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TechnoratiIt's easy to blame the poor for growing pressure on the world's resources. But still the wealthy west takes the lion's share
I cannot avoid the subject any longer. Almost every day I receive a clutch of emails about it, asking the same question. A frightening new report has just pushed it up the political agenda: for the first time the World Food Programme is struggling to find the supplies it needs for emergency famine relief. So why, like most environmentalists, won't I mention the p-word? According to its most vociferous proponents (Paul and Anne Ehrlich), population is "our number one environmental problem". But most greens will not discuss it.
Is this sensitivity or is it cowardice? Perhaps a bit of both. Population growth has always been politically charged, and always the fault of someone else. Seldom has the complaint been heard that "people like us are breeding too fast". For the prosperous clergyman Thomas Malthus, writing in 1798, the problem arose from the fecklessness of the labouring classes. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenicists warned that white people would be outbred. In rich nations in the 1970s the issue was over-emphasised, as it is the one environmental problem for which poor nations are largely to blame. But the question still needs to be answered. Is population really our number one environmental problem?
The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) cites some shocking figures, produced by the UN. They show that if the global population keeps growing at its current rate, it will reach 134 trillion by 2300. But this is plainly absurd: no one expects it to happen. In 2005, the UN estimated that the world's population will more or less stabilise in 2200 at 10 billion. But a paper published in Nature last week suggests that there is an 88% chance that global population growth will end during this century.
In other words, if we accept the UN's projection, the global population will grow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stop runaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent the overuse of resources. But compare this rate of increase with the rate of economic growth.
Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by about 1,600%. As the equations produced by Professor Roderick Smith of Imperial College have shown, this means that in the 21st century we will have used 16 times as many economic resources as human beings have consumed since we came down from the trees.
So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth. And if governments, banks and businesses have their way, it never stops. By 2115, the cumulative total rises to 3,200%, by 2138 to 6,400%. As resources are finite, this is of course impossible, but it is not hard to see that rising economic activity - not human numbers - is the immediate and overwhelming threat.
Those who emphasise the dangers of population growth maintain that times have changed: they are not concerned only with population growth in the poor world, but primarily with growth in the rich world, where people consume much more. The OPT maintains that the "global environmental impact of an inhabitant of Bangladesh ... will increase by a factor of 16 if he or she emigrates to the USA". This is surely not quite true, as recent immigrants tend to be poorer than the native population, but the general point stands: population growth in the rich world, largely driven by immigration, is more environmentally damaging than an increase in population in the poor world. In the US and the UK, their ecological impact has become another stick with which immigrants can be beaten.
But growth rates in the US and UK are atypical; even the OPT concedes that by 2050 "the population of the most developed countries is expected to remain almost unchanged, at 1.2 billion". The population of the EU 25 (the first 25 nations to join the union) is likely to decline by 7 million.
This, I accept, is of little consolation to people in the UK, where the government now expects numbers to rise from 61 million to 77 million by 2050. Eighty per cent of the growth here, according to the OPT, is the direct or indirect result of immigration (recent arrivals tend to produce more children). Migrationwatch UK claims that migrants bear much of the responsibility for Britain's housing crisis. A graph on its website suggests that without them the rate of housebuilding in England between 1997 and 2004 would have exceeded new households by 20,000-40,000 a year.
Is this true? According to the Office for National Statistics, average net immigration to the UK between 1997 and 2004 was 153,000. Let us (generously) assume that 90% of these people settled in England, and that their household size corresponded to the average for 2004, of 2.3. This would mean that new immigrants formed 60,000 households a year. The Barker Review, commissioned by the Treasury, shows that in 2002, the nearest available year, 138,000 houses were built in England, while over the 10 years to 2000, average household formation was 196,000. This rough calculation suggests that Migrationwatch is exaggerating, but that immigration is still an important contributor to housing pressure. But even total population growth in England is responsible for only about 35% of the demand for homes. Most of the rest is the result of the diminishing size of households.
