Stories tagged with "an gorta mor"

A distant mirror: Ireland's great famine

Posted by Ugo Bardi on December 12, 2008 - 9:17am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: an gorta mor, deforestation, ireland famine, m. king hubbert, overshoot, peak oil [list all tags]




In the 18th century, Ireland lost much of its forested land. This graph of wooded land for sale has been generated from data reported by Eileen Mc Cracken in "The Irish Woods since Tudor Times" (1971). The data are fitted with a derivative logistic, as for a "Hubbert" curve. The good fit indicates the over-exploitation of a slowly renewable resource.

Deforestation was not the direct cause of the Great Irish famine of mid 19th century, but it was the start of a chain of events that led to it. In this article, I show the condition of "overshoot" that Ireland was in at the time of the famine has much in common with the "overshoot" condition our world is in today.

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