’s son, the Emperor Alexander II. In 1815, however, Russia did not have the means –which meant above all the educated cadres –to carry out radical reforms of the type undertaken two generations later. It is naive to believe that defeat by Napoleon would have unleashed a programme of successful liberalization in Russia. Even less well founded is the belief that Nicholas’s conservatism was the basic cause of Russia’s growing backwardness in 1815–60 vis-à-vis north-western Europe. The Industrial Revolution had dynamics well beyond the control of the Russian government of that era. It required levels of education and population density which Russia lacked, and the bringing together of coal and iron deposits, which in Russia’s case was only possible with the introduction of the railway. In any case, the question whether the sacrifices made in 1812–14 were worthwhile implies that the Russians had a choice.

Similarly, our sensitivity to bitter foods is largely associated with a gene called TAS2R38,40 and you can measure yours at home by picking up some paper test strips saturated with a chemical called 6-n-propylthiouracil41 (PROP), which are widely available online. About half the population finds these strips moderately bitter42 (“tasters”), while a quarter finds them unpalatably bitter (“supertasters”), and another quarter describes them as having no taste at all (“nontasters”). Supertasters also tend to have a higher density of taste buds,43 and although this might sound like a coveted foodie superpower, supertasters are likely to be pickier eaters44 and avoid things like coffee, wine, spirits, dark chocolate, and various fruits and vegetables (e.g., grapefruit, broccoli, kale) because they find them too bitter.

Once people believed her careful documentation, there was an easy answer—since babies are cute and inhibit aggression, something pathological must be happening. Maybe the Abu langur population density was too high and everyone was starving, or male aggression was overflowing, or infanticidal males were zombies. Something certifiably abnormal. Hrdy eliminated these explanations and showed a telling pattern to the infanticide. Female langurs live in groups with a single resident breeding male. Elsewhere are all-male groups that intermittently drive out the resident male; after infighting, one male then drives out the rest. Here’s his new domain, consisting of females with the babies of the previous male. And crucially, the average tenure of a breeding male (about twenty-seven months) is shorter than the average interbirth interval. No females are ovulating, because they’re nursing infants; thus this new stud will be booted out himself before any females wean their kids and resume ovulating. All for nothing, none of his genes passed on. What, logically, should he do? Kill the infants. This decreases the reproductive success of the previous male and, thanks to the females ceasing to nurse, they start ovulating. That’s the male perspective. What about the females? They’re also into maximizing copies of genes passed on. They fight the new male, protecting their infants. Females have also evolved the strategy of going into “pseudoestrus”—falsely appearing to be in heat. They mate with the male. And since males know squat about female langur biology, they fall for it—“Hey, I mated with her this morning and now she’s got an infant; I am one major stud.” They’ll often cease their infanticidal attacks. Despite initial skepticism, competitive infanticide has been documented in similar circumstances in 119 species, including lions, hippos, and chimps. A variant occurs in hamsters; because males are nomadic, any infant a male encounters is unlikely to be his, and thus he attempts to kill it (remember that rule about never putting a pet male hamster in a cage with babies?). Another version occurs among wild horses and gelada baboons; a new male harasses pregnant females into miscarrying. Or suppose you’re a pregnant mouse and a new, infanticidal male has arrived. Once you give birth, your infants will be killed, wasting all the energy of pregnancy. Logical response? Cut your losses with the “Bruce effect,” where pregnant females miscarry if they smell a new male. Thus competitive infanticide occurs in numerous species (including among female chimps, who sometimes kill infants of unrelated females). None of this makes sense outside of gene-based individual selection. Individual selection is shown with heartbreaking clarity by mountain gorillas, my favorite primate. They’re highly endangered, hanging on in pockets of high-altitude rain forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are only about a thousand gorillas left, because of habitat degradation, disease caught from nearby humans, poaching, and spasms of warfare rolling across those borders. And also because mountain gorillas practice competitive infanticide. Logical for an individual intent on maximizing the copies of his genes in the next generation, but simultaneously pushing these wondrous animals toward extinction. This isn’t behaving for the good of the species.

