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.
Erich,
Are you lost to plain language?
Allowing something doesn't mean one needs to be pleased about it. I answered your question as far as 18 years olds go as a yes.
I do however think your "unrestricted ability to purchase" clause is kind of like how our American budgetary process is all messed up.
Telling a person over and over agian to grow up and take responsibility for their own actions doesn't mean they will do it either.
As an "American" there is individual freedom until that freedom impinges upon the rights of others.
The only method of contraception or "birth control" I would say should be "restricted" is the use of abortion and early confirmed pregnancy pharmacueticals aimed at preventing a viable pregnacy once a conception has already occurred.
I am not saying these should be outlawed, I am saying they should be restricted and legal records with individual names on them should be kept so the rest of society can know what they're actually paying for if public funds are used. Privacy should only be maintained for those cases of rape or forced pregancies against the will of either party.
I understand, Karl. You want people who have sex for pleasure to wear the equivalent of scarlet letters.
Erich,
I do not believe you have a grasp of my perspective, only of what you consider my perspective to be, because of how you believe it comments upon your meaning and purpose in life.
If you would like me to spell out in detail what my views on the purpose of human sexuality are I would be glad to try and do so.
First of all, human beings are more than flesh and blood. Right there we have begun to consider this entire matter from different perspectives, so no matter what I say you are likely to consider what I have to say as not having anything meaningful to you.
In this regard nearly everything I have to say from here on will be seen as an unfortunate human being believing something that is contrary to the world that you live in.
But, I will not be deterred from sharing my perspective in hope that you may at least see that I am not simply a kill joy for human pleasure.
There are many "things" in life that human beings are in search of – but the basic one thing is meaning or significance of one form or another.
I happen to believe that there is more significance to be found in the quality of our relationships with both our own sense of meaning and moral sense of well being, but also our relationships with those around us that we also consider as significant relationships.
Pleasure, power, pride, and projects (works of one sort of another) all tie into the quality of our relationships with both our own sense of personal meaning and morality but also the sense of significance and meaning that we extent to others as well.
People tend to head down either of two roads in life.
One road, or lifestyle if you will, seeks to fulfill the desires of separate individuals at the expense of the significance of the relationships between individuals. This is the idea that every encounter is simply two ships passing in the dark.
The second road, or lifestyle if you will, seeks to improve the quality of the relationships with those that we consider to be the significant others in our lives. This second lifestyle can also seek to give meaning and value to others even at the cost of a loss of pleasure, power, pride or projects that are often the driving influences in an individual's own personal life.
To me pleasure, or hedonism as Americans are prone to call it is not something to be sought after, nor is pain something to be rejected. Many women don't want to have children because of the risks and pain involved. They are both a part of life.
To me power, or community organizing is also not something to be sought after, nor is personal humiliation something to be rejected. Many human beings seem to function on the premise that if they can't make a difference for good in the world then they would just as soon make a difference for anything they consider to be important to their perspective.
To me pride, or personal individual meaning, simply means I put consideration of my own desires and goals and ambitions above the relationships I have with others – including my significant others, no matter how small or large that group may be.
To me projects, or that which I find to do with my life, can easily be seen as providing me with all three of these, or none of these. Many people derive pleasure from a job well by their own estimation. The job well done could be considered to be anything from baking a pizza to having sex with a significant other. Many people derive pleasure from having others reward them for a job well done which is really just another form of power to influence others. Many people also derive a sense of pleasure by being able to get their own desires and will accomplished, but this is simply pride in its purest form.
So you see physical pleasure is only a small piece of the picture to someone who really understands their own heart and what is craves in life.
This is why the Bible says that the human heart is desperately wicked and "who can really understand it?"
Human sexuality is not something to be indulged as a simple human "appetite," or it will prevent you from seeing clearly what its influence upon your life really is, and what your relationships with the significant others in your life really is.
Most people consider human intimacy to be included in the most pleasurable experiences in life, and they find significant personal meaning in this intimacy.
However, to me, as remarkable as that actually is, there is much more to life than simply seeking physical intimacy, and that can only be found in the quality of the rest of one's relationships with the other significant people in your life, most of which are in no wise sexual, nor meant to be sexual in nature.
If one's chosen course in life is one that consistently separates an individual from those other people that one would normally and naturally considered to be your significant others, you are letting pleasure, power, pride and projects dictate the course of those relationships.
Enough said.
Niklaus and Mark,
All it takes is one group of people to show you what I say is true.
I already said earlier that America's over all fertility is about about level. That is because the non-hispanic fertility rates are less then 2.0 but the Hispanic rate is much a larger than 2.0.
Most of these are or will require social assistance for their American anchor babies mostly born out to single hispanic moms.
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/003890.html
I now understand you better, Karl. You see it as important to have more "white" children and fewer of those other colors. There are terms for that sort of thinking, such as "bigot" and "racist." I am not threatened by American being a big melting pot but you apparently are.
Erich,
Number one – The comments you seem to have just addressed were addressed to Niklaus and Mark and were about a totally different matter that were not meant to be a response to your scarlet letters comment. Feel free to jump in, but please do tell me what your response to my response about the scarlet letters would be.
Number two – It appear you do not want to address this issue without casting aspersions around. I don't see what racism or bigotry has to do with what the actual facts about a matter are. Your original article pointed to Mumbai, Mexico City, and Karachi’s Orangi Township which certainly contain definite ethnic majorities. However, Don't worry I won't call you a bigot or racist eventhough that seems to be the number one response to anyone that disagrees with some people these days.
Number three – From the topic of the thread, you are the one wanting to slow down the population growth of various people groups that are "exceeding their quota" – not me.
Karl: The world is bursting at its seams, and we are exhausting our most basic resources such as water and soil as well as oil. Only a fool would suggest that we don't have a problem. I have not suggested how we deal with this problem, only that we need to start having a serious conversation. You have suggested a way to deal with the problem, or at least a reason to ramp up the numbers of "white" people, and I find your approach to be insulting and bigoted.
Karl writes:—"One road, or lifestyle if you will, seeks to fulfill the desires of separate individuals at the expense of the significance of the relationships between individuals."
Right there is where the difficulty lies. "At the expense…" is fraught with assumptions, some accurate, others not, but in any case off-base for this discussion.