Surely there is one respect in which the growing human population constitutes the primary threat? The amount of food the world eats bears a direct relationship to the number of mouths. After years of glut, the storerooms are suddenly empty and grain prices are rocketing. How will another 3 billion be fed?
Even here, however, population growth is not the most immediate issue: another sector is expanding much faster. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation expects that global meat production will double by 2050 - growing, in other words, at two and a half times the rate of human numbers. The supply of meat has already trebled since 1980: farm animals now take up 70% of all agricultural land and eat one third of the world's grain. In the rich nations we consume three times as much meat and four times as much milk per capita as the people of the poor world. While human population growth is one of the factors that could contribute to a global food deficit, it is not the most urgent.
None of this means that we should forget about it. Even if there were no environmental pressures caused by population growth, we should still support the measures required to tackle it: universal sex education, universal access to contraceptives, better schooling and opportunities for poor women. Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts. But to suggest, as many of my correspondents do, that population growth is largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.
George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.
www.monbiot.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
41 Comments so far
Show AllI agree with foamweapons near the top of the posts - overpopulation will be self-correcting; not just from global warming but from numerous environmental collapses. The collapse of bee populations which do desirable things for us, and other animal populations which prevent the proliferation of undesirable species (like certain insects) are good examples of things which will lead to the collapse of human populations too.
I just love these folks who still talk about the "myth" of overpopulation. They visualize the earth as just so enormous and endless. The crust of a loaf of bread must look enormous to an ant colony, too, but eventually it's gone and they must find another loaf. Anyone who doesn't think we can use up the earth's crust is just fooling themselves. Just keep on makin' them babies and eventually, the council of the earth will be fighting over which 8 humans are going to be the lucky ones to go live on Mars to spend the rest of their lives inside an enclosed plastic suit!
DKML: Most people if given the option would prefer a stable life enough food etc and two kids rather than cut throat competition and 5 kids. It is only a matter of consciousness.
NP: Making it a question of options seems to focus on the individual or family unit and their decisions. I'm more convinced by dmitri's theoretical model, in which spikes in population are related to material and historical conditions that determine general outcomes.
Cut throat competition will exist under capitalism even if we are under carrying capacity as we are now. This seems obvious.
When you say it is "only a matter of consciousness" I'm unclear as to your meaning. Are you saying that if the Third World people could just have their consciousness raised it would over ride the material reality they faced? This seems more idealist than theoretical to me. You may counter that you are talking about the "developed world" too, but the problem of rising birth rates isn't a first world problem in general.
DKML: As for methods of control the most effective ones are not direct.
NP: Even if the best "methods of control" are not direct, why resort to controlling people when the problem is systemic?
DKML: Also, might I add that if we don't consider such things nature will do the work for us, just in far more drastic ways.
NP: When you say "consider such things" you are insinuating we need to "take action" to curb population and yet you are unwilling to take ownership of the implications of what that would entail. I find it scary that you totally bypass the points Dmitri makes about systemic roots of resource depletion and environmental destruction, to jump directly to a police action to cut down on "breeding" which you imply is more of a problem in the Third World (rather than a reflection of systemically created scarcity). You mention that more people more consumption is true "regardless of the system" but this ignores the glaring fact that it is capitalism that has dramatically accelerated our impact on the environment, and that it is capitalist production that has been a major factor in worsening "natural disasters" creating millions of corpses in its wake. When you combine your focus on the Third World as a greater problem, and your default defense of capitalism, it's no wonder dmitri sees the genocidal implications in your arguments.
Two books you may want to read are Mike Davis's _Late Victorian Holocausts_ and John Bellamy Foster's _The Vulnerable Planet_.
Proto Genocidal? Thats is total b.s. the mere fact that I make the case that EVERYONE in both the developed and developing world needs to consider population essentially negates that assertion. As for methods of control the most effective ones are not direct. Most people if given the option would prefer a stable life enough food etc and two kids rather than cut throat competition and 5 kids. It is only a matter of consciousness. Also, might I add that if we don't consider such things nature will do the work for us, just in far more drastic ways.
dmitri:
Again, I agree with your assessment of capitalism with few exceptions. And you correctly point out a couple of places where our premises differ. Just a couple of comments.