In the face of the threats of a total weightlessness, an unbearable lightness of being, a universal promiscuity and a linearity of processes liable to plunge us into the void, the sudden whirlpools that we dub catastrophes are really the thing that saves us from catastrophe. Anomalies and aberrations of this kind re-create zones of gravity and density that counter dispersion. It may be hazarded that this is how our societies secrete their own peculiar version of an accursed share, much after the fashion of those tribal peoples who used to dispose of their surplus population by means of an oceanic suicide: the homeopathic suicide of a few serving to maintain the homeostatic balance of the group. So the actual catastrophe may turn out to be a carefully modulated strategy of our species - or, more precisely, our viruses, our extreme phenomena, which are most definitively real, albeit localized, may be what allow us to preserve the energy of that virtual catastrophe which is the motor of all our processes, whether economic or political, artistic or historical.

So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people’s intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world—the habitat ring, the Eye, and all the rest—were so vastly greater than what the people of Old Earth had ever accomplished. It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they’d been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence. Their devices could hold more data than anything you could buy today. Their ability to communicate through all sorts of wireless schemes was only now being matched—and that only in densely populated, affluent places like the Great Chain.

The radial patterning of Protestantism allows us to use a county’s proximity to Wittenberg to isolate—in a statistical sense—that part of the variation in Protestantism that we know is due to a county’s proximity to Wittenberg and not to greater literacy or other factors. In a sense, we can think of this as an experiment in which different counties were experimentally assigned different dosages of Protestantism to test for its effects. Distance from Wittenberg allows us to figure out how big that experimental dosage was. Then, we can see if this “assigned” dosage of Protestantism is still associated with greater literacy and more schools. If it is, we can infer from this natural experiment that Protestantism did indeed cause greater literacy.16 The results of this statistical razzle-dazzle are striking. Not only do Prussian counties closer to Wittenberg have higher shares of Protestants, but those additional Protestants are associated with greater literacy and more schools. This indicates that the wave of Protestantism created by the Reformation raised literacy and schooling rates in its wake. Despite Prussia’s having a high average literacy rate in 1871, counties made up entirely of Protestants had literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that were all Catholic.18 FIGURE P.2. The percentage of Protestants in Prussian counties in 1871.17 The map highlights some German cities, including the epicenter of the Reformation, Wittenberg, and Mainz, the charter town where Johannes Gutenberg produced his eponymous printing press. These same patterns can be spotted elsewhere in 19th-century Europe—and today—in missionized regions around the globe. In 19th-century Switzerland, other aftershocks of the Reformation have been detected in a battery of cognitive tests given to Swiss army recruits. Young men from all-Protestant districts were not only 11 percentile points more likely to be “high performers” on reading tests compared to those from all-Catholic districts, but this advantage bled over into their scores in math, history, and writing. These relationships hold even when a district’s population density, fertility, and economic complexity are kept constant. As in Prussia, the closer a community was to one of the two epicenters of the Swiss Reformation—Zurich or Geneva—the more Protestants it had in the 19th century. Notably, proximity to other Swiss cities, such as Bern and Basel, doesn’t reveal this relationship. As is the case in Prussia, this setup allows us to finger Protestantism as driving the spread of greater literacy as well as the smaller improvements in writing and math abilities.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

the city, while an accumulator of the energies of culture, is also an accumulator of potencies of evil (Amos 3:9; Micah 1:5).”15 Sometimes these seats of culture making can be established to bring glory to God’s name (1 Cor 10:31) and therefore be a means of serving God and neighbor (e.g., Bezalel in Exod 31:3 – 5), or they can be erected to “make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4), resulting in a culture of human pride, self-salvation, violence, and oppression (Gen 4:17 – 24). Vos adds that what makes the human city fallen is not its density of population (indeed, this is what makes it an “accumulator of the energies of culture”), but its “spirit of rebellious self-dependence over against God.”16 A horse is a more valuable animal than a mouse, yet a crazed horse is capable of far more damage than a crazed mouse; so too a city’s strengths under sin can unleash more destructive evil. As the Genesis narrative unfolds, we see that warring with the city’s great potential is a profound bent toward corruption and idolatry. For most of the rest of Genesis, the city is seen in a negative light. The city is mentioned in connection

When James Larrick and his colleagues studied the still relatively isolated Waorani Indians of Ecuador, they found no evidence of hypertension, heart disease, or cancer. No anemia or common cold. No internal parasites. No sign of previous exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, or serum hepatitis.16 This is not as surprising as it may seem, given that almost all these diseases either originated in domesticated animals or depend upon high-density population for easy transmission. The deadliest infectious diseases and parasites that have plagued our species could not have spread until after the transition to agriculture.

