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Page added on July 13, 2014
Population crisis putting world at risk
Since 1989, July 11 has been designated World Population Day.
The United Nations was inspired to do so because of public interest in Five Billion Day on July 11, 1987, when the world’s human population reached 5 billion. Two billion more were added by October 2011, and the estimates for population in 2050 are between 9.3 billion and 11 billion.
World population has nearly quadrupled in the lifetime of many of its older citizens – like me. It is important to understand that population growth at the rate of an additional million people every four days is the major problem facing humanity; hence every day should be “Population Crisis Awareness Day.”
Social economist Thomas Malthus wrote a treatise on population in 1798 that explained that population increases exponentially and hence would grow faster than the means of subsistence, which increases slowly. Population would likely be controlled by premature deaths due to war, pestilence, famine and disease.
His gloomy predictions were staved off by the green revolution breeding more productive plants, more lands cleared for food production, the mechanization of agriculture using fossil energy to replace animal and human labor, fertilizer and pesticide production using fossil energy.
Thus we have greatly increased the carrying capacity of Earth to support humans to the detriment of natural ecosystems. However, this is likely an overshoot of carrying capacity, setting us up for a population crash of enormous magnitude.
This so-called progress of economic and population growth was accomplished at the expense of a sustainable future, and we have been slow to recognize our vulnerabilities – victims of our own success created with our big brains. We are locked into a lifestyle created by the agricultural and industrial revolutions, two events of enormous consequences. We are now depleting the planet of fossil energy (millions of years of sun energy preserved as coal, gas and oil) to maintain civilization and are warming the planet as an unintended consequence.
Being the dominant species and with our vast numbers and high rates of consumption, we are crowding out the rest of nature. Zoos and nature reserves host the remnant populations of our fellow species that have avoided extinction. Oceans are overfished, soils eroded, grasslands overgrazed by livestock as we try to feed ever-increasing numbers. Climate change is causing more devastating storms, droughts and a warming and acidifying ocean. Of course, we are also crowding one another off the planet with the hindmost falling prey to unemployment; 3 billion live in poverty, 800 million hungry, and 2 billion being micronutrient malnourished. The population explosion causes the erosion of civilization, and we see and feel it all around us whether it be war, terrorism and lawlessness, traffic jams or disappearing farmland and natural areas.
As we look into the future, a decline in energy production is inevitable and will result in continued price increases and concomitantly higher food prices. Those who cannot afford food are already living the Malthusian nightmare. Yet with all this knowledge of history and biology, our political leaders and economists continue to call for economic and population growth. We need growth to create jobs for ever more job seekers from a growing population. We need growth to get the GDP back on track, to get the housing industry growing, to consume more and grow business, to support social security, to continue dominating the world, etc.
Since infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible in the long run, the sooner humanity figures out how to have a nongrowing, more sustainable population, economy and culture, the better our chances are for the future. “Live Simply So Others Might Simply Live” is not a bad bumper sticker, but can we do it? Time is not on our side, so we had better get busy.
Humans have decreased birth rates to below replacement in 42 percent of the world’s population – a good result of science creating a range of effective contraceptives. However, 58 percent of the population is above the replacement level because contraception is not universally available, mostly to the poorest nations that cannot afford them without subsidies from richer nations (the U.S. spends $610 million on population assistance). Even with subsidies, some nations, cultures and religions want to cling to high fertility rates and not use contraception. For example, new leaders in Iran now want to increase fertility. In 1979, Iran had an average fertility rate of 3.6 children per woman, and the supreme leader, concerned about rapid population growth, subsidized condoms and promoted vasectomies, which achieved a below-replacement fertility rate of 1.8 today. Iran actually reduced its population growth faster than China without resorting to coercion, as China did.
Population awareness is vital, because we need to focus on how we can shape a more sustainable future rather than have Earth’s limits destroy civilization, which is our current, inadvertent path. This conversation needs to happen if we are to have a future.
Lee Miller is a retired fisheries biologist. He studied ecology and biology at the University of Delaware, where he obtained a master’s degree in 1963. He is a UC Master Gardener, writes a gardening blog for The Record and is a member of the Sierra Club’s Committee for a Sustainable World Population.
8 Comments on "Population crisis putting world at risk"
nemteck on Sun, 13th Jul 2014 11:06 am
In the Financial Post. Earth—Population 29 billion: Contrary to popular belief that may be a good thing.
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/07/10/earth-population-29-billion-contrary-to-popular-belief-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
These idiotic writer still has an outlet of their garbage but the Financial Post is to blame for it.
JuanP on Sun, 13th Jul 2014 11:16 am
I agree with most of the author’s points, but I am not as optimistic as he is about how much time we’ve got.
This option the author claims we have to change our behavior, IMHO, does not exist. Life grows and uses all the resources available to it; as living animals that we are we will do the same thing. We will burn, erode, pollute, hunt, fish to virtual or real extinction or depletion, eventually. Very few places, if any, will allow humans to survive what’s coming without suffering. Our future as a species looks very uncertain.
Time to go raft fishing 😉
DMyers on Sun, 13th Jul 2014 1:51 pm
The late comedian, Sam Kenison, once offered the answer to world hunger: “Go where the food is!!!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0q4o58pKwA
In the same sense, I think many of us would like to say to the prolific who are in starving desperate conditions, “Stop having babies!!!”
There are many complicated variables that further human reproduction, not even considering the Mother of All Complications, the sex drive. Just to name a few: reliance on the proximity of close family for socio/psychological support (best illustrated by Mexican immigrants), a sense of duty or destiny linked with the perpetuation of familial bloodlines, religious mandates and restrictions, and last but not least, economic benefits. Far from an exhaustive list, these examples suggest what lies behind human procreation and why it will remain impervious to top down control, either by force or by education. In other words, this thing is going to happen the old fashioned way.