Firstly, it has been shown, repeatedly, that a thorough-going, nonjudgmental sex education course coupled with counseling and available clinic services REDUCES not only teen pregnancy, STDs, but also delays first sex. Kids with ALL THE INFORMATION AND THE ABILITY TO ACT ON IT tend to put off hopping into bed.
Secondly, the assumption at the heart of that phrase is that sex is a means to an end and that only one end is desirable, viable, and morally supportable. It ignores the possibility that sex can be and is an end in itself.
If such a lifestyle is not to your taste, fine. But to lay your judgment on people for whom it may work just fine is narrow-minded and at the root of this disjunction of understanding.
There have probably been untold numbers of people who married as virgins and discovered they were incompatible—in bed and probably otherwise—and because in the past there was nothing they could do about it they lived their lives stuck. It no doubt still happens here and with absolutely no doubt it happens all over the world.
Consider—the first time we experience anything, especially thrilling things, the experience can be overwhelming. Just how many people thought they were "in love" after their first sexual encounter? Experience leavens such response and allows for more reasoned choices. Giving people the ability to have those experiences without the life-altering consequences has the very real potential to allow them as individuals to make better decisions about the partners they choose.
Besides—sex is a conversation. Would you dare to tell people they can only have certain conversations with only one person in their entire life? Ridiculous.
But you are also basing your negative judgment on sensational reportage, bad fiction, and horror stories. You likely have no idea about the lives of people who have had multiple partners who have enjoyed no wasted opportunities and have led fulfilled lives. Monogamy is not for everyone. More to the point, monogamy may not be for everyone to begin with but may become the preferred choice later.
This probably will make no difference to you because you've opted to see sex as part of a life choice that automatically discounts the possibilities of viable alternatives. That, frankly, is sad. Not for you so much if you're happy and fulfilled with your choice but sad that such fulfillment is used to validate a prejudice which can (may) feed into a judgmentalism about other peoples choice that is at odds with reality.
As to that remark about "anchor babies"—again, the assumptions in that are way off. Clearly, if anchor babies are the issue, then we're not talking about promiscuous sex but rather purposeful sex with a specific end in mind. As the tabloid type reports have it, these are women who intentionally have their babies here in order to take advantage of 14th amendment privileges. That's not the same as somebody having a so-called irresponsible good time but someone with a plan. So you're picking the wrong demographic to make your case.
And it is a bit racist since it lumps legal and illegal Hispanics into the same definitional category and paints them all with the same brush.
It is very true that there are more Hispanics that mean well for the United States than those that don't.
But when will Americans wake up to the fact that a large number of hostile people are working towards the demise of America from both the outside and inside. Many of these people have no reason to work together accept for their common goals of seeing the demise of the American system of government.
There are illegal aliens in America who make no qualms about their desire to see America fall apart in anarchy. California and other parts of the southwest has large vocal groups who make it a point to make it clear that they are not working towards the same goals as most of their neighbors.
That is not a crime in America, and there are ways to work towards those ends that are not illegal as well.
One way of accomplishing the demise of America is to push the social limits of the government to the point where the financial support base is beyong repair.
Karl,
I don't sit and constantly monitor this blog, I live in the real world. so I check in from time to time. I want to mention this. It is my opinion that individualist attitude promoted among libertarians makes them seem as boorish, immature, egocentric pricks.
Another problem I've observed is that the realization of individualism rationalizes self exceptionalism. By exceptionalism, I mean that an individual who believes his rights supersede that same rights in others. This is the foundation on which fascist regimes are constructed.
However, the United States of America is being destroyed from within and without, not by flooding the nation with their children, but by manipulating us, by dividing our once united country into millions of nations of one, using fear and distrust of our neighbor to cultivate lawlessness so that the masses can't coordinate a defense against these powerful and often evil overlord.
These powerful persons that are seeking to destroy democracy throughout the world, that are behind the push to dismantle out constitution, are the multinational corporations, who see us as a resource to be exploited.
In many countries that have recovered from famine, are seeing a decline in the birthrate as the people realize their choice to have large families increased the severity of the famine. They know that family planning is the key to surviving future food shortages.
I would continue, but it is late, and I have to sleep sometime., as I have a day job,
When this physical life and its experiences are viewed or seen as an end to itself you can rationalize anything you want and find justification from your own experience. This is why personal meaning in life has disinterated into a million perpsectives.
If pleasure, power, pride and projects are the tail that wags the dog then all the individual knows of meaning is driven from within him or herself.
Even significant relationships are then just ships passing in the darkness of physical existence.
Here is what sex as an end in itself looks like to Brits.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.as…
This is being broadcast on one of the major networks in Britain. I guess ratings are the end they are in search of.
The show is probably already in many American homes because of the internet. When people are encouraged to chose what is an end in itself without moral constraints this is what we get.
This may very well reduce the population levels, but the loss of morality is the sacrifce.
When will adults come to understand that their sexual behavior is much more than just an end in itself?
When individual human experience is all they have to go on what others have to say means nothing to them.
In these cases the people that are significant to them are those that indulge their own attitudes and ideas, the rest of society is simply a bunch of prudes.
Karl: What I seek is dignified sex education. Of course there are people who are out of control sexually. Many of them are people who hold your conservative views. Ever hear of serial marriage? Think of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Think of those who are sexually inactive because they consider it to be immoral. That can be a perversion too, in my book. And I don't buy your argument that people who are highly and exotically active sexually are necessarily immoral.
I understand your viewpoint. You don't like the idea of people being able to freely engage in sex (with the use of pills and devices to prevent pregnancy). Fine. You are entitled to live that life. To the extent that you make overall moral judgments of others who choose otherwise, your arguments are entirely backed with anecdotes and speculation. Just pick someone who you much admire and ask yourself: Do you really know anything about that person's sex life? You probably don't. That person might well be using those cursed pills and devices. That's probably why they only have one, two or three children.
Erich,
I have not suggested a way to solve the population "crisis" as you claim. I have been trying to better clarify what I consider the real problem to be. You consistently refuse to believe that this is anything but a numbers related matter.
You treat as many people as you want as non-entities and then label me a bigot when you have already pointed out your own inhumanity concerning people that you claim are both ignorant and the cause of the problem.
You believe that education that teaches people how to prevent unwanted pregnancies is the best answer, so do I. But the entire problem is not just teaching about birth control, it is also about teaching and modeling basic morality as well.