It was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people's intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world - the habitat ring, the Eye, and all the rest - were so vastly greater than what the people of Old Earth had ever accomplished. It boiled down to Amistics [the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives]. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they'd been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence. Their devices could hold more data than anything you could buy today. Their ability to communicate through all sorts of wireless schemes was only now being matched - and that only in densely populated, affluent places like the Great Chain... Anyone who bothered to learn the history of the developed world in the years just before Zero understood perfectly well that Tavistock Prowse had been squarely in the middle of the normal range, as far as his social media habits and attention span had been concerned. But nevertheless, Blues called it Tav's Mistake. They didn't want to make it again. Any efforts made by modern consumer-goods manufacturers to produce the kinds of devices and apps that had disordered the brain of Tav were met with the same instinctive pushback as Victorian clergy might have directed against the inventor of a masturbation machine. To the extent the Blue's engineers could build electronics of comparable sophistication to those that Tav had used, they tended to put them into devices such as robots...

the end of the hunter-gatherer way of life. Ever since this transition, which began about six hundred generations ago, the human species’ punishment has been to toil miserably as farmers, growing our daily bread rather than plucking luscious fruits just there for the taking. In a rare instance of accord, creationists and evolutionary biologists agree that it has been downhill for humans ever since. According to Jared Diamond, farming was the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.”1 In spite of having more food, hence more children, than hunter-gatherers, farmers generally have to work harder; they eat a lower-quality diet; they more often confront starvation because their crops occasionally fail from floods, droughts, and other disasters; and they live at higher population densities, which promote infectious diseases and social stress. Farming may have led to civilization and other types of “progress,” but it also led to misery and death on a grand scale. Most of the mismatch diseases from which we currently suffer stem from the transition from hunting and gathering to farming.

As the polar ice caps receded and the earth began to warm, hunter-gatherers experienced a population boom. Having more children may seem a blessing, but they are also a source of great stress to hunter-gatherer communities who cannot survive at high population densities. Even

Another prerequisite of plagues are permanent settlements with high population densities. Farmers

To be sure, the early days of the Industrial Revolution were rough going, but within a few generations, innovations in technology, medicine, government, and public health led to effective solutions for many of the mismatch diseases caused by the Agricultural Revolution, especially the burden of infectious disease from living at higher population densities with animals and in unsanitary conditions. Not all of these advances, however, are available to people unfortunate enough to live in poverty, especially in less developed nations. In addition, the progress made over the last 150 years has also come with some consequential drawbacks for people’s health. Most essentially, there has been an epidemiological transition. As fewer people succumb to diseases from malnutrition and infections, especially when they are young, more people are developing other kinds of noncommunicable diseases as they age. This transition is still ongoing: in the forty years between 1970 and 2010, the percentage of deaths worldwide from infectious disease and malnutrition fell by 17 percent and life expectancy increased by eleven years, while the percentage of deaths from noncommunicable diseases rose by 30 percent.61 As more people live longer, more of them are suffering from disability. In technical terms, lower rates of mortality have been accompanied by higher rates of morbidity (defined as a state of ill health from any form of disease).

There are problems humans cannot solve, to wit: density dependent birth rates, loss of genetic diversity, the overturning of his population pyramid, traveling to the nearest star, and the extinction of Man.

We differ from other large mammals, but not much from rodents, in the great variety of habitats we now occupy and in the population densities we have achieved. In

Given our current system of property ownership, it makes sense that we would see greater wealth inequality in places where there's greater population density because land values command a greater percentage of the financial resources in the denser areas and only flow into the hands of those who own land.