"So I don't accept your premise that a supposed linear evolution of ever-improving standards of living necessitates more exponential growth and consumption." - I don't recall stating that this phenomenon necessitates these things, just that they happened to go together throughout the entire linear history since the establishment of civilization. Consider me skeptical that that linkage is likely to be broken anytime soon, with or without capitalism.
"And, come on, "cultures" didn't "choose" capitalism, it was foisted on people by the ruling class, enforced and maintained through militaries, police, law, etc. Further, I totally disagree that it is meaningful to even describe capitalism as cultural; if anything its material requirements historically shape "culture," not the other way around." - This paragraph basically misses my meaning about capitalism being cultural. In order for capitalism to be established within any culture, a certain set of stories must be present and accepted, whether voluntarily or enforced. Stories like "humans have a right to improve their standards of living at the expense of others, human or not," "increasing consumption is improvement," "converting the living community of which we are a part into material goods is acceptable," "controlling nature is better than cooperating with it," and so on are precursors to the stories specific to capitalism, which you understand well and have argued against.
We agree that capitalism is especially bad as an economic system, both for its theoretical and practical anti-human and anti-life biases and effects. It appears that where we differ is the source of the problem. You assert that capitalism is uniquely bad and without it much could be alleviated. I agree, but I believe that the problem is more fundamental and can be found in the stories unique to civilization rather than one of its economic systems.
If you are interested in this, I'd suggest Stanley Diamond's "In Search of the Primitive" as a good place to start. If not, I'm happy to agree to disagree, and I wish you luck in dethroning capitalism!
Dmitri calls it the "myth" of overpopulation.
Dmitri is living in a dream world.
However, no worries, decisions unmade have a tendency to make themselves. Humanity has not decided to deal with overpopulation using the "birth rate solution" so that implies acceptance of the "death rate solution."
It doesn't matter who eats the pie, when it's gone, it's gone.
This is just too funny. Personally, I would rather try to convince a rock that I am correct than some of the people here.....
More people more things consumed. Yes the big bad Americans consume more than those poor helpless folks in the third world that every person in the first world obviously is repressing with their racist imperialist might. However, one more person regardless of where they live is one more mouth to feed. If you look at impact both the high population growth in the third world and the modest one in America and a few other industrialized countries is a huge problem in terms of environmental impact. Basically, we ALL need to cut back on the good ole breed'in. What offends me the most about thinking like this is the a-theoretical politically correct tone to its arguments. If people really want to make head way on these topics I suggest they become more abstract and and theoretically grounded in their arguments rather than playing around with faddish themes, pet issues and half the facts..
dmitri:
You're right, we'd probably be in for a long afternoon. Thanks for not addressing any of the questions that I posed.
"I hope that we could all dismiss racist explanations for disparate global population growth, and "cultural" explanations are just a analytical stone's throw away. Therefore, vastly disparate population growths indicate a relationship to both a country's economics and more generally its role in the global economy. Put extremely simply, you could say capitalism produces poverty, poverty produces faster growing populations…"
You have to be bold to ignore what you just did. You refer to cultural explanations as racist by implications, yet you explain population growth with capitalism, which is cultural. Not all cultures in the world have chosen capitalism. Only a subset of civilized cultures have voluntarily chosen capitalism. Yes, as a story that we tell ourselves to determine how to live our lives, capitalism is in fact a cultural artifact. By the way, you might be errantly assuming that I mean the word "civilized" in a positively biased way - I don't. I mean it in the sense of societies marked by the presence of cities, which are collections of humans that exceed the carrying capacity of their local environment.
