You do not add to your discussion that Ireland had the fastest growing population in the world due to the introduction of modern market economies. In the preceding 50 years the population doubled from 4 to 8 million and many were forced to farm land not suitable for the production of their core crop. One then could argue that this was the main reason the famine effected this area the hardest. This sort of population growth was not seen in the rest of the world until the advent of modern fertilizers which made all areas more productive.
Theodore, allow me to partly disagree. With the best of goodwill, Ireland's economy was not a "modern" economy in the mid-19th century. It was a peasant economy. The Irish behaved as peasants do everywhere: more children, more arms on the farm. But, you have a good point, yes, you could say that overpopulation was at the basis of the collapse, but take into account that collapses never occur for a single cause, they are always the result of a tangle of forcings and feedbacks.
Your question, though, brings an interesting point that I didn't discuss in the post. What if the British had helped the Irish? It is an exercise in alternate history; I think they would have kept growing for a while, but then, as everywhere in Europe, they would have gone through the demographic transition. Probably, their population today would have been the same as it is in the real world.
Hi Ugo, I think if the Irish poor had the time there is nothing they would like more than to diversify their diet but many of these children would have been so young and this was the main reason other areas of Europe fared marginally better. The English did help the Irish as their rights and education were improved and their population flourished from just over a million to over 8.5 million, again faster than any country on the globe but in the end this was what I believe drove them over the cliff. We are not much different today we have just passed the emphasis to nature instead of man and it is definitely paying the price of our continued rapid growth.
And in 2026, Ireland has one of the fastest growing populations in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa at 7 times the EU average. What could go wrong eh.
Come on, Mark. Ireland has been undergoing the demographic transition just like all Western countries. Its total fertility rate has been below the replacement rate since 1990 -- later than other countries, but following the same path. It is true that its population is still growing because of earlier trends and immigration, but it will soon start going down.
Sure, our fertility rate is collapsing. My argument is slightly different - its the population as a whole that is having an impact on our ecosystem (Ireland is in ecosystem collapse I would argue). I believe Irelands population will continue to ballon for a long time to come as there are many forces yielding power to increase it, not least the asset holders. There will also be plenty of people to suck in from around the world as the number of wars increase. And all of this while our fertility rate continues to plunge. But we'll see.
My understanding of the Potato-Blight Famine in Ireland is that English landowners had Irish workers growing wheat to feed the English armies, and that the Queen was advised that this natural order should not be changed by feeding the wheat to the starving Irish, whose own potatoes were dying from the disease.
Exactly. The Irish workers had to pay rent to their landlords for the huts they occupied, and they did that by working for them. Essentially, they worked for free. In other settings, they would have been called slaves. There are no reports that the Queen played a role in the story, but there are plenty of documents about British economists advising the government to let the Irish starve for their own good. Economists are an evil race.
I do not recall, having read it a year or 2 ago. It seemed worth adjusting my worldview for a tiny bit, a tree in a forest. Queen Victoria always had to choose the army and navy over "subjects" of various stripes.
We're still not back at our pre-famine population. The UKs population at the time was 12m, now 70m, and probably higher (its so out of control the demographers can no longer count accurately).
Of note is that in Ireland during the famine, most of the starving were in the countryside. The cities did okay, though of course were inundated with the starving. Dublin, Cork and Belfast had imports of wheat and oats to rely on. The country folk relied solely on potatoes.
Its generally assumed that collapse will be worse felt in the cities. But like in the past, cities may have the leverage to stay going longer, and collapse will work its way in from the margins, consuming the farmers and homesteaders first.
Speaking as a rural expert in America, many of my neighbors will be challenged. We all exist from the supermarket bounty. Many will have a hard time growing their own and preserving for the winter months. And this is assuming an economy that allows them to keep paying the mortgage and acquire the tools they need.