Such then is the nature of quasispecies : the density of the sequence cloud at any point in sequence space is determined by the relative fitness of the sequence; regions of the cloud representing sequences of lesser fitness will be less densely populated and those with higher fitness, most populated. Here lies the most powerful quality of viral quasispecies: the density distribution of fitness variants dictates that sequences are represented at frequencies in relation to their relative fitness. Genomes with lower fitness will replicate poorly, or not at all, and the fittest genomes will replicate most efficiently. It therefore follows that there is a large bias toward the production of well-adapted genotypes: there are more of them, and they undergo most replicative cycles. This can permit viruses to experience evolutionary adaptation at rates that are orders of magnitude higher than those that could be achieved by truly random unbiased mutation. Sequences rapidly condense around the fittest area of the sequence space. Should the environment change, and, therefore, selective pressures change, a quasispecies can opportunistically exploits its inherent adaptive potential. Genotypes rapidly and ever-faster gravitate toward the cloud's new notational center of gravity. Changes in the fitness landscape of the sequence space that is occupied by a quasispecies are the natural consequence of altered selective pressures operating on the virus population. Such alterations may be the consequence of changed immunologic pressures exerted by the host, the application of antiviral drug therapy, or even cross-species transmission requiring the virus to adapt to a new host. Genotypes that once occupied the 'central' space, reserved for the fittest genotypes, are reduced in frequency and now occupy the more sparsely populated fringes of the fitness landscape; the very edge of the sequence cloud if you will. Here too lies an advantage for a quasispecies: it has a memory. The once best-adapted genotypes, now at a fitness disadvantage, can persist in the quasispecies as minor sequence variants. Under circumstances of fluctuating selective pressures, the ability of the population to recall an 'old' genome variant is a great asset. The quasispecies can rapidly respond and adapt by plucking out a preexisting variant and quickly coalescing around it to recreate an optimal fitness landscape.

The survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, more than 60,000 previously unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers, and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of supporting intensive agriculture. Previously scholars had believed that only scattered city-states had existed in an otherwise sparsely populated region, but the Lidar images make it clear, [...] that 'scale and population density had been grossly underestimated.

Manhattan had the same population density as Greenland, its population would be two.

Propaganda and urban density Thus for propaganda to be effective psychologically and sociologically, a combination of demographic phenomena is required. The first is population density, with a high frequency of diversified human contacts, exchanges of opinions and experienced and with primary importance placed on the feeling of togetherness. The second is urban concentration, which, resulting from the fusion between mass and crowd, gives the maas its psychological and sociological character. Only then can propaganda utilize crowd effects; only then can it profit from the psychological modifications that collective life produces in the individual and without which practically none of the propaganda would "take." Much more, the instruments of propaganda find their principal source of support in the urban concentration.

So long as the population density was low, then human beings viewed as units of labor were far more important than other factors of production such as land. From one end of the continent to the other, it is easy to find examples that African people were conscious that population was in their circumstances the most important factor of production. Among the Bemba, for instance, numbers of subjects were held to be more important than land. Among the Shambala of Tanzania, the same feeling was expressed in the saying, "A king is people.

The United States could not win the war if blacks continued as sharecroppers down South. The South was not an important area either politically or economically as far as the internationalists were concerned. (“The white South,” Myrdal wrote, “is itself a minority and a national problem.”) It was important only as a source of much-needed labor, at a time when most white southerners concurred because they no longer needed them to chop or harvest cotton and considered migration a simple solution to their biggest social problem. The foundations which did the thinking for the internationalist ruling class quickly realized that that flow of labor into the factories of the industrial North was impeded less by the system of political segregation in the South than by what they would eventually term the de-facto housing segregation in the North, which meant, in effect, the existence of residential patterns based on ethnic neighborhoods. The logistics problem facing Louis Wirth and his colleagues in the psychological-warfare establishment was not so much how to move the black up from the South — the wage differential and the railroads would accomplish that — but rather where to put him when he got there. Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia were essentially an assemblage of neighborhoods arranged as ethnic fiefdoms, dominated at that time by the most recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the Irish and Germans. As Wirth makes clear in his sociological writings, any group that has this kind of cohesiveness and population density had political power, and the question in his mind was precisely whether this political power was going to be used in the interests of the WASP ruling elite, who needed these people to fight a war that had nothing approaching majority support among ethnics of the sort Wirth viewed with suspicion. This group of “ethnic” Americans posed a problem for the psychological-warfare establishment because it posed a problem to the ethnic group that made up that establishment. This group of people constituted a Gestalt - ethnic, Catholic, unionized, and urban - whose mutual and reinforcing affiliations effectively removed them from the influence of instruments of mass communication which the psychological-warfare establishment saw as critical in controlling them. If one added the demographic increase this group enjoyed — as Catholics they were forbidden to use contraceptives — it is easy enough to see that their increase in political power posed a threat to WASP hegemony over the culture at precisely the moment when the WASP elite was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with fascism. It was Wirth’s job to bring them under control, lest they jeopardize the war effort.