Capitalism is many things, but most of all it is the progression of a theme that has been present throughout the history of civilization - the desire to accumulate "wealth" and power over others, including the natural world. It's just the latest and most impacting way of the powerful and power-hungry to privatize (deny use to others, including natural non-human use) and control as much of the world and the people in it as possible. Do you think it is some kind of fluke that every civilized society in history grew in both population, economic complexity, and environmental impact and that only capitalism "necessitates" these things? Was feudalism based on stable populations and practiced in an environmentally benign way? What about Islamic societies with their prohibitions against interest and usury, did they never grow in size and impact?
Don't limit your questioning to the concept of capitalism. There are many more fun things to talk about, too.
The above nonsense trying to convince someone of the obvious demostrates why humans are their own worst enemy and they believe only that which makes them feel good. Hopeless evolutionary fluke, that's us.
By the way, just to put why I'm saying into perspective, I consider myself a "libertarian socialist", or closest to it ideologically. I don't say what I'm saying as a right winger or even as a liberal.
Population and economic growth is, like many other negatives such as greed and an entirely subjective view of morals, exacerbated in capitalism. However, removing capitalism would not solve the problem by itself. The same problems in regards to population and consumption growth have occurred over and over again over the last few thousand years of human civilization. You should read the "Epic of Gilgamesh", which was written in 4700 BC. In it he talks about the continued expansion of people and consumption and the effects it had on the environment, eventually turning what is modern Iraq into a dessert wasteland. The quote that stuck out to me was when he was describing the former healthy green environment and how "the hills have turned white" (into sand), or something similar. Rome had the same exact problems. They grew and consumed away their environment (cutting down vegetation and leaving exposed soil, amongst many other environmental disasters), eventually helping bring down their civilization. More recent examples are Easter Island and Rwanda.
Regarding China: When Mao was giving his directives the country was in no way capitalist and the problems of population growth originated during his rule and as a result of his directives. I don't think that anything that I would call socialism, by nature, could be directed from above. I do, however, think that you could take that away after reading certain portions of Marx's ideas. I'd also disagree with you that what China did was in many ways contrary to what Marx called for (he did use the relatively stateless Paris Commune as an example of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" but the idea in practice has and would always be a disaster. There's never a justification to giving a small group of elites, no matter how "revolutionary", the power that Marx's theories call for during a social revolution. The arguments between the "statist" or "authoritarian" socialists and the anarchists goes way back and, in case you haven't noticed, the anarchists' critique of Marx's ideas in practice turned out to be more accurate & realistic than the capitalist theorists).
If your argument rests on capitalism alone, and I say this as a leftist, then you've missed the point along your logical journey and the problems that are present in ALL systems will not go away. This doesn't mean that capitalism can solve this or any other environmental problem, it's my opinion that it can't. I'm just telling you that no economic or social arrangement can get over the fact that the economy is a subsystem to the ecosystem (in that it feeds on the environment for resources and uses it as a sink for waste) and as a result the size of the economy relative to the eco-system must always stay bellow the level that causes ecological collapse (hopefully far bellow). I really do suggest you read economist Herman Daly. He talks about these very issues and as a socialist you could take away a lot from his ideas. His analysis logically leads to decentralization of decision making, leads back to the question of the means of production, leads back to the differences in wealth and power and he aggressively attacks globalization and the ideas that are used to justify its existance.
"Your points would be valid if soil erosion wasn't increasing, which it is, if forest cover hasn't been lost worldwide, which it has, and if things like entropy didn't exist. It would be valid if environmental destruction didn't happen in the non-capitalist countries, which it has. If this degradation didn't happen in human civilizations, without exception, before capitalism even existed, which it did.As far as I'm concerned, you're arguing against gravity and you're doing it with bravado not earned by the logic you're presenting."
That made me literally laugh out loud.
It's great to see such spirited, informed, and engaged debate about the problems facing our world. I'm personally glad to see this discussion being held, regardless of my thoughts about the validity (or lack thereof) of the arguments being presented. Thank you each and all, and a big cheer for Monbiot and CD for facilitating!