Ireland / Seneca; this was net loss, included migration. Whence Egypt now; the biggest wheat importer and an urban population largely on the traditional grains/pulses for their calories? OK while it can still leverage the processing and re-export Israeli NG for hard currency?
Soil and water and Liebig limits. Think of aquifers. Palestine and water withdrawal by modern Israel. And then note depleting Oglala in the US supplies ~30% of US horticulture and there are already modern forms of malnutrition distributed by income or lack of it, not least in the USA.
Ugo, with all due respect to your research there was no Famine in Ireland if you describe Famine as a complete lack of food. There was a Potato Blight that decimated the main food source of the peasant rural Irish who worked the land. Their circumstance derived directly from Colonial edicts , Landed Gentry who reaped the financial benefit of the produce of the land with no concern for the natives working it except how little they could get away with giving back. The estimates of the Irish population at that time are likely underreported by a couple of million..... 10 to 11 million people is more likely a true number. Nearly HALF the British Army was on active service in Ireland during this time period. It was there to ensure the safe passage of wheat ,barley , hops, pigs, cattle , vegetables and other food stuffs for export to England to feed THEIR population that had been drawn to the cities. Irishmen were denied the ability to fish in river or sea to feed their families under pain of violent retribution from Crown Forces. Ireland provided at least a 3rd of the income to the Crown at the time....from an agrarian society. There was no food shortage in Ireland. Ireland feed England while the native Irish were forced starved to death and ruin by the ideology of Crown and the advent of the moralistic Victorian Superman.
History it is said is written by the Victors.....but the Victims remember the truth.
Well, of course, famines never are "complete." Someone dies, but others live. While South-Western Ireland starved, North-Eastern Ireland continued to export food to England. As I say, it is a question of supply, not of production. The Western part of Ireland didn't receive the supply it needed because it lacked the financial, governmental, and military resources that could have brought food there. This was a situation that the English had created. No wonder that they kept a strong military force there.
My first wife was (and still is) Puerto Rican. We lived there 1962-1963.
The Great Depression hit PR far harder than the US. My father-in-law left for NYC, working his way from restaurant dishwasher to certified quartermaster (helmsman) in the US merchant marine, so his family was well fed and clothed. Too many children in her home town showed classic symptoms of kwashiorkor, the disease of childhood protein deficiency.
In the early 20th century, the Puerto Rican poor people's diet was based on rice and beans, and so was protein rich (I love it still). Both were grown in Puerto Rico, available and inexpensive. Around the time of WW1, farms passed to the ownership of mostly mainland US companies. They got a better return on investment by growing sugar than rice and beans and importing rice and beans from the US. The price for rice and beans in Puerto Rico rose to well above what the poor Puerto Ricans could pay. There was no shortage of nutritious food. The problem was the absence of affordable nutritious food.
Death by starvation was not common. But the situation was economically homologous to that of Mid-19th Century. From folk history from my Irish (and English) ancestors, I gathered that people, including victims, of both famines suffered in general from ignorance of the overall situation. It is easy to avert eyes from your neighbors suffering when they are like the first two passers-by in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
A desperate Iran (using food as a weapon against them) will just make it more likely for them to use the Sampson option, Ugo, to take 25% of hydrocarbon extraction and processing offline. This Unnecessary Ramadan War against Iran is just beginning and the rogue hegemon seems to have distain for International Law. The best that can be hoped for is that 2026 marks the beginning of Degrowth which would be a good thing for the biosphere which all of humanity depends on.
Yes, for sure, Ugo, although many Gulf states are quite dependent on imported food. But this outrage won't go unpunished by an Iran that has already suggested they many options for retaliation. Where is the international outrage against using food as a weapon? Congress seems like a rubber stamp Duma and even the EU "leadership" seems to be falling in line to tacitly validate the US and its outrageous war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f88VNr1qWM
The Irish weren't the first to suffer from famine - long before, that happened in (now) Latin America (Aztecs among others) as well. In the case of climate or supply disruption, the issue then becomes availability of (remaining) local vegetation able to sustain the minimum food supply (not a matter of calories BTW). Wet tropical climes with clay soil provide the best guarantee of surviving droughts.