A limited population produces fewer ordinary intelligences than a numerous population, but it can produce an equal or greater number of talents. Great demographic densities are the breeding grounds of mediocrity.

47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.

It is no longer “the biggest city on earth,” if it ever could have been accurately counted as such. Others such as Los Angeles have a far greater land mass, and several years ago the Tokyo-Yokahama corridor replaced Mexico City as the world’s most populous metropolis. Numerous other cities, although with fewer residents, have far greater population density. Mexico City has eighty-four hundred people per square kilometer, while Mumbai, Lagos, Karachi, and Seoul have more than double that figure. Bogotá, Shanghai, Lima, and Taipei also are significantly more jam-packed.

I emerge into a library/study with the highest book population density I have ever come across. Book walls, book towers, book avenues, book side streets. Book spillages, book rubble. Papperback books, hardback books, atlases, manuals, almanacs. Nine lifetimes of books. Enough books to build an igloo to hide in. The room is sentient with books. Mirrors double and cube the books. A Great Wall of China quantity of books. Enough books to makes me wonder if I am a book too.

Jakarta is the perfect place to start an attack—the population density is high and there are tons of expatriates

The Mong Kok area in China holds the record for most crowded area, with an estimated population density of 130,000 people per square kilometer.

Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behavior, social interaction, and communication. Imagine invisible bubbles around every person that provides each of us with comfort zones for social engagement and interaction.

As a rule of thumb, the hermaphrodite lifestyle works well if the prospects of finding a mate are slim, for example in low-density or immobile populations (explaining why many plants are hermaphrodites), while separate sexes develop in species with higher population densities or greater mobility.

Since the population of Berlin actually declined between 1933 and 2002 from 4.23 million to only 3.38 million, the density of cars in relation to population has actually increased by a factor of 30.

Therefore, according to the Bible, the essence of a city was not the population’s size but its density. A city is a social form in which people physically live in close proximity to one another.

From the safety and comfort of rarefied zip codes, open-border theorists tutor the little people in the positive economic effects on productivity and economic growth of high population density. But regular folks don't have to travel to Cairo or Karachi to discover that this urban theory is an urban myth.

For generations beyond count, this land sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth. Without any chemical 'fertilizers', pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain, or the new, fancy 'bio-tech' inputs that [agricultural scientists] champion… The Upanishads say: Om Purnamadaha Purnamidam Purnat Purnamudachyate Purnasya Purnamadaya Purnamewa Vashishyate "This creation is whole and complete. From the whole emerge creations, each whole and complete. Take the whole from the whole, but the whole yet remains, Undiminished, complete!" In our forests, the trees like ber (jujube), jambul (jambolan), mango, umbar (wild fig), mahua (Madhuca indica), imli (tamarind), yield so abundantly in their season that the branches sag under the weight of the fruit. The annual yield per tree is commonly over a tonne - year after year. But the earth around remains whole and undiminished. – Open Letter from Bhaskar Save to M.S.Swaminathan

An ecumene is a core geographical area, one with special significance. Cohen (2009, p. 35) uses the term to refer to areas with the greatest population density and the greatest density of wealth creation: “The most advanced portion of the state economically, it is usually its most important political area.

Bachofen, furthermore, is perfectly right in contending that the transition from what he calls "hetaerism" or "incestuous generation" to monogamy was brought about mainly by women. The more in the course of economic development, undermining the old communism and increasing the density of population, the traditional sexual relations lost their innocent character suited to the primitive forest, the more debasing and oppressive they naturally appeared to women; and the more they consequently longed for relief by the right of chastity, of temporary or permanent marriage with one man. This progress could not be due to men for the simple reason that they never, even to this day, had the least intention of renouncing the pleasures of actual group marriage. Not until the women had accomplished the transition to the pairing family could the men introduce strict monogamy—true, only for women. The

Some families evicted from the Flats settled in a segregated development, also created by the federal government, that later opened on the west side. But because public housing was intended not for poor but for lower-middle-class families, many of those displaced from the Flats had incomes that were insufficient to qualify. Instead, many had to double up with relatives or rent units created when other African American families subdivided their houses. A result of the government program, therefore, was the increased population density that turned the African American neighborhoods into slums.