My god Dimitri, how intentionally thick can you get? When I brought up the extremely high population as an example it was an attempt to show that there is such thing as a population growth limit, which you seem to think doesn't exist. I TRIED to show that the question is then where that limit is, since you say it doesn't exist and since the laws of thermodynamics don't exist in your world apparently, forget that I mentioned it. When you talk about untapped areas to exploit you are talking about taking over parts of the environment not under control by people, which means the economic system (socialist, capitalist or other) is bigger relative to the larger system it feeds from and uses as a dump for waste, the environment. When we take over an environment we exploit the area and ecological damage is inevitable. To restore any damaged environment (which, like anywhere else in the universe, is irreversible over the long term) we need energy and resources from elsewhere. Human population has grown, in capitalist and socialist countries, and this environmental degradation has continuously increased. That growth has removed areas that could be used to replenish the harmed ecosystems. If you look at deforestation rates (which are increasing worldwide continuously) for instance, the majority has occurred in the tropics. Why? The developed countries are passing, or are attempting to pass, stronger environmental regulations and are importing timber and other resources from the developing world, who need capital and are selling their resources for needed funds (all they have are their reserve army of labor and their natural resources thanks to the capitalist financial markets). China has destroyed their environment (desertification, deforestation, soil erosion, overpopulation, etc). As they've destroyed their environment (which has caused, according to the Chinese government even, tens of thousands of "pollution protests" each year) have they reversed their environmental practices? A little, certain zones yes, for the most part they're simply importing resources from elsewhere, basically exporting the environmental damage. The situation began, need I remind you, largely as a result of Mao's directives and happened during the most radical periods of Chinese development. Your points would be valid if soil erosion wasn't increasing, which it is, if forest cover hasn't been lost worldwide, which it has, and if things like entropy didn't exist. It would be valid if environmental destruction didn't happen in the non-capitalist countries, which it has. If this degradation didn't happen in human civilizations, without exception, before capitalism even existed, which it did. As far as I'm concerned, you're arguing against gravity and you're doing it with bravado not earned by the logic you're presenting.
dmitri,
Wow tautologies, thats a big word..
As I said there is a basic relationship between numbers and consumption. More people more consumption. That occurs regardless of the system. The more intensive the system the less people the environment can support....
Another point relative to things I have been reading is this fantasy thinking that we can simply inhabit all those vast open spaces and that technology will save us. Two big porblems with this one that vast open spaces can't support people very well and that why they are vast and open and assuming we go about our merry little way have 20 billion people on the planet what about the quality of people's lives and what happens if that fine balance we have acheived to support that population is some how disrupted? All said, small less than carrying capacity populations in which quality of life is high is really the only viable option.
dmitri:
I'm glad that such faith in technology still exists, but your faith in the ability of civilization to overcome the limits of finite resources seems misplaced to me. You mention how energy technologies can be used more efficiently, and you point to renewable sources for it, yet you ignore the fact that there are limits to the levels of these resources that can be harvested by humans. You're still talking about indefinite exponential growth of consumption of finite resources.
The mathematics of exponential growth are straightforward. The area under the curve of an exponential function becomes infinite, thereby necessitating the presence of some infinite resource to be consumed.
Your point about LV and California seems to imply the assumption that the massive importation of food, water, and energy is somehow sustainable over a significant period of time. How exactly do you propose to support concentrations of people that vastly exceed the carrying capacity of their local environment without the energy resources (oil, coal, etc.) that are clearly finite and will run out no matter how much we like them?
We agree that capitalism necessitates incessant growth, but you disagree that other industrial economics requires the same. I didn't "overlook" anything in this, it's just my observation that increasing "standards of living" is not a unique goal to capitalist economies. All of civilized history from the onset of the use of agriculture have been marked by increasing consumption of resources and increasing human impact on the environment, even though capitalism was not present for the majority of that history. You may see things differently.