What helps a great deal is to know the minimum set of foods required to maintain health in such conditions of deprivation. Unfortunately, nutrition isn't a favorable object of study and isn't of much help either because every person has a different microbiome so very few did / do the experiments to discover the flexibility of their metabolism (let alone, improve it).
Regarding the so called "decision makers" who should look beyond the event horizon to prevent calamities, this:
Intelligent people learn from their mistakes. Very intelligent people can also learn from the mistakes of others. Hence there are no intelligent people among politicians and yet they determine the fate of entire populations.
Yes, it is good in general. The problem is that people aren't listening to these concepts anymore. You just mention the term "climate," and they fall into a catatonic state. So, if you allow me a suggestion, I would be a little more optimistic. If you use the term "rebuildable," then people would ask you, "why do you want us to build them if they won't last?" Everything has become incredibly difficult. Yet, we try to do our best.
Die Iren mussten enorme Abgaben leisten an die Briten...die Iren wurden regelrecht ausgehungert und zur Auswanderung bewegt, denn die Briten benötigten Siedler in Übersee. Somit schließt sich der Kreis. Wenn nicht dieser Monokulturanbau der Kartoffel in Europa existiert hätte und somit deren Anfälligkeit (die es in Amerika so nicht gab), dann hätte dieser Pilz auch nicht solchen enormen Schaden anrichten können.
You do not add to your discussion that Ireland had the fastest growing population in the world due to the introduction of modern market economies. In the preceding 50 years the population doubled from 4 to 8 million and many were forced to farm land not suitable for the production of their core crop. One then could argue that this was the main reason the famine effected this area the hardest. This sort of population growth was not seen in the rest of the world until the advent of modern fertilizers which made all areas more productive.
Theodore, allow me to partly disagree. With the best of goodwill, Ireland's economy was not a "modern" economy in the mid-19th century. It was a peasant economy. The Irish behaved as peasants do everywhere: more children, more arms on the farm. But, you have a good point, yes, you could say that overpopulation was at the basis of the collapse, but take into account that collapses never occur for a single cause, they are always the result of a tangle of forcings and feedbacks.
Your question, though, brings an interesting point that I didn't discuss in the post. What if the British had helped the Irish? It is an exercise in alternate history; I think they would have kept growing for a while, but then, as everywhere in Europe, they would have gone through the demographic transition. Probably, their population today would have been the same as it is in the real world.
Hi Ugo, I think if the Irish poor had the time there is nothing they would like more than to diversify their diet but many of these children would have been so young and this was the main reason other areas of Europe fared marginally better. The English did help the Irish as their rights and education were improved and their population flourished from just over a million to over 8.5 million, again faster than any country on the globe but in the end this was what I believe drove them over the cliff. We are not much different today we have just passed the emphasis to nature instead of man and it is definitely paying the price of our continued rapid growth.
And in 2026, Ireland has one of the fastest growing populations in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa at 7 times the EU average. What could go wrong eh.
Come on, Mark. Ireland has been undergoing the demographic transition just like all Western countries. Its total fertility rate has been below the replacement rate since 1990 -- later than other countries, but following the same path. It is true that its population is still growing because of earlier trends and immigration, but it will soon start going down.
I added a note based on this conversation to the post. Thanks to you both, Mark and Theodore
Sure, our fertility rate is collapsing. My argument is slightly different - its the population as a whole that is having an impact on our ecosystem (Ireland is in ecosystem collapse I would argue). I believe Irelands population will continue to ballon for a long time to come as there are many forces yielding power to increase it, not least the asset holders. There will also be plenty of people to suck in from around the world as the number of wars increase. And all of this while our fertility rate continues to plunge. But we'll see.
True. But these things happen fast!