There is good evidence that Aborigines are genetically insulin resistant,94 so that some of their metabolic traits ‘are associated with being Aboriginal (mild impairment of glucose tolerance, hyperinsulinemia and elevated total and VLDL [very low density lipoprotein] triglycerides)’.95 In such a population, replacing ancestral food choices with the ‘displacing foods of modern commerce’ must predictably lead to high rates of T2DM.

This is the place to dispel the "solar myth." The United States is a relatively sunlit nation of low population density, a particularly favorable place for solar energy. Yet even in the United States the numbers don't work out for it. In 1971 the average United States energy use was 0.3 watts per square meter. Staying with those units, the use rate will be 4.4 a century from now, even at the very modest growth rate of 2.5 percent per year overall (including population increase). Windpower, tidepower, photosynthesis, and hydroelectric power are all forms of solar energy. If

The second variable is population density in relation to the carrying capacity. Density pushing at the subsistence limits promotes intragroup competition, and causes asabiya to decline. Low population density implies low intragroup competition, and conditions favoring the increase of asabiya.

When viewed at the state level, voting patterns obscure more than they illuminate; what really matters is population density within states. The more densely populated an area is, the more Democratic it will tend to vote.

None of the bottom five states in population density (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota) have voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992, and, even that year, only Montana went for Clinton, and by a small margin. By contrast, none of the top five states with the highest population density (New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Maryland) have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.

As worldview became the dominant fault line in party politics in the early 2000s, residential political sorting accelerated even more dramatically. This has had a profound impact on the country’s electoral landscape. In particular, counties in the United States are much more politically homogeneous than they once were. There are about 3,000 counties in the United States, and they vary greatly by size. Some, like Kings County (Brooklyn), are huge—population 2.6 million. Others are tiny, like Loving County, Texas, population 82. Over time, the big ones, with high population densities, have trended Democratic, while the small ones, with low population densities, have trended Republican.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

For causes entirely incompatible with reason, or for reasons entirely undeserving of death, hot headed youths rushed into it as insects fly into fire; mixed and dubious motives drove more samurai to this deed than nuns into convent gates. Life was cheap—cheap as reckoned by the popular standard of honor. The saddest feature was that honor, which was always in the agio, so to speak, was not always solid gold, but alloyed with baser metals. No one circle in the Inferno will boast of greater density of Japanese population than the seventh, to which Dante consigns all victims of self-destruction!

The greatest environmental gains from population density arise once destinations become so close to one another that people elect to get around all by themselves - the urban-transit equivalent of the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining.

Stories of individual animals must now be told. Not stats and population densities, but characters in stories that very much mirror our own daily struggles to survive. An individual, well loved, even heroic wolf like OR7 with whom we've so deeply identified can never be a statistic again.

Evidence is overwhelming that, after switching to agriculture, human stature decreased, a very reliable indicator of a decline in overall wellbeing. People fell sick more often because of higher population density and because pathogens jumped from domesticated animals to humans. The quality of nutrition declined, as is abundantly documented in ancient bones and teeth.

Most human cultures have been overtly polygynous. In hunter-gatherer cultures the men who are the most charming, the most respected, the most intelligent, and the best hunters tend to attract more than their fair share of female sexual attention. They may have two or three times as many offspring as their less attractive competitors. In pastoral cultures the men who have the largest herds of animals attract the most women. In agricultural societies the men who have the most land, wealth, and military power attract the most women. Before the middle ages, in urban civilizations with high population densities, the men at the top of the hierarchy almost always had harems of hundreds of women producing hundreds of babies.

Long before this, our ancestors lived on a thinly populated planet, with altogether only a couple of million people. Their density may have resembled that of the Bushmen, who live on ten square miles per capita. There are even suggestions that before this, about seventy thousand years ago, our lineage was at the edge of extinction, living in scattered small bands with a global population of just a couple of thousand. These are hardly the sort of conditions that promote continuous warfare. Furthermore, our ancestors probably had little worth fighting over, again like the Bushmen, for whom the only such exceptions are water and women. But Bushmen share water with thirsty visitors, and regularly marry off their children to neighboring groups. The latter practice ties groups together and means that the men in one group are often related to those in the other. In the long run, killing one’s kin is not a successful trait.