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I'm seeing a lot of talk from techno-fanatics about how the earth could support 20 billion humans, how we're only using some percentage of the arable land, and whatnot. These claims may be technically true, but they rest on a set of assumptions that don't seem likely to remain true. Assumptions like "all arable land is identical" and "topsoil depletion (on which CD ran an article last week) does not apply, and topsoil will always be there no matter what we do to it." I see talk of fossil fuels in agriculture, but only mentioned regarding industrial meat production - what about the gas-based fertilizers and petrochemicals used to boost production of commodity crops? With what do we replace those technologies when oil becomes more scarce or prohibitively expensive?
There seems to be a willingness to base assumptions on past performance of technology somehow guaranteeing future results. Yes, people have been talking about the limits of the natural world for some time, and yes, civilized humans have found ways to expand their reach or suppress environmental feedbacks. These two things do not negate the presence of physical and biological limits on the only planet that we have.
However, poverty, adversity and chaos can disrupt what little control most females have over birth control, and so the campaign against human numbers must work intensely on providing means of contraception. Chinas one child policy is leading the world on this. So all means of occupation and war must be specifically against reproduction, in direct opposition to Papal and Christian edicts. The standard war is to imprison and slaughter the men, kill the children, and then the victors have the women to produce more of their own, alas for ape heritage. A war to slow reproduction would be on entirely different lines. Abortion, sterilization, and contraception rewarded, and multiplicatives punished. Since women are the primary child producers, they are the targets of war. It could be a war of education, but its more likely to be the worst kind. It goes against natural selection. The right to have more than 1 or two still becomes the prerogative of the rich and the devious.
A terrible dilemma, and one that will generate its own terrible solutions. The first solution to the problems of too much economic growth that is being applied now, is for rich nations such as the US of I to even more grossly increase their wealth disparity, by putting most of their own population in such economic straits that they can barely afford to eat. The next stage is to only provide food and relatively good prospects to those people who are willing to fight terrorism, that is people in other countries who would complain about not having it so good. With arms and military and nuclear power all around, a good attempt at population decimation and economic destruction could be made, and the resulting breakdown in society, disease and starvation bring human numbers down to manageable levels. These are the only solutions known to work, and some countries are getting increasingly good at it.
From jmacneil: "This planet could easily support quadruple the current population of humans if it is managed right, although for a comfortable distribution it shouldn't exceed seven or eight billion"... yeah, if we were tube worms. See the YouTube video, ARE HUMANS SMARTER THAN YEAST?
We are already overpopulated. The Bomb has exploded. Every resource is already strained and the oil, which fueled the great technological leap to the civilization we live in, is now so scarce there are wars over it (Iraq) and the poles and deep oceans are being drilled... so what's left for next? It's coming to an end. And we are many billions over any reasonable limit of sustainable population, to live with any semblance of a decent life. We already need 20 Billion meals... a day. Now!
So to talk about quadrupling population or even just to "eight billion" is lunacy. Reference the scholarly books THE LONG EMERGENCY and THE REVENGE OF GAIA and COLLAPSE. Unless you are like Mitt Romney who believes in the fantasy pseudo-science of Economics (...and it's ALL voodoo, but it made HIM Croesus-Rich) and dis-believes in physical science and hard evidence when it is inconvenient, you will perceive that the sustainable carrying capacity of the Earth for civilized human culture has been exceeded already.
It is imperative that controls must be put on archaic and reptile-brain modes of thinking that developed when human life was, as Hobbes put it, nasty, brutish and short. Now that science and technology have provided for childhood survival and long life, the procreation urge to surge must also be controlled, and controlled First, so we may make progress on the other fronts of alleviating poverty and suffering and war, and end environmental abuse and destruction.
I doubt this logical inperative will happen, due to the Capitalist mantra of Growth Uber Alles, and Tribal and Religious views of children as the future soldiers of god.
Even George Monbiot thinks it is too politically incorrect to even mention overpopulation. At least not without laying on a guilt-trip about the civilized life that he and everyone wants to and should lead, verses the impoverished ignorant backwaters he exonerates by saying they don't use so much stuff as the West. Maybe that's because they are, like, POOR, and live in cardboard hovels they want to get the hell out of, just like anyone would. But the more impoverished people there are, the harder it is to lift living standards in a sustainable way.
