The Overpopulation Problem w/ Jason Godesky

The Rewilding Podcast w/ Peter Michael Bauer

My guest today is Jason Godesky. Jason is an old friend and colleague of mine. We met in the early 2000’s on an internet chat board called “Ish Con” short for Ishmael Conference. It was a place to discuss the ideas presented in the books by Daniel Quinn. It was here that I gave Jason the nickname, “The Machine Gun” for his ability to remember and rapidly deploy facts, journals, studies, ethnographies, and more to back up many of the positions in what we would later call Rewilding. When ishcon closed down in 2006, I bought the domain rewild.info and invited Jason to help create a new online chat board specific to rewilding. Jason is well known for his essays on his now defunct blog, The Anthropik Network. A few years ago when Rewild Portland acquired rewild.com, I asked Jason to write the content to help people describe what rewilding means. These days his main focus is on using storytelling and gaming to promote the concepts of rewilding. Though, every once and a while he’ll post a new essay on a particular topic of interest. It’s his latest essay, entitled “Overpopulation” that we’ll be discussing here on the rewilding podcast today.

Notes:

Jason’s Projects

• Overpopulation by Jason Godesky
• The Fifth World
• The Fifth World Patreon

Mentions

• Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
• Making Kin Not Population
• Perceptions of the Environment by Tim Ingold
• Population Growth Daniel Quinn
• Lotka–Volterra equations
• Law of Limited Competition
• Europe & The People Without History by Eric Wolf
• The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
• Against the Grain by Richard Manning
• All Things Being Equal: A Review of The Dawn of Everything
• Overshoot by William Catton
• The Neolithic refrigerator on a Friday night
• Why These Bears “Waste” Food
• Jevons Paradox: The Efficiency Dilemma
• Disinterpretation
• Degrowth

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