Discussing the effect of many people . . .
Since writing a recent post where I joined the tiny chorus of people who are asking why we don’t ask whether we have too many people on the planet, I’ve been noticing quite a few articles in which the authors could have, might have, suggested to some of us that the resource depletion/crowding/degradation/contamination considered in the article had something to do with sheer numbers of people. Here are two examples.
The first one is from the May, 2007 edition of National Geographic. It is a story of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) India. More particularly, it is about a slum within Mumbai called Dharavi,
the teeming slum of one million souls, where as many as 18,000 people crowd into a single acre (0.4 hectares). By nightfall, deep inside the maze of lanes too narrow even for the putt-putt of auto rickshaws, the slum is as still as a verdant glade. Once you get accustomed to sharing 300 square feet (28 square meters) of floor with 15 humans and an uncounted number of mice, a strange sense of relaxation sets in—ah, at last a moment to think straight.
Dharavi is routinely called “the largest slum in Asia,” a dubious attribution sometimes conflated into “the largest slum in the world.” This is not true. Mexico City’s Neza-Chalco-Itza barrio has four times as many people. In Asia, Karachi’s Orangi Township has surpassed Dharavi. Even in Mumbai, where about half of the city’s swelling 12 million population lives in what is euphemistically referred to as “informal” housing, other slum pockets rival Dharavi in size and squalor.
The other article is actually part of a “Special Advertising Section” promoting the newest Ken Burns documentary featuring America’s National Parks. I found this article in the September 2009 edition of Harper’s Magazine. It was written by Robert F. Kennedy, who reminisced that his dad took him to the Grand Canyon in 1967. Based on his 2006 return trip to the Grand Canyon, things have changed dramatically:
Today, National Park Service employees are kept busy policing small infractions while our political leaders forced them to turn a blind eye to major abuses by powerful private interests. In 2006, I returned to paddle the Grand Canyon with my daughter, Kick. I was sad to see that the beaches where I camped with my father were gone; the sands that fed them are now trapped above the Grand Canyon Dam. The river itself, once a dynamic and specialized ecosystem, has been transformed into a plumbing conduit between the two largest reservoirs in the United States. The water, which should be warm and muddy, is clear and the frigid 46 degrees. Four of the eight native fish species are extinct, and the canyons of beaver, otter, and muskrat populations have disappeared. The reservoirs themselves are emptying to quench reckless developers and big agriculture, and the Colorado no longer makes it to the sea or feeds the great estuaries in the Gulf of California that once teamed with life. Instead, it dies ignominiously in the Sonoran Desert.
Kennedy never mentions that these “powerful private interests” are driven by the needs of large numbers of people to have direct or indirect access to water, admittedly oftentimes in wasteful amounts.
Neither of these articles address overpopulation by name, and this is typical of most article that comment on stressed resources. People who dare to bring up this topic of overpopulation get crucified from all angles of the political spectrum. To mention this word suggests that we need to actually consider whether we have too many people on the planet, and that raises the specter of admittedly terrible actions that have been taken to limit population in the past. To avoid this criticism, though, it’s only a rare writer that will dare to mention that we need to consider this issue. In my opinion, we need to consider the possibility of overpopulation and its effect on every square mile of land on the surface of the earth, from Antarctica, to Florida, to Great Britain, to Indonesia. If our goal has been to wipe out most of the biodiversity of this planet by shoving once-common plants and animals off of their native habitats with ever more humans, we are doing a great job of it.
If we don’t consider this issue, we will never able to deal with it. The current situation reminds me of many of the characters in the Harry Potter movies, who dare not refer to the character Voldemort by name. To mention that name would mean that they would have to risk dealing with the problem.
Whenever we think about buying or renting a house, we consider the capacity of that living space. How many people will it comfortably hold? We consider the same things when buying a car. How many people can safely use this vehicle at one time? I think it’s time that we consider the same basic question with regard to the entire planet. It is time to consider this issue to cause it’s already difficult to think of a basic natural resource that has not been degraded, depleted, contaminated or put at risk. If it’s not pressures put on these resources by increasing numbers of humans, it’s hard to think of what the cause might be. And for those who insist that it’s only our unsustainable lifestyles that are the problem, we are well past the point of making that argument. It is only thanks to our unsustainable use of water, fertilizers and fuel that have allowed the population to get to this point where humans fill every nook and cranny of the planet.
For more information on this topic, see this prior DI post and the website of the Global Population Speak Out.
Interesting Erich, but I cannot even in my wildest imagination envision a scenario where the world can muster the will to address an issue like this, so it doesn’t bother me that it isn’t discussed in many conversations.