So nature will create balance in the bad-cop way, with a new black plague... maybe the avian flu with its 80% death rate... or some radical failure in the life-supporting biosphere caused by, you know, too much CO2 or methane or other mass poisons of air and water and earth too numerous to mention. Or nuclear war, which after all, would be brought on by those natural baboons, the humans.
There are crazy cultural traditions that drive overpopulation and crazy economic systems that drive overconsumption AND overpopulation. The worst of the two is the crazy economic system known as "laissez-faire" capitalism, with its corporate media consumption ramrod. Reign them both in but reign in the capitalism the most. Capitalism is clearly over-riding the public will, particularly in Washington, to perpetuate economic growth because the capitalists fear that economic contraction will knock them off their high horses.
In Kerala province, India, an acre feeds six people, so with 7.7 billion acres of arable land the earth can support a maximum of 46 billion people. Allowing some space among the arable fields for wildlands, arable land can support 20 billion people sustainably. If we can cap the population at 10 billion we will only need 22% of arable land. This doesn't account for seafood.
Today we are using about 25% of arable land to feed 6 billion. An unsustainable amount of fossil fuels and water are being consumed to feed about 1.5 billion of these high-meat diets. When the other 4.5 billion reaches for the high meat diet too, plus irresponsible biofuel production/consumption, look out.
Very simply, what needs to happen includes population capped at 10 billion, arable land use capped at 25%, Kerala-like tree/permaculture methods adopted universally, fossil/water inputs eliminated, and meat consumption reduced to control of wild animal populations (i.e. one meal per week).
"the motor of history" Marx, population growth,
Monbiot mentions Nature and the UN projecting a leveling out, cessation of population growth, without getting into how this would occur. Was mass worldwide famine the underpinning of their conclusions?....
PJD, Thank you. Nice post if I may.
Monbiot is correct.
Of the twin evils destroying the planet--economic growth is the worst.
Consumption and economic growth are problems of the developed world--this includes the USA. Population is a problem of the third world. As one of my friends from India says, "You concentrate on solving your country's economic growth problems and I'll concentrate on solving my country's population growth problems." This way, we don't waste time pointing fingers.
Yes, population growth is a problem, but too many people for too many years have been using Someone Else's Problem of population growth as an excuse to avoid examining their own problems of economic growth and their own contributions to Earth's environmental problems.
Within the USA, there is an almost perfect correlation between economic growth (i.e. GDP) and numbers of endangered and threatened species (see title page and Figure 5 in this publication of the Wildlife Society: http://steadystate.org/files/Technical_Review_on_Economic_Growth.pdf ).
Curbing the consumption of meat is not a solution, even if the vegans like to propose that recipe in every argument. The fact is, meat protein is concentrated and, by volume, cannot be replaced by a vegetable substitute, so there is always going to be those people whose bodies require the volume of energy which can only be supplied by meat protein. That makes the vegan's argument of reducing meat consumption a case for saving the planet's biosphere a strawman argument.
This planet could easily support quadruple the current population of humans if it is managed right, although for a comfortable distribution it shouldn't exceed seven or eight billion. The problem is not in how populations are growing, but in how they are maintained. A healthy urban environment must supply all of the basic needs of the citizens so that the birth/death ratio will stabilize as people can sustainably organize their lives. This trend is discernible in all of the developed countries. Such a system will never materialize so long as capitalism exists because capitalism is fundamentally dependant on exploitation.
Energy conservation must be a top priority for every government so that resources can be allocated realistically. For the best current model study Cuba's energy policy. For the world society to survive into the future it must convert fully to socialism. There is no other option for survival in the long term. And, to conserve resources, products must be made to last at least a lifetime, as opposed to the current style of making even cars so increasingly fragile that they are designed to collapse at the slightest intersection with any object.
there is plenty of room on the planet to suport lots of people. but we will have to stop the infernal consumption machine that is global capitalism. to have a sustainable economy that works for everyone, we would all be consuming much less than we do now. and maybe no more meat except on wednesdays. it will be a very different looking world, but is the only way we can take care of our planet so our grandchildren can live in it.