I have suggested that there are people that simply have little or no reason to want to prevent pregnancies and I get lamblasted as a myth builder and bigot.
You can't have it both ways unless you consider yourself detached from the human race, or at least detached from as many of them as suits your needs.
I do not wish to see the white people dominate anyone else as you have suggested. I do not even wish for Christians to have more worldly influence than atheists.
It cannot simply be reduced to a matter of numbers which you think is the way to solve your perceived crisis.
This is how nearly every act of genocide begins as a simple reduction of humans to statistics.
It is in fact how planned parenthood has been helping to cause genocide to the black population of America for decades as well detroying many basic family units of would be moral citizens.
http://www.blackgenocide.org/planned.html
Karl, you said: "You believe that education that teaches people how to prevent unwanted pregnancies is the best answer, so do I. But the entire problem is not just teaching about birth control, it is also about teaching and modeling basic morality as well."
I did not say that the entire problem is addressed by this: "just teach about birth control." Please show me the respect of not misstating me to create a straw man.
And its interesting how you and many other conservatives come to the aid of "the black population" when it comes to denying them family planning, letting large numbers of "the black population" fester in terrible schools, and allowing the children to be raised in dangerous neighborhoods. You are disingenuous.
Niklaus, High Libertarianism at its inception was a very liberal and progressive initiative, with its core beliefs of free will and freedom of individual thought and action. However, the purity of the ideal has been debased and hijacked by the conservative right to further their own twisted agenda. The Tea Party style "libertarianism" you may be referencing seems more of a sad and corrupt ideology, one that doesn't deserve to camp under the umbrella of 'Libertarian'. Also, I feel Individualism is a noble concept– because it supports the interests of the individual over the interests of the State; Individualists go astray if they feel others should not share in the same rights that they enjoy – this only fosters further degradation of the ideal of equality and self worth for all.
Well, then I guess I have been barking up the wrong tree and been getting accused of all manner of bigotry because I simply suggest there is more to the solution to a mis- identified problem than teaching about preventing unwanted prepnancies and providing birth control.
As I see it, if we fail to teach and model morality in these matters we will never be able to identify the true nature of the problem so anyone's discussion of anything but impersonal numbers could be seen as bigoted and racist.
Some have clearly stated their goals are bigoted and racist and now others try to hide these facts. Still others have agendas that are based upon social superiority and revolution through shear number increases.
Reducing this problem to a numbers dilemma is misguided at best.
Karl,
Naturally you throw out the potentially worst example of what you think is wrong as a counterargument.
Please. That's not what I'm talking about. No one here, I believes, advocates irresponsible sexual relations. The whole point of my position and, I believe, Erich's is to increase responsibility.
Kindly review this piece. It's a bit older, but my position hasn't changed.
http://marktiedemann.com/wordpress/?p=64
Now. What part of "education" don't you understand?
I never said people should be encouraged to just go out and fuck any old way they want. But the solution is not to take away the tools they need to behave more responsibly. Nor is to bring back into force a system of guilt that makes them ashamed every time they have an "impure thought."
It seems that your problem is—and I'm guessing here, based purely on what you've written—that if after giving someone ALL the information and ALL the resources they might need to, by your lights, act responsibly, and they decide to go ahead and have sex anyway, you view everything that preceded the act as a failure.
Yeah, that pretty much does sound like a prude. Sorry.
Karl,
You were not necessarily barking up the wrong tree, but consider a practical matter—maybe it would be a good idea to start with doing what we can to teach people how to prevent those unwanted pregnancies first and then attack the problem of moral niceties. You don't wait to teach someone how to drive till after they wreck the car.
Erich,
I have no need to know what's going on inside of the privacy of people's bedrooms or tents.
It is obvious from your thread here that you think that other people do have a vested interest in keeping the population numbers from climbing beyond what the resources can ideally support.
Some people chose to have large families and it has everything to do with wanting their children for whatever strange reason you may think the are acting upon.
You seem to be giving advice to all manner of people including those that have self control over their sexuality. Do think they are part of the problem? I seem to detect that you even call that a perversion.
Do you advocate that non-sexually active youth and adults are an aboration and should be encouraged to want to indulge in open sexuality with whom ever they may desire?
Someone who doesn't engage in sexual activity is definitely not the problem for your population crisis. You may consider them to be "un-natural" or even "weird" human beings, But then, you are projecting your view of sexuality onto them. If so, you haven't got a leg to stand on in thinking they are modelling the wrong way to solve your population crisis. If you think their choice to not live indulgent sexual lifestyles makes them look down upon those that do, you are mistaken in calling them prudes.
What ever goes on in the privacy between people only comes out to public discussion by those who value the experience above how much they value their partner.
If you value an experience above the known potential consequences, you are not thinking rationally and probably don't need to be told that your partner is probably also not thinking rationally also.
That's what happens when sex is viewed as an end in itself.
Karl: You are way off-base. You are the one who is claiming that people should not have sex for pleasure, because it is morally wrong and it is making the world crumble. You say this without any credible evidence. Sex-without-pregnancy is not the thing that is ravaging our natural resources. BTW, abstinence is a choice that I respect; what I don't respect is when people like you try to force OTHER people to be abstinent.
Here's two simple questions for you: Is the earth yet at its carrying capacity regarding the number of human beings on the planet? Are we living sustainably such that most human societies will be living with comparable quality of life 20 years from now?
Consider this related post: http://dangerousintersection.org/2009/12/15/popul…
Karl, WTF are you talking about? Trying to decipher any meaning out of your babblings is like working a crossword puzzle at the peak of an acid trip. Do you jot your ideas down on scraps of paper, put them into a hat, and then pull them out at random to craft your posts? Your fractured thoughts and mixed metaphors make for very confused reading. I read and re-read your comments (I don't know why I still do) and usually CANNOT uncover whatever point you're trying to get across. The failure could be on my end of the communication chain…but I think not.
I actually wonder if this is a deliberate ploy of yours– a tactical disinformation campaign meant to jam the signals and disrupt "enemy" communications? Is this your game?
If I may, I think both of you are starting to talk past each other.
Karl, Erich (or I) is not advocating anyone be made to have sex. But you must admit, throughout the world, an awful lot of people are forced into it. Most women have little or no say in it whatsoever, and even though many of them may be having sex within the bounds of marriage, there is probably no actual consent on their part. Child brides, women who won't leave their husbands for fear of death, mutilation, or losing their families. Marriage is no barrier to coercion and just because a man becomes a husband does not automatically make him a caring person.
Erich, I think Karl sees only the abuses of a sexualized world and can't see an up side to self-empowered people choosing to partner by their own standards. Of course there are people who opt to have large families—but in the absence of any kind of contraception, just how much of that is choice? If I understand him correctly, he wants the moral imperatives put in place first before anyone is allowed to play with the toys. That the world simply doesn't work like that doesn't make the desire any less valid.
Mark: I do believe that you have sized up this dispute accurately. I would add the following detail, because the devil is in the details: Karl wishes to subject adult Americans (and teenagers) to the Court of Karl whereby applicants would plead their case for wanting to have pleasurable sexual encounters with other adults (some of these other adults being long-term significant others and some of them being their marriage partners). Only if the Court of Karl concludes that these proposed sexual encounters are done for a purpose approved by the Court of Karl (based upon what must necessarily be vague, arbitrary or perhaps bigoted standards–Karl, offer some working standards to prove me wrong) then the Court of Karl would issue a permission slip to a pharmacist to issue some (but not too many) birth control preventative pills and devices.
Here's a hypothetical application to obtain pregnancy-avoiding devices:
"Dear Court of Karl: I met a cute and fun woman last night in a bar. Tonight I would like to have sex with her because we enjoyed each others' company. I don't yet know if this is the right woman for me for a lifetime together. But I do want to share some sexual pleasure with her if she is willing. May I please have permission to purchase a few condoms?"
Court of Karl: "Denied. Next!"
I hope I have about said my peace on this thead.
I have not stated that finding pleasure in sexual experiences is evil. I don't know why Erich keeps saying that I have said this?
I have stated that pleasure, power, pride and projects can lead people to consider themselves or other people to be more or less significant by comparison.
I have not recommended any means of solving the problem that Erich believes is clearly evident because I do not consider the problem can be so easily reduced to a simple comparison of resources verses resource users.
My statements of non-agreement with Erich's analysis has led to repeated characterizations of bigotry and racism and prudish outlooks.
I can easily say I should have seen these misunderstandings coming, but I will say to all who have a hard time following what I have to say, it is probably because I do believe it is more important to teach morality and how to establish loving caring relationships before one is encouraged to jump in and test the waters.
If participation in sexual activity is analogous to learning to drive a car there will always be underage driving, people who will drive without a license, or even with a suspended or revoked license.
Whenever relationships between sexual partners are seen as either superficial or dominated by the will of one person over another their really is more harm than love that results from the encounters.
Karl: I see that you won't answer my simple questions. You apparently don't see a problem regarding natural resources given a world population of 7 billion (and growing). We'll check back in ten years, perhaps, and then we'll see how bad things have gotten. I hope you're right that things will somehow be rosy.
If the only the Hindus, and Buddhists can find ways to educate their children in ways that won't offend their Gods, Goddesses and ancestors we might easily make another ten years.
If you look at the trends in fertility rates of the major religions you may gain some insight into the actual trends of population growth, and who seems to currently be pushing the available resources in their specific regions of the world.
This is taken from Answers.com
The religion of parents used to affect fertility rates to a considerable degree. Since Catholics were banned from almost any form of contraception and were enjoined to have children, Catholics traditionally had much larger families than their Protestant peers.
However, people are much less guided by their Church doctrines now, and the differences in fertilitiy rates among Christians has disappeared. In fact, some European countries that are predominantly Catholic also have among the lowest fertility rates in the world.
Muslims tend to have a higher fertility rate than modern Christians, but sociologists believe that second and third generation Muslims in Western countries are moving towards the same fertility rates as their non-Muslim peers.
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_does_the_religion_o…
One of the sources then compelling population increases is basically being fueled by those religions that hold to a compelling or sacred purpose behind bringing as many children into the world as possible.
Another potential source compelling some population increases is driven by political and sociological policies that provide the opportunity for unchecked fertility considerations on behalf of the mothers, and that leave the fathers unable to do anything about it.
This doesn't mean all religions are putting guns to their children's heads and making them play Russian roulette with their sexuality.
Karl,
You are focusing too much on the numbers.
This is about people, real human beings, not numbers.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-b…
(full text included so Karl doesn't have to click evil link)
One day in Delft in the fall of 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant who is said to have been the long-haired model for two paintings by Johannes Vermeer—“The Astronomer” and “The Geographer”—abruptly stopped what he was doing with his wife and rushed to his worktable. Cloth was Leeuwenhoek’s business but microscopy his passion. He’d had five children already by his first wife (though four had died in infancy), and fatherhood was not on his mind. “Before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” as he later wrote to the Royal Society of London, Leeuwenhoek was examining his perishable sample through a tiny magnifying glass. Its lens, no bigger than a small raindrop, magnified objects hundreds of times. Leeuwenhoek had made it himself; nobody else had one so powerful. The learned men in London were still trying to verify Leeuwenhoek’s earlier claims that unseen “animalcules” lived by the millions in a single drop of lake water and even in French wine. Now he had something more delicate to report: Human semen contained animalcules too. “Sometimes more than a thousand,” he wrote, “in an amount of material the size of a grain of sand.” Pressing the glass to his eye like a jeweler, Leeuwenhoek watched his own animalcules swim about, lashing their long tails. One imagines sunlight falling through leaded windows on a face lost in contemplation, as in the Vermeers. One feels for his wife.
Leeuwenhoek became a bit obsessed after that. Though his tiny peephole gave him privileged access to a never-before-seen microscopic universe, he spent an enormous amount of time looking at spermatozoa, as they’re now called. Oddly enough, it was the milt he squeezed from a cod one day that inspired him to estimate, almost casually, just how many people might live on Earth.
Nobody then really had any idea; there were few censuses. Leeuwenhoek started with an estimate that around a million people lived in Holland. Using maps and a little spherical geometry, he calculated that the inhabited land area of the planet was 13,385 times as large as Holland. It was hard to imagine the whole planet being as densely peopled as Holland, which seemed crowded even then. Thus, Leeuwenhoek concluded triumphantly, there couldn’t be more than 13.385 billion people on Earth—a small number indeed compared with the 150 billion sperm cells of a single codfish! This cheerful little calculation, writes population biologist Joel Cohen in his book How Many People Can the Earth Support?, may have been the first attempt to give a quantitative answer to a question that has become far more pressing now than it was in the 17th century. Most answers these days are far from cheerful.
Historians now estimate that in Leeuwenhoek’s day there were only half a billion or so humans on Earth. After rising very slowly for millennia, the number was just starting to take off. A century and a half later, when another scientist reported the discovery of human egg cells, the world’s population had doubled to more than a billion. A century after that, around 1930, it had doubled again to two billion. The acceleration since then has been astounding. Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population, but there are people alive today who have seen it triple. Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us. (Pictures: Population 7 Billion.)
And the explosion, though it is slowing, is far from over. Not only are people living longer, but so many women across the world are now in their childbearing years—1.8 billion—that the global population will keep growing for another few decades at least, even though each woman is having fewer children than she would have had a generation ago. By 2050 the total number could reach 10.5 billion, or it could stop at eight billion—the difference is about one child per woman. UN demographers consider the middle road their best estimate: They now project that the population may reach nine billion before 2050—in 2045. The eventual tally will depend on the choices individual couples make when they engage in that most intimate of human acts, the one Leeuwenhoek interrupted so carelessly for the sake of science.
With the population still growing by about 80 million each year, it’s hard not to be alarmed. Right now on Earth, water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing. Close to a billion people go hungry each day. Decades from now, there will likely be two billion more mouths to feed, mostly in poor countries. There will be billions more people wanting and deserving to boost themselves out of poverty. If they follow the path blazed by wealthy countries—clearing forests, burning coal and oil, freely scattering fertilizers and pesticides—they too will be stepping hard on the planet’s natural resources. How exactly is this going to work?
THERE MAY BE SOME COMFORT in knowing that people have long been alarmed about population. From the beginning, says French demographer Hervé Le Bras, demography has been steeped in talk of the apocalypse. Some of the field’s founding papers were written just a few years after Leeuwenhoek’s discovery by Sir William Petty, a founder of the Royal Society. He estimated that world population would double six times by the Last Judgment, which was expected in about 2,000 years. At that point it would exceed 20 billion people—more, Petty thought, than the planet could feed. “And then, according to the prediction of the Scriptures, there must be wars, and great slaughter, &c.,” he wrote.
As religious forecasts of the world’s end receded, Le Bras argues, population growth itself provided an ersatz mechanism of apocalypse. “It crystallized the ancient fear, and perhaps the ancient hope, of the end of days,” he writes. In 1798 Thomas Malthus, an English priest and economist, enunciated his general law of population: that it necessarily grows faster than the food supply, until war, disease, and famine arrive to reduce the number of people. As it turned out, the last plagues great enough to put a dent in global population had already happened when Malthus wrote. World population hasn’t fallen, historians think, since the Black Death of the 14th century.
In the two centuries after Malthus declared that population couldn’t continue to soar, that’s exactly what it did. The process started in what we now call the developed countries, which were then still developing. The spread of New World crops like corn and the potato, along with the discovery of chemical fertilizers, helped banish starvation in Europe. Growing cities remained cesspools of disease at first, but from the mid-19th century on, sewers began to channel human waste away from drinking water, which was then filtered and chlorinated; that dramatically reduced the spread of cholera and typhus.
Moreover in 1798, the same year that Malthus published his dyspeptic tract, his compatriot Edward Jenner described a vaccine for smallpox—the first and most important in a series of vaccines and antibiotics that, along with better nutrition and sanitation, would double life expectancy in the industrializing countries, from 35 years to 77 today. It would take a cranky person to see that trend as gloomy: “The development of medical science was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” wrote Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968.
Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, made him the most famous of modern Malthusians. In the 1970s, Ehrlich predicted, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” and it was too late to do anything about it. “The cancer of population growth … must be cut out,” Ehrlich wrote, “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.” The very future of the United States was at risk. In spite or perhaps because of such language, the book was a best seller, as Malthus’s had been. And this time too the bomb proved a dud. The green revolution—a combination of high-yield seeds, irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizers that enabled grain production to double—was already under way. Today many people are undernourished, but mass starvation is rare.
Ehrlich was right, though, that population would surge as medical science spared many lives. After World War II the developing countries got a sudden transfusion of preventive care, with the help of institutions like the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Penicillin, the smallpox vaccine, DDT (which, though later controversial, saved millions from dying of malaria)—all arrived at once. In India life expectancy went from 38 years in 1952 to 64 today; in China, from 41 to 73. Millions of people in developing countries who would have died in childhood survived to have children themselves. That’s why the population explosion spread around the planet: because a great many people were saved from dying.
And because, for a time, women kept giving birth at a high rate. In 18th-century Europe or early 20th-century Asia, when the average woman had six children, she was doing what it took to replace herself and her mate, because most of those children never reached adulthood. When child mortality declines, couples eventually have fewer children—but that transition usually takes a generation at the very least. Today in developed countries, an average of 2.1 births per woman would maintain a steady population; in the developing world, “replacement fertility” is somewhat higher. In the time it takes for the birthrate to settle into that new balance with the death rate, population explodes.
Demographers call this evolution the demographic transition. All countries go through it in their own time. It’s a hallmark of human progress: In a country that has completed the transition, people have wrested from nature at least some control over death and birth. The global population explosion is an inevitable side effect, a huge one that some people are not sure our civilization can survive. But the growth rate was actually at its peak just as Ehrlich was sounding his alarm. By the early 1970s, fertility rates around the world had begun dropping faster than anyone had anticipated. Since then, the population growth rate has fallen by more than 40 percent.
THE FERTILITY DECLINE that is now sweeping the planet started at different times in different countries. France was one of the first. By the early 18th century, noblewomen at the French court were knowing carnal pleasures without bearing more than two children. They often relied on the same method Leeuwenhoek used for his studies: withdrawal, or coitus interruptus. Village parish records show the trend had spread to the peasantry by the late 18th century; by the end of the 19th, fertility in France had fallen to three children per woman—without the help of modern contraceptives. The key innovation was conceptual, not contraceptive, says Gilles Pison of the National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris. Until the Enlightenment, “the number of children you had, it was God who decided. People couldn’t fathom that it might be up to them.”
Other countries in the West eventually followed France’s lead. By the onset of World War II, fertility had fallen close to the replacement level in parts of Europe and the U.S. Then, after the surprising blip known as the baby boom, came the bust, again catching demographers off guard. They assumed some instinct would lead women to keep having enough children to ensure the survival of the species. Instead, in country after developed country, the fertility rate fell below replacement level. In the late 1990s in Europe it fell to 1.4. “The evidence I’m familiar with, which is anecdotal, is that women couldn’t care less about replacing the species,” Joel Cohen says.
The end of a baby boom can have two big economic effects on a country. The first is the “demographic dividend”—a blissful few decades when the boomers swell the labor force and the number of young and old dependents is relatively small, and there is thus a lot of money for other things. Then the second effect kicks in: The boomers start to retire. What had been considered the enduring demographic order is revealed to be a party that has to end. The sharpening American debate over Social Security and last year’s strikes in France over increasing the retirement age are responses to a problem that exists throughout the developed world: how to support an aging population. “In 2050 will there be enough people working to pay for pensions?” asks Frans Willekens, director of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague. “The answer is no.”
In industrialized countries it took generations for fertility to fall to the replacement level or below. As that same transition takes place in the rest of the world, what has astonished demographers is how much faster it is happening there. Though its population continues to grow, China, home to a fifth of the world’s people, is already below replacement fertility and has been for nearly 20 years, thanks in part to the coercive one-child policy implemented in 1979; Chinese women, who were bearing an average of six children each as recently as 1965, are now having around 1.5. In Iran, with the support of the Islamic regime, fertility has fallen more than 70 percent since the early ’80s. In Catholic and democratic Brazil, women have reduced their fertility rate by half over the same quarter century. “We still don’t understand why fertility has gone down so fast in so many societies, so many cultures and religions. It’s just mind-boggling,” says Hania Zlotnik, director of the UN Population Division.
“At this moment, much as I want to say there’s still a problem of high fertility rates, it’s only about 16 percent of the world population, mostly in Africa,” says Zlotnik. South of the Sahara, fertility is still five children per woman; in Niger it is seven. But then, 17 of the countries in the region still have life expectancies of 50 or less; they have just begun the demographic transition. In most of the world, however, family size has shrunk dramatically. The UN projects that the world will reach replacement fertility by 2030. “The population as a whole is on a path toward nonexplosion—which is good news,” Zlotnik says.
The bad news is that 2030 is two decades away and that the largest generation of adolescents in history will then be entering their childbearing years. Even if each of those women has only two children, population will coast upward under its own momentum for another quarter century. Is a train wreck in the offing, or will people then be able to live humanely and in a way that doesn’t destroy their environment? One thing is certain: Close to one in six of them will live in India.
I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago… The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. —Paul Ehrlich
In 1966, when Ehrlich took that taxi ride, there were around half a billion Indians. There are 1.2 billion now. Delhi’s population has increased even faster, to around 22 million, as people have flooded in from small towns and villages and crowded into sprawling shantytowns. Early last June in the stinking hot city, the summer monsoon had not yet arrived to wash the dust from the innumerable construction sites, which only added to the dust that blows in from the deserts of Rajasthan. On the new divided highways that funnel people into the unplanned city, oxcarts were heading the wrong way in the fast lane. Families of four cruised on motorbikes, the women’s scarves flapping like vivid pennants, toddlers dangling from their arms. Families of a dozen or more sardined themselves into buzzing, bumblebee-colored auto rickshaws designed for two passengers. In the stalled traffic, amputees and wasted little children cried for alms. Delhi today is boomingly different from the city Ehrlich visited, and it is also very much the same.
At Lok Nayak Hospital, on the edge of the chaotic and densely peopled nest of lanes that is Old Delhi, a human tide flows through the entrance gate every morning and crowds inside on the lobby floor. “Who could see this and not be worried about the population of India?” a surgeon named Chandan Bortamuly asked one afternoon as he made his way toward his vasectomy clinic. “Population is our biggest problem.” Removing the padlock from the clinic door, Bortamuly stepped into a small operating room. Inside, two men lay stretched out on examination tables, their testicles poking up through holes in the green sheets. A ceiling fan pushed cool air from two window units around the room.
Bortamuly is on the front lines of a battle that has been going on in India for nearly 60 years. In 1952, just five years after it gained independence from Britain, India became the first country to establish a policy for population control. Since then the government has repeatedly set ambitious goals—and repeatedly missed them by a mile. A national policy adopted in 2000 called for the country to reach the replacement fertility of 2.1 by 2010. That won’t happen for at least another decade. In the UN’s medium projection, India’s population will rise to just over 1.6 billion people by 2050. “What’s inevitable is that India is going to exceed the population of China by 2030,” says A. R. Nanda, former head of the Population Foundation of India, an advocacy group. “Nothing less than a huge catastrophe, nuclear or otherwise, can change that.”
Sterilization is the dominant form of birth control in India today, and the vast majority of the procedures are performed on women. The government is trying to change that; a no-scalpel vasectomy costs far less and is easier on a man than a tubal ligation is on a woman. In the operating theater Bortamuly worked quickly. “They say the needle pricks like an ant bite,” he explained, when the first patient flinched at the local anesthetic. “After that it’s basically painless, bloodless surgery.” Using the pointed tip of a forceps, Bortamuly made a tiny hole in the skin of the scrotum and pulled out an oxbow of white, stringy vas deferens—the sperm conduit from the patient’s right testicle. He tied off both ends of the oxbow with fine black thread, snipped them, and pushed them back under the skin. In less than seven minutes—a nurse timed him—the patient was walking out without so much as a Band-Aid. The government will pay him an incentive fee of 1,100 rupees (around $25), a week’s wages for a laborer.
The Indian government tried once before to push vasectomies, in the 1970s, when anxiety about the population bomb was at its height. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay used state-of-emergency powers to force a dramatic increase in sterilizations. From 1976 to 1977 the number of operations tripled, to more than eight million. Over six million of those were vasectomies. Family planning workers were pressured to meet quotas; in a few states, sterilization became a condition for receiving new housing or other government benefits. In some cases the police simply rounded up poor people and hauled them to sterilization camps.
The excesses gave the whole concept of family planning a bad name. “Successive governments refused to touch the subject,” says Shailaja Chandra, former head of the National Population Stabilisation Fund (NPSF). Yet fertility in India has dropped anyway, though not as fast as in China, where it was nose-diving even before the draconian one-child policy took effect. The national average in India is now 2.6 children per woman, less than half what it was when Ehrlich visited. The southern half of the country and a few states in the northern half are already at replacement fertility or below.
In Kerala, on the southwest coast, investments in health and education helped fertility fall to 1.7. The key, demographers there say, is the female literacy rate: At around 90 percent, it’s easily the highest in India. Girls who go to school start having children later than ones who don’t. They are more open to contraception and more likely to understand their options.
SO FAR THIS APPROACH, held up as a model internationally, has not caught on in the poor states of northern India—in the “Hindi belt” that stretches across the country just south of Delhi. Nearly half of India’s population growth is occurring in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh, where fertility rates still hover between three and four children per woman. More than half the women in the Hindi belt are illiterate, and many marry well before reaching the legal age of 18. They gain social status by bearing children—and usually don’t stop until they have at least one son.
As an alternative to the Kerala model, some point to the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where sterilization “camps”—temporary operating rooms often set up in schools—were introduced during the ’70s and where sterilization rates have remained high as improved hospitals have replaced the camps. In a single decade beginning in the early 1990s, the fertility rate fell from around three to less than two. Unlike in Kerala, half of all women in Andhra Pradesh remain illiterate.
Amarjit Singh, the current executive director of the NPSF, calculates that if the four biggest states of the Hindi belt had followed the Andhra Pradesh model, they would have avoided 40 million births—and considerable suffering. “Because 40 million were born, 2.5 million children died,” Singh says. He thinks if all India were to adopt high-quality programs to encourage sterilizations, in hospitals rather than camps, it could have 1.4 billion people in 2050 instead of 1.6 billion.
Critics of the Andhra Pradesh model, such as the Population Foundation’s Nanda, say Indians need better health care, particularly in rural areas. They are against numerical targets that pressure government workers to sterilize people or cash incentives that distort a couple’s choice of family size. “It’s a private decision,” Nanda says.
In Indian cities today, many couples are making the same choice as their counterparts in Europe or America. Sonalde Desai, a senior fellow at New Delhi’s National Council of Applied Economic Research, introduced me to five working women in Delhi who were spending most of their salaries on private-school fees and after-school tutors; each had one or two children and was not planning to have more. In a nationwide survey of 41,554 households, Desai’s team identified a small but growing vanguard of urban one-child families. “We were totally blown away at the emphasis parents were placing on their children,” she says. “It suddenly makes you understand—that is why fertility is going down.” Indian children on average are much better educated than their parents.
That’s less true in the countryside. With Desai’s team I went to Palanpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh—a Hindi-belt state with as many people as Brazil. Walking into the village we passed a cell phone tower but also rivulets of raw sewage running along the lanes of small brick houses. Under a mango tree, the keeper of the grove said he saw no reason to educate his three daughters. Under a neem tree in the center of the village, I asked a dozen farmers what would improve their lives most. “If we could get a little money, that would be wonderful,” one joked.
The goal in India should not be reducing fertility or population, Almas Ali of the Population Foundation told me when I spoke to him a few days later. “The goal should be to make the villages livable,” he said. “Whenever we talk of population in India, even today, what comes to our mind is the increasing numbers. And the numbers are looked at with fright. This phobia has penetrated the mind-set so much that all the focus is on reducing the number. The focus on people has been pushed to the background.”
It was a four-hour drive back to Delhi from Palanpur, through the gathering night of a Sunday. We sat in traffic in one market town after another, each one hopping with activity that sometimes engulfed the car. As we came down a viaduct into Moradabad, I saw a man pushing a cart up the steep hill, piled with a load so large it blocked his view. I thought of Ehrlich’s epiphany on his cab ride all those decades ago. People, people, people, people—yes. But also an overwhelming sense of energy, of striving, of aspiration.
THE ANNUAL meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) is one of the premier gatherings of the world’s demographers. Last April the global population explosion was not on the agenda. “The problem has become a bit passé,” Hervé Le Bras says. Demographers are generally confident that by the second half of this century we will be ending one unique era in history—the population explosion—and entering another, in which population will level out or even fall.
But will there be too many of us? At the PAA meeting, in the Dallas Hyatt Regency, I learned that the current population of the planet could fit into the state of Texas, if Texas were settled as densely as New York City. The comparison made me start thinking like Leeuwenhoek. If in 2045 there are nine billion people living on the six habitable continents, the world population density will be a little more than half that of France today. France is not usually considered a hellish place. Will the world be hellish then?
Some parts of it may well be; some parts of it are hellish today. There are now 21 cities with populations larger than ten million, and by 2050 there will be many more. Delhi adds hundreds of thousands of migrants each year, and those people arrive to find that “no plans have been made for water, sewage, or habitation,” says Shailaja Chandra. Dhaka in Bangladesh and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are 40 times larger today than they were in 1950. Their slums are filled with desperately poor people who have fled worse poverty in the countryside.
Whole countries today face population pressures that seem as insurmountable to us as India’s did to Ehrlich in 1966. Bangladesh is among the most densely populated countries in the world and one of the most immediately threatened by climate change; rising seas could displace tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Rwanda is an equally alarming case. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond argued that the genocidal massacre of some 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 was the result of several factors, not only ethnic hatred but also overpopulation—too many farmers dividing the same amount of land into increasingly small pieces that became inadequate to support a farmer’s family. “Malthus’s worst-case scenario may sometimes be realized,” Diamond concluded.
Many people are justifiably worried that Malthus will finally be proved right on a global scale—that the planet won’t be able to feed nine billion people. Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch Institute and now head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, believes food shortages could cause a collapse of global civilization. Human beings are living off natural capital, Brown argues, eroding soil and depleting groundwater faster than they can be replenished. All of that will soon be cramping food production. Brown’s Plan B to save civilization would put the whole world on a wartime footing, like the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, to stabilize climate and repair the ecological damage. “Filling the family planning gap may be the most urgent item on the global agenda,” he writes, so if we don’t hold the world’s population to eight billion by reducing fertility, the death rate may increase instead.
Eight billion corresponds to the UN’s lowest projection for 2050. In that optimistic scenario, Bangladesh has a fertility rate of 1.35 in 2050, but it still has 25 million more people than it does today. Rwanda’s fertility rate also falls below the replacement level, but its population still rises to well over twice what it was before the genocide. If that’s the optimistic scenario, one might argue, the future is indeed bleak.
But one can also draw a different conclusion—that fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future. People packed into slums need help, but the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation. Giving every woman access to family planning services is a good idea—“the one strategy that can make the biggest difference to women’s lives,” Chandra calls it. But the most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems.
Global warming is a good example. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are growing fastest in China, thanks to its prolonged economic boom, but fertility there is already below replacement; not much more can be done to control population. Where population is growing fastest, in sub-Saharan Africa, emissions per person are only a few percent of what they are in the U.S.—so population control would have little effect on climate. Brian O’Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research has calculated that if the population were to reach 7.4 billion in 2050 instead of 8.9 billion, it would reduce emissions by 15 percent. “Those who say the whole problem is population are wrong,” Joel Cohen says. “It’s not even the dominant factor.” To stop global warming we’ll have to switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy—regardless of how big the population gets.
The number of people does matter, of course. But how people consume resources matters a lot more. Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others. The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty—the slum dwellers in Delhi, the subsistence farmers in Rwanda—while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet.
The World Bank has predicted that by 2030 more than a billion people in the developing world will belong to the “global middle class,” up from just 400 million in 2005. That’s a good thing. But it will be a hard thing for the planet if those people are eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars at the same rate as Americans now do. It’s too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born; it’s not too late to change how they and the rest of us will produce and consume food and energy. “Eating less meat seems more reasonable to me than saying, ‘Have fewer children!’ ” Le Bras says.
How many people can the Earth support? Cohen spent years reviewing all the research, from Leeuwenhoek on. “I wrote the book thinking I would answer the question,” he says. “I found out it’s unanswerable in the present state of knowledge.” What he found instead was an enormous range of “political numbers, intended to persuade people” one way or the other.
For centuries population pessimists have hurled apocalyptic warnings at the congenital optimists, who believe in their bones that humanity will find ways to cope and even improve its lot. History, on the whole, has so far favored the optimists, but history is no certain guide to the future. Neither is science. It cannot predict the outcome of People v. Planet, because all the facts of the case—how many of us there will be and how we will live—depend on choices we have yet to make and ideas we have yet to have. We may, for example, says Cohen, “see to it that all children are nourished well enough to learn in school and are educated well enough to solve the problems they will face as adults.” That would change the future significantly.
The debate was present at the creation of population alarmism, in the person of Rev. Thomas Malthus himself. Toward the end of the book in which he formulated the iron law by which unchecked population growth leads to famine, he declared that law a good thing: It gets us off our duffs. It leads us to conquer the world. Man, Malthus wrote, and he must have meant woman too, is “inert, sluggish, and averse from labour, unless compelled by necessity.” But necessity, he added, gives hope:
“The exertions that men find it necessary to make, in order to support themselves or families, frequently awaken faculties that might otherwise have lain for ever dormant, and it has been commonly remarked that new and extraordinary situations generally create minds adequate to grapple with the difficulties in which they are involved.”
Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let’s hope that Malthus was right about our ingenuity.
Ben,
I prefaced all of my comments before this by saying that the composite numbers alone do not reveal the true nature of the problem.
I do not doubt that the planet can hold more people and that ingenuity on behalf of thinking people can help even the poor and destitute in resource depleated regions.
In the mind of Karl, problem solved.
Problems with more than two related factors can not be reduce to an emphasis upon just two variables.
I properly identified problem allows the solution to be more readily arrived at.
It was Albert Einstein who said: “the formulation of a problem is often more important than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, or regard old problems from a new angle, requires imagination and makes a real advance in science”.
Karl writes:—"One of the sources then compelling population increases is basically being fueled by those religions that hold to a compelling or sacred purpose behind bringing as many children into the world as possible."
Or—what hasn't been mentioned so far—the still very present machismo factor in many non-Western countries, which prompts ridicule on men whose women do not bear many children.
Which leads right back to, not religion, but culture as a driving force.
Karl is correct insofar as simply providing birth control and clinic services is not the cure. There are many people, in many places, who could care less about how much sense it might make to limit births—they see it as a threat to their self image to do so.
We have to be careful about citing locations, because this happens here as well, usually in small enclaves within splinter groups like the break-away Latter Day Saints. But this is a thorny problem—some males seem to require evidence of their virility by continually knocking their women up. This is social, it is cultural. I cannot think of any religion that specifically calls for as many births as can be got from all women as part of their "sacred purposes." The Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply is vague—what qualifies as replenishing the Earth?
But many religions are used to reinforce already extant cultural practices that require women to be subserviant and serve the men as trophy breeders.
It would help if we all decided to stop making such a big praiseworthy deal out of reproduction, even here. That tacit privileging of parenthood over everything drenches our popular entertainments, our advertising, and our consumerism. The default assessment of women who opt out of the baby-game is that of a cold, calculating, selfish woman.
Part of this is basic biology—nature insists on reproduction. It catches many people by surprise, people who otherwise believe themselves guided by reason and conscience. It was once strongly suggested to me that I leave my partner because it was assumed she wanted children and since I didn't it was unfair of me to keep her in a childless relationship. What is really surprising is that now, decades later, the people who did this pressuring don't remember it. I'm inclined to believe them. They were acting on the Darwinian imperative.
So I agree, the problem has multiple vectors. But not one of those other factors argues against doing this very basic and sensible thing—making birth control readily available and providing education to go with it. This is something that can be done and even if it's not a "cure" it will have some effect. We can work on the rest later—but let's stop pretending that ignorance prevents unwanted pregnancies or that contraception doesn't work or shouldn't be used because of some fear of immorality. Ask the child brides that pepper the Asian subcontinent how they feel about being "safe" in "moral" marriages.
Mark: I agree with your point about deep emotional drives to reproduce contributing greatly to the present situation. A quote that comes to mind is Robert Wright's "The emotions are evolution's executioners."
On the other hand, it might bear repeating that HALF of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended. That's a lot of new bodies on the planet, even if many of these are intended "unintended" pregnancies.
Basically there are three waya a pregnancy is unplanned. One – the physical, hormonal, emotional and psychological nature of sex either clouds are shades rational thinking. Two – when "protected" sex messes up. Three – when one partner forces their will upon another.
Saying strong emotions are at work is true, but often so are other variables in the other person's head that are totally undiscussed and sometimes lied about.
Karl – you forgot one. Doesn't happen often, but most of the ancient religions record at least one instance of such.