Population, Resources, and Human Idealism

By Richard Heinberg

I’m not about to give up on humanitarianism. But there is an essential lesson here. If we want peace, democracy, and human rights, we must work to create the ecological condition essential for these things to exist: i.e., a stable human population at—or slightly less than—the environment’s long-term carrying capacity.

This is a lesson that ancient humans internalized, to one degree or another. But during the first half of the fossil-fuel era we could afford to forget it: we were creating new temporary carrying capacity left and right. We could dream of “freedom of the bathroom”—human rights to food, education, health care, housing, and so on—no matter how many of us there were. Now, as that phantom carrying capacity is set to disappear, and as the human population is overshooting the natural limits of topsoil, water, fish, and fuels, the ideals we have come to hold are being threatened.

I do not advocate an absolute ecological determinism (as Stanton comes very close to doing): even given population pressure and resource depletion, some societies do better than others (at least temporarily) at maintaining a humane social environment. Peak Oil doesn’t necessarily lead to Soylent Green—unless we ignore the lesson.

To do so—to think that we can advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis—is both intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating.

Energy Bulletin