Bruce Trigger, who compared seven early civilizations in such features as population density, technology, religious beliefs and practices, legal systems, and family and community organization.

You have to live the solution, and to set about solving the new problems that this creates. It is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain, with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had at its zenith, and at an enormously higher standard of living. Appropriately enough, this civilization has knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain.

In Gaza, around one-third of the land housed some six thousand Jewish settlers, several military bases, and a network of roads designed so that settlers avoided contact with the Palestinian residents. The remaining two-thirds of the territory, cut into cantons, was left to 1.1 million Palestinians, which translated to a population density of about 128 Israelis per square mile, compared with 11,702 Palestinians per square mile. The double standard, overcrowding for Palestinians, economic disparity, and resulting resentment and anger were entirely foreseeable.

The actual issue is not the excess of population but the actions of population.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive. At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators. Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto. With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools. In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.

Parents with one child or two child or more child all are contributor to population explosion.

By not imposing laws to control the population, we are issuing the nature a license to kill the population.

Density also drives innovation. Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West discovered that every time the population of a city doubles, its rate of innovation, as measured in number of patents, increases by 15 percent. In fact, in West’s research, no matter the city studied, as population density increases, so do wages, GDP, and quality-of-life factors like the number of theaters and restaurants.

Inextricably linked to the climate emergency is a broader environmental crisis. A third of the Earth’s land is now acutely degraded, with fertile soil being lost at a rate of 24 billion tonnes a year through intensive farming.[19] Generating three centimetres of top soil takes 1,000 years, and, the UN said in 2014, if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.[20] 95% of our food presently comes from the soil. Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960. The equivalent of 30 football pitches of soil are being lost every minute. Heavy tilling, monocropping multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. Agriculture is actually the number one reason for deforestation. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, often leading to land abandonment and desertification. Decreasing productivity has been observed, due to diminished fertility, on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Furthermore, tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon.[21] Forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a crucial role in absorbing GHG – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, more than all the traffic in the US. This is due to the thinning of tree density and culling of biodiversity, reducing biomass by up to 75%. Scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America – home to the world’s biggest forest, the Amazon, which is responsible for 20% of its oxygen – accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia. Every year about 18 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly one billion hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has been torn down. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century and they will vanish altogether at current rates within another. Earth’s “sixth mass extinction”[22] is well underway: up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades and almost half of land mammals have lost 80% of their range in the last century. Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and in some countries there has been an even faster decline of insects – vital, of course, for aerating the soil, pollinating blossoms, and controlling insect and plant pests.

most scope for unique finishability will have the most honor. Prospective settlers may be screened and accepted or rejected not only on the basis of their primary skill and occupation or profession but also on the basis of what they can contribute by their secondary talents, skills, hobbies, and avocations. If the new settlements are to avoid terminal blahs, the population will have to have a very high talent density in comparison with Earth.

A result of the government program, therefore, was the increased population density that turned the African American neighborhoods into slums.

Scanning the next two centuries, we see that the pattern changes dramatically (see page 229). Solo, amateur innovation (quadrant three) surrenders much of its lead to the rising power of networks and commerce (quadrant four). The most dramatic change lies along the horizontal axis, in a mass migration from individual breakthroughs (on the left) to the creative insights of the group (on the right). Less than 10 percent of innovation during the Renaissance is networked; two centuries later, a majority of breakthrough ideas emerge in collaborative environments. Multiple developments precipitate this shift, starting with Gutenberg’s press, which begins to have a material impact on secular research a century and a half after the first Bible hits the stands, as scientific ideas are stored and shared in the form of books and pamphlets. Postal systems, so central to Enlightenment science, flower across Europe; population densities increase in the urban centers; coffeehouses and formal institutions like the Royal Society create new hubs for intellectual collaboration.

Research shows the negative effects of diversity on the United States. Robert Putnam of Harvard studied 41 different American communities that ranged from the extreme homogeneity of rural South Dakota to the very mixed populations of Los Angeles. He found a strong correlation between homogeneity and levels of trust, with the greatest distrust in the most diverse areas. He was unhappy with these results, and checked his findings by controlling for any other variable that might affect trust, such as poverty, age, crime rates, population densities, education, commuting time, home ownership, etc. These played some role but he was forced to conclude that “diversity per se has a major effect.” Prof. Putnam listed the following consequences of diversity: 'Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media. Lower political efficacy—that is, confidence in their own influence. Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups. Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage). Less likelihood of working on a community project. Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering. Fewer close friends and confidants. Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life. More time spent watching television and more agreement that “television is my most important form of entertainment.”' Other research confirms that people in “diverse” workgroups—not only of race but also age and professional background—are less loyal to the group, more likely to resign, and generally less satisfied than people who work with people like themselves. Carpooling is less common in racially mixed neighborhoods because it means counting on your neighbors, and people trust people who are like themselves.

The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortālitās magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of Ulster, devastating the aristocracy (and no doubt every other class). Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, also died of plague in 547 or 549, according to the Annales Cambriae. A folk memory of this dreadful disease, and the depopulation it caused, would remain in the Arthurian legend of the Waste Land, combining famine with military defeat, and a mysterious wound (to the king) in the groin area—one of the characteristics of bubonic plague. There is even a little genetic evidence that strikingly bears this out. Comparing the pattern of Y-chromosome DNA from samples in a line across from Anglesey to Friesland, a recent study found that the Welshmen were to this day clearly distinct from those in central England, but that the English and Frisian samples were so similar that they pointed to a common origin of 50–100 per cent of the (male) population; this could have resulted from a mass migration from Friesland.50 On the usual assumption that the Roman-period population of the island had reached 3 to 4 million, it seems hardly possible that anything other than an epidemic could have so eliminated the Britons from the ancestry of central England. So English supervened.

COVID-19 self-isolation in India is not easy – pushing people to self-isolate on trees, due to lack of space. The population density in India is 464 per km2 (1,202 people per sq. mi).

Yet it has to be recognized that these checklists conform to managerial norms of measuring sustainability because they are made up of easily quantifiable items: more solar roofs, less airborne particulates; more transit riders, less water use per capital; more housing density, less golf courses. Greening the world, from this standpoint, suggests that the ecological crisis can be fixed by making slight technical adjustments to people's habits and interactions with their daily environments. When sustainability is defined by a set of metrics, it reflects a purely physical understanding of how societies strive to be ecologically resilient. By contrast, there are no indexes for measuring environmental justice, no indicators for judging equity of access to the green life, and no technical quantum for assessing the social sustainability of a population. The vogue for green governance by the numbers is a recipe for managing, rather than correcting, inequality.

When this story opens at the birth of Christ, the European landscape was marked by extraordinary contrasts. The circle of the Mediterranean, newly united under Roman imperial domination, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced and culturally developed civilization. This world had philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture and rubbish collection. Otherwise, apart from some bits west of the Rhine and south of the Danube which were already beginning to march to the tune of a more Mediterranean beat, the rest of Europe was home to subsistence-level farmers, organized in small-scale political units. Much of it was dominated by Germanic-speakers, who had some iron tools and weapons, but who worked generally in wood, had little literacy and never built in stone. The further east you went, the simpler it all became: fewer iron tools, less productive agricultures and a lower population density. This was, in fact, the ancient world in western Eurasia: a dominant Mediterranean circle lording it over an undeveloped northern hinterland. Move forward a thousand years, and the world had turned. Not only had Slavic-speakers replaced Germanic-speakers as the dominant force over much of barbarian Europe, and some Germanic-speakers replaced Romans and Celts in some of the rest, but, even more fundamentally, Mediterranean dominance had been broken. Politically, this was caused by the emergence of larger and more solid state formations in the old northern hinterland, as exemplified by the Moravians, but the pattern was not limited to politics. By the year 1000, many of the Mediterranean's cultural patterns - not least Christianity, literacy and building in stone - were also spreading north and east. Essentially, patterns of human organization were moving towards much greater homogeneity right across the European landmass. It was these new state and cultural structures that broke for ever the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer. The ancient world order had given way to cultural and political patterns that were more directly ancestral to those of modern Europe.

the physician Louis-René Villermé (1782–1863), who measured death rates across the twelve arrondissements, or districts, of Paris and correlated them with population density and income. Motivated by the hypothesis that miasma emanating from waste caused disease, Villermé urged action through a cleanup campaign that would remove refuse and clean public spaces in the most badly affected localities.