Instead, I wonder about whether continued population growth is irreversible and inevitable. I’m heartened and in agreement with views like Stewart Brand’s at TED a few years ago:
http://bit.ly/6AfVzp
Maybe population will top out some time this century, and that then (or by then), we as a species will have begun to learn to live in whatever world exists at that time. However, even if population growth continues, the USA and its citizens really don’t have the clout or credibility anymore (if we ever had it) to adequately influence the rest of the world to stop growing in population.
I don’t mean to sound overly pessimistic here. I’m with Brand, who I believe is optimistic about the future, even as he is brutally realistic about what’s going to happen with regards to population, climate change, and geo-engineering.
What do you think?
Mark: The people of earth don’t have the political will to pull themselves in check on big environmental issues. Hell, we don’t even have the political will to kick the big corporations out of the room and have a meaningful discussion. Based on the past few decades (at least), we can be confident that people will not show the discipline necessary to address any problem that requires people to consistently say no to their short-term desires. My bet is that the population of the world will keep growing until it hits an equilibrium maintained by war, disease and exhaustion of resources. There are far better ways to run a world, but this dreadful scenario is where I would put my chips based on the historical record.
Why that is the way it seems to be serves as another set of subjects that I periodically attempt to explore in some of the posts at this website. Indeed, why don’t people take better long-term care of their planet? To compound matters, quite a few people who I consider to be smart, well-informed and equipped with ample good intentions seem to be resigned that there is nothing that can be done. I can imagine a United States filled with people who DO work hard to pass the world onto the next generation in reasonably good shape, but that is not the country we have. Here is a recent post reflecting my reading of the will of the populace.
I totally agree with you that the U.S. has neither the clout nor credibility to lead the way.
I had watched the Stewart Brand talk about five months ago and I posted on it here: I was also intrigued by his talk, but I thought he was trying to keep a stiff upper lip despite the dreadful things he was pointing out. I figure that we’re going to burn a hell of a lot of coal over the next 50 years (and “oil sand”), leading to terrible air quality and horrific environmental disasters. In the throes of all of this, the desperately poor will essentially cut down and burn what’s left of our forests. As I see it, we are at a critical time, arguably already past the critical moment, and that we don’t have the guts, the personal communications skills nor the foresightedness to even discuss (meaningfully) the looming crises.
From the Boston Herald:
“Tessa Savicki, who has nine children aged 3 to 21, claims doctors were supposed to implant an intrauterine device, which is a type of reversible birth control, after she delivered a son, Manuel Flores, on Dec. 19, 2006, at Baystate Medical Center. Instead, she said, a type of permanent sterilization known as a tubal ligation was performed, leaving her mentally distraught and incapable of bearing more children . . . Savicki has nine children from several men, is unemployed and relies on public assistance for two of the four children who live with her. She receives supplemental security income, or SSI, for a disability, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she said. Her mother has custody of three of her children . . . She had her first child at 13 and dropped out of high school in the ninth grade.”
http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1222682&format=&page=2&listingType=Loc#articleFull
The reason this story gets people talking is the concern that this is not a good situation for society. But these kinds of stories are usually discussed only on an individual level, the silence suggesting that it is not the community’s business how many children a person has. Most stories refuse to mention the “O” word (overpopulation, in this case on a very local level), even though it is that precise concern that drives much of the interest in this story.
Admittedly, this is not how a person should be sterilized (assuming Savicki’s allegations are true), but she is, in my opinion, a person who shouldn’t have more children, given her situation. This is what almost everyone reading her story thinks, but public media almost never bring the issue out into the open. Why is it that we can’t even have this discussion? Here’s the dangerous question that we’re all thinking but we’re not allowed to discuss in the public media: In the year 2010, should any American man or woman have a legal right to create more than 9 children?
Yesterday, after watching the movie “Children of Men” from my sizable DVD collection, I noticed that among the DVD extras was a short film, “The Possibility of Hope” which makes several valid points about overpopulation and rapidly dwindling resources to support human population growth.
It is available on youtub in three parts.
Jeffrey Sachs is one of a select group of prominent writers who directly acknowledges the desperate need for stabilizing the world’s population. According to Sachs, if we don’t stop adding new people, all of our efforts for increasing food supply and preserving the earth’s ecosystems will be for naught. The first sentence of his recent SCIAM article is instructive: “We are eating ourselves out of house and home.” Sachs quotes Norman Borlaug, who stated the following while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970:
“There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”
For the entire article in the Dec 2009 edition of Scientific American, go here.