My understanding of the Potato-Blight Famine in Ireland is that English landowners had Irish workers growing wheat to feed the English armies, and that the Queen was advised that this natural order should not be changed by feeding the wheat to the starving Irish, whose own potatoes were dying from the disease.
Exactly. The Irish workers had to pay rent to their landlords for the huts they occupied, and they did that by working for them. Essentially, they worked for free. In other settings, they would have been called slaves. There are no reports that the Queen played a role in the story, but there are plenty of documents about British economists advising the government to let the Irish starve for their own good. Economists are an evil race.
What I saw said that the Queen knew and decided not to intervene for the Irish, against her army and navy.
Do you have a source?
I do not recall, having read it a year or 2 ago. It seemed worth adjusting my worldview for a tiny bit, a tree in a forest. Queen Victoria always had to choose the army and navy over "subjects" of various stripes.
I looked this up just now: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/specialfeatures/victoria-s2-e4-irish-famine-history/
No evidence that the Queen had a role in this story
Not direct documentation of a command decision, no...
One would not want to record those things, would one?
Contemporaneous awareness.
We're still not back at our pre-famine population. The UKs population at the time was 12m, now 70m, and probably higher (its so out of control the demographers can no longer count accurately).
Of note is that in Ireland during the famine, most of the starving were in the countryside. The cities did okay, though of course were inundated with the starving. Dublin, Cork and Belfast had imports of wheat and oats to rely on. The country folk relied solely on potatoes.
Its generally assumed that collapse will be worse felt in the cities. But like in the past, cities may have the leverage to stay going longer, and collapse will work its way in from the margins, consuming the farmers and homesteaders first.
Indeed. The Irish cities had a monetized economy. They could import some food.
Speaking as a rural expert in America, many of my neighbors will be challenged. We all exist from the supermarket bounty. Many will have a hard time growing their own and preserving for the winter months. And this is assuming an economy that allows them to keep paying the mortgage and acquire the tools they need.
We all exist as long as supermarkets exist.....
Thanks Ugo. Valuable discussion.
Ireland / Seneca; this was net loss, included migration. Whence Egypt now; the biggest wheat importer and an urban population largely on the traditional grains/pulses for their calories? OK while it can still leverage the processing and re-export Israeli NG for hard currency?
Soil and water and Liebig limits. Think of aquifers. Palestine and water withdrawal by modern Israel. And then note depleting Oglala in the US supplies ~30% of US horticulture and there are already modern forms of malnutrition distributed by income or lack of it, not least in the USA.
Ugo, with all due respect to your research there was no Famine in Ireland if you describe Famine as a complete lack of food. There was a Potato Blight that decimated the main food source of the peasant rural Irish who worked the land. Their circumstance derived directly from Colonial edicts , Landed Gentry who reaped the financial benefit of the produce of the land with no concern for the natives working it except how little they could get away with giving back. The estimates of the Irish population at that time are likely underreported by a couple of million..... 10 to 11 million people is more likely a true number. Nearly HALF the British Army was on active service in Ireland during this time period. It was there to ensure the safe passage of wheat ,barley , hops, pigs, cattle , vegetables and other food stuffs for export to England to feed THEIR population that had been drawn to the cities. Irishmen were denied the ability to fish in river or sea to feed their families under pain of violent retribution from Crown Forces. Ireland provided at least a 3rd of the income to the Crown at the time....from an agrarian society. There was no food shortage in Ireland. Ireland feed England while the native Irish were forced starved to death and ruin by the ideology of Crown and the advent of the moralistic Victorian Superman.
History it is said is written by the Victors.....but the Victims remember the truth.
Well, of course, famines never are "complete." Someone dies, but others live. While South-Western Ireland starved, North-Eastern Ireland continued to export food to England. As I say, it is a question of supply, not of production. The Western part of Ireland didn't receive the supply it needed because it lacked the financial, governmental, and military resources that could have brought food there. This was a situation that the English had created. No wonder that they kept a strong military force there.
My first wife was (and still is) Puerto Rican. We lived there 1962-1963.
The Great Depression hit PR far harder than the US. My father-in-law left for NYC, working his way from restaurant dishwasher to certified quartermaster (helmsman) in the US merchant marine, so his family was well fed and clothed. Too many children in her home town showed classic symptoms of kwashiorkor, the disease of childhood protein deficiency.
In the early 20th century, the Puerto Rican poor people's diet was based on rice and beans, and so was protein rich (I love it still). Both were grown in Puerto Rico, available and inexpensive. Around the time of WW1, farms passed to the ownership of mostly mainland US companies. They got a better return on investment by growing sugar than rice and beans and importing rice and beans from the US. The price for rice and beans in Puerto Rico rose to well above what the poor Puerto Ricans could pay. There was no shortage of nutritious food. The problem was the absence of affordable nutritious food.
Death by starvation was not common. But the situation was economically homologous to that of Mid-19th Century. From folk history from my Irish (and English) ancestors, I gathered that people, including victims, of both famines suffered in general from ignorance of the overall situation. It is easy to avert eyes from your neighbors suffering when they are like the first two passers-by in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
No sin is altogether original.
A desperate Iran (using food as a weapon against them) will just make it more likely for them to use the Sampson option, Ugo, to take 25% of hydrocarbon extraction and processing offline. This Unnecessary Ramadan War against Iran is just beginning and the rogue hegemon seems to have distain for International Law. The best that can be hoped for is that 2026 marks the beginning of Degrowth which would be a good thing for the biosphere which all of humanity depends on.
If starvation is used as a weapon, it will be used against Iran, mainly.
Yes, for sure, Ugo, although many Gulf states are quite dependent on imported food. But this outrage won't go unpunished by an Iran that has already suggested they many options for retaliation. Where is the international outrage against using food as a weapon? Congress seems like a rubber stamp Duma and even the EU "leadership" seems to be falling in line to tacitly validate the US and its outrageous war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f88VNr1qWM
The Irish weren't the first to suffer from famine - long before, that happened in (now) Latin America (Aztecs among others) as well. In the case of climate or supply disruption, the issue then becomes availability of (remaining) local vegetation able to sustain the minimum food supply (not a matter of calories BTW). Wet tropical climes with clay soil provide the best guarantee of surviving droughts.
What helps a great deal is to know the minimum set of foods required to maintain health in such conditions of deprivation. Unfortunately, nutrition isn't a favorable object of study and isn't of much help either because every person has a different microbiome so very few did / do the experiments to discover the flexibility of their metabolism (let alone, improve it).
Regarding the so called "decision makers" who should look beyond the event horizon to prevent calamities, this:
Intelligent people learn from their mistakes. Very intelligent people can also learn from the mistakes of others. Hence there are no intelligent people among politicians and yet they determine the fate of entire populations.
Thanks for your work on this Ugo I wondered if you have time to review my new white paper? https://energyandresilience.substack.com/p/the-limits-to-the-energy-transition
Yes, it is good in general. The problem is that people aren't listening to these concepts anymore. You just mention the term "climate," and they fall into a catatonic state. So, if you allow me a suggestion, I would be a little more optimistic. If you use the term "rebuildable," then people would ask you, "why do you want us to build them if they won't last?" Everything has become incredibly difficult. Yet, we try to do our best.
Die Iren mussten enorme Abgaben leisten an die Briten...die Iren wurden regelrecht ausgehungert und zur Auswanderung bewegt, denn die Briten benötigten Siedler in Übersee. Somit schließt sich der Kreis. Wenn nicht dieser Monokulturanbau der Kartoffel in Europa existiert hätte und somit deren Anfälligkeit (die es in Amerika so nicht gab), dann hätte dieser Pilz auch nicht solchen enormen Schaden anrichten können.