I still contend that our economic system, which relies on constant growth, is itself a reflection of population growth more than any other kind. On the most basic level, economic growth in the past has been predicated on population growth. More and more people needed more and more things, which led to growth in an economy which responded to the needs of the population. This applies to government programs as well, the most obvious being Social Security, a scheme which depends on a growing work force for its success. Granted, there has been a critical place for oil and modern technologies in economic growth, but these have been enabling factors rather than root causes IMHO.
Evidence for this necessary link (population-economic growth) comes from the current crisis on the southern border with Mexico. Our government has not only allowed millions of immigrants to come here, stay, and work over the past twenty or more years; in recent weeks there has been a massive inflow of Central American immigrants (many being children), who have found a wide open door at the border.
Our government has run the numbers and itself recognizes that neither our economy nor our social programs can be sustained without population growth. One way to get quick population growth is to open the borders. I believe that’s what’s going on, notwithstanding the many other speculations about the situation, e.g., that this is a planned crisis that will not go to waste, in terms of new, responsive policies.
I’m not arguing to increase population for its economic benefits. But let’s stop acting like the link between the two is not all that important. And let’s recognize that our government, at the moment, is choosing the ills of “open the floodgates” population growth, likely as a maneuver to deter economic collapse due to an underpopulated tax base and consumer culture, and other pending actuarial spoilers.
Davy on Sun, 13th Jul 2014 2:32 pm
D, yea, numb nut economist are still preaching population dynamics for economic growth. The problem comes when you are to the point Eygpt is at. At some point diminishing returns sets in with population. Further at some point overpopulation is a time bomb. We are at diminishing returns of population growth in the US. In Egypt they are at the time bomb phase.
Makati1 on Sun, 13th Jul 2014 8:49 pm
JuanP, I would join you in the fishing outing if I could. You understand the future culling of the herd. About 90% will not get through the coming bottleneck. Even that number may be off by 99% or 100%. No guarantee that there will be any humans on the planet in 2100. Until then, we make our choices and go fishing. ^_^
dubya on Mon, 14th Jul 2014 12:20 am
http://xkcd.com/1338/
Theedrich Yeat on Mon, 14th Jul 2014 3:24 am
The population problem is only one of the deadly trajectories being followed by the U.S. regime. Its current, century-long attempt to take over the world militarily and economically, to persuade the rest of the planet that it knows best, and so forth, is leading to world-historical disaster. So the question might be asked: why are we going against longer-term survivability for our species?
The domestic justification of America’s grotesque imperial overreach rests ultimately on the collective unconscious of its White population. The core current in this unconscious, in turn, is religious — specifically, Christian. The dominant theme — again, unconscious — of this religion is guilt. Politically, this guilt finds expression in strange notions of the “White Man’s burden,” and of White guilt more generally.
With modern propaganda techniques, this guilt can be pinned on anyone for anything. Hence the civil rights movement, including the North’s demonic vengeance in slaughtering Southerners during the American Civil War, the “need” to “help” equatorial tribal societies to become wealthy and American-like, the whole gamut of “philanthropic” interference in other cultures, as well as many other products of the political imagination. White guilt is also blatantly obvious (though invariable denied) in the popularity of the current Black president. And it drives the highly manipulable feelings of “compassion” for suffering humanity everywhere, regardless of the ingrained sado-masochism of many non-Western cultures.
This guilt is rooted in the myth of the first humans’ “fall” from paradisiacal grace as related in Genesis (chapters 2-3), the first book of the Bible. However, as anyone who has studied psychology and comparative religion will recognize, the Genesis tale is a symbolic narrative, not of a “fall,” but of a rise from the pre-human, animal state to human consciousness. In the myth, there are two trees: one of Life and one of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Religiologically, these are one and the same tree — the world tree, which is the brain’s own symbolic projection of the Central Nervous System, whose “foliage” and crown are the brain. The “fruit” of the Tree of Knowledge is not an “apple,” but knowledge itself, i.e., fully human consciousness and self-awareness. The fig-leaf clothing donned after eating the fruit (i.e., after becoming conscious) is an outward sign and symbol of the recognition of the self as distinct from society and nature. Yahweh-God’s “condemnation” of man to death is in fact early man’s recognition of his own personal mortality. Et cetera.
However, Christianity misinterpreted this symbolism and turned it into a way of instilling feelings of inherited guilt — especially over sex — into its adherents. Jesus was viewed as the God-man who had saved everyone from this state of “original sin.” But the guilt somehow remained, and the religion kept reminding its believers about their intrinsic fallenness. Only religious practices, guided by the churchmen, could keep man on the path to supernatural safety. Such practices included monetary and other donations, ostracizing or killing pagans, heretics or other undesirables (such as Confederates). The self-righteousness of the guilt-projectors eventually led to carpet-bombing and nuking “godless” civilian populations.
Yet for some inexplicable reason, the losing sides did not always develop a Stockholm syndrome and view themselves as guilty. Today they and others even want some of our oil. On top of that, there is even the opposed religion of Islam, which has its own ideas about who is guilty. And some of its members think the American idea of mass-killing civilian populations is worth imitating.
Given this witch’s brew, it is not possible to tell what will happen as America’s global hegemony fades. Not all other cultures are amnesiac. They do not like the “benefits” that America has given them. And there are millions — even billions — of scavengers waiting to scarf up the remains of America. History has ways of doing away with peoples that do not learn from the past.
Kenz300 on Mon, 14th Jul 2014 10:05 am
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