It amazes me how stupid people on the left can be not to understand the fundamental issues facing humans. Over population in both the developed and developing worlds is a fundamental issue. Population dictates resource consumption and environmental impact and for that matter quality of life. Of course our friends on the right know that we are too disorganized to do anything thing useful and they take full advantage of it.. Oh well enjoy your lattes, hybrids and psuedo intellectualism....... I am going to dig a hole and hide in it while natural selection takes its course....
When people complain to me about the increased population of my city, I say "The problem is not the people, it's the cars." I'm a bicyclist. I would prefer a world with many fewer cars. Most people hate the idea of giving up their cars, so for them the problem is too many people. It's the same for a vegetarian who would say "it's not the people, it's the cows [that are the bigger problem]." Monbiot says as much here.
In any case, if one of us were king of the world, we'd work on the population problem and the car and cow problems simultaneously. There's no king of the world. Poor and overcrowded countries didn't fix their problems and it's too late now. Their people live incredibly tough lives. Their lives will get tougher; and shorter. We are right now in history arriving at a point where, with grain being devoted to making ethanol, there is a direct tradeoff between food and fuel. Drive to the dog park, less grain for the hungry.
Certainly the lifestyle of us in the first world beamed to all who have access to our media has a big influence on legitimizing consumptive lifestyles all over the world
We have been exploiting poor countries to obtain cheap resources and labor for centuries. What has changed is that the economic system is dominated by a hydra headed group of non-entities who have more power money and influence than governments. This system has no real leadership unless you buy in to the various secret organization conspiracy theories. Perhaps it is more like an out of control invisible brain... running on the hype of ever increasing production without factoring in the true costs of production like the environment or the limited nature of the worlds resource base.
Sure the lowering excesses of grain on the world market are a result of our short sighted oil based economy that discourages labor intensive farming.
Permaculture may be a viable option with it's ability to be self sustaining and could likely equitably support just as large numbers as big agriculture does.
In some ways though scarcity is a myth. Think of the huge fortunes that are made controlling information. It takes perhaps a billion dollars to develop a program yet it can be distributed for essentially free.
In regards to not sharing with the poor so that the many other can not be consumptive despoilers of the earth, misses the point.
We are not immune from the laws of Nature. Nature will cull the human species with disease and disasters. It's all normal and should be expected. Each day of life is a gift so live it well.
"Actually, with existing equitable distribution of resourses, and no large reduction in arable land, the planet could support 6 billion. With one acre of land allocated to every man women and child, you could fit that number in an area equal to the US and some of Canada. "
The equitable distribution of current consumption is not sustainable. Sure, the earth can (and does) currently support an enormous human population. As others have pointed out, this is based on energy inputs from finite sources (directly and indirectly to the food supply), the exhaustion of otherwise renewable resources (ocean fisheries, for example), the overconsumption of topsoil, and other unsustainable practices.
It's about overshooting the carrying capacity of the earth. Humans consume some 40% of the available primary energy on the planet, and we do so in ways that damage the ability of the planet to continue supporting such large numbers of us.
Again, I'm not arguing your point about current consumption being sufficient to feed 6 billion of us. Clearly it does, even if unevenly distributed. My point is that current consumption is massively unsustainable. I was under the impression that most observers of the natural world would agree with that statement. Perhaps my impression is unfounded.
dmitri:
Have you been to the vast swathes of sparsely populated land in North America? There are plenty of reasons that it is sparsely populated, most notably that they are arid, cold, or otherwise unsuitable for significant populations.
I'm with you on the ending capitalism thing. That's not enough. The problem with citing statistics showing that agricultural production has grown exponentially is that it ignores the finite nature of the "input resources" in that production system. There is only so much arable land. There is only so much water, so much topsoil. Inequality is one qualitative problem of capitalