The Lens and the Looker and The Bronze and the Brimstone. In addition I have interviewed Lory. I enjoyed his books and I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that he is making history palatable to young people. Lory and I have emailed back and forth and he has been kind enough to allow me to “plumb the depths” of how he created his World of History Camp. Please note that I have no financial relationship with Lory, nor do I reap any benefits from posting his back story. I am making these posts because as a reader and an author I find the novel building process interesting and informative and I hope you will too. Plus you have the opportunity to garner a FREE book. (more on that later)
Population Explained: 300,000,000 is a huge number but is it?
So, why 300,000,000 was chosen as a sustainable population:
As I started to mention earlier, in my back story, I envisioned a planetary council of elders determining a target number of humans that could be sustained by the ecosystem of the planet for an indefinite amount of millennium. I had them choose 300,000,000. I saw this happened in the last years of the 21st-century and they choose as a target deadline for reaching it, the early 24th-century. They impose a one child per couple law, among other things.
The impetus for the drastic lowering were the many cataclysmic events in the latter half of the 21st-century; the rising of the oceans, droughts that starved millions, bacterial infections that wiped out billions and wars that cause Diasporas of whole populations. Refugees, like a diseased horde of locusts, limped from continent to continent, consuming, killing and dying. Wow, this short description outlines scores of great dystopian books that have been written since the middle of the twentieth-century, after the first atomic bombs were dropped and it was realized by many visionary writers that, finally, humans really did have the ability to really destroy the planet. Dystopian literature was born!
However, at the end of my imaginary 21st-century, (and with me being an eternal optimist) I have humans starting to rebuild the world successfully. And luckily, this time, humans have retained enough knowledge and wisdom to not repeat the mistakes of the past; not to burn our library of Alexandria, fall into religious fundamentalism or create a fascist state. Finally, in the scenario of the History Camp world, humans rise from the ashes more or less, as one group. Why that was able to happen is described under several of the headings that follow, but let me mention a few of the fundamental truths that became burned into the brains of all humans.
- It was recognized that for humans to survive, we must allow other species to survive. It became a common currency of thought that there is a complex underpinning to nature, a balanced, complex web of life, where we support and sustain each other. For these millions of other species to survive, we must share planetary resources. To share planetary resources, our numbers must be lower.
- The concept was accepted that humankind had outstripped its biology, that is, nature could no longer keep human’s numbers in check. For millions of years, before agriculture and medicine, a certain reproduction rate was needed to keep a stable population of the estimated 1,000,000 homo sapiens on the planet. After the invention of agriculture, and because of our unique human unique brain, infant mortality rate steadily decreased and the average human lifespan increased. The inevitable outcome, population growth. With this in mind, it was decided in the late 21st-century, that, since nature could no longer control population size, it was our responsibility to do it ourselves.
- Besides agriculture and medicine, it was recognized that every invention humans created allowed its population to grow. Another accepted concept about inventions was that, during history, societal systems were always being tweaked to allow fewer and fewer people to control larger masses of industry and population. Some logical, future thinker then determined the following; the whole of human society must turn this reality on its head. Human kind must also burn into the front of its consciousness that the purpose of inventions must be to allow populations to remain small while helping to keep the individual’s quality of life high. This would not only allow the demands our biological selves made on the planet to remain small, but also allow us to expand the ability to express ourselves creatively or to just live our lives in peace.
None of these ideas are expressed explicitly in the narrative of my story. After all, this is supposed to be an exciting action story. However, all these machinations is what a writer has to do when world building a credible future society.
Now we have an idea of what defined the population of The World of History Camp but what defined that specific number of 300,000,000? Read next month's installment to find out.
How do you qualify for a FREE book?
Fine Print
Simply read the post and fill out the form below. Each entry will be assigned a number and those numbers will be input into a random number generator to choose the winner. I will email the winner. The winner’s address will be sent to Lory Kaufman who will be sending out the autographed books. If you have a specific name or nickname you wish the autograph to mention, please submit it with the form. Each winner will be announced at the posting of the next segment of Lory Kaufman’s back story. No purchases necessary and your email address will not be given to anyone else.
The next post will be November 9th when the winner of this month's book will be announced. . As an additional incentive for those of you who are actually reading the entire post, if you comment on any of my blog posts throughout the month I will input an additional entry to the contest, please note in your comment your desire for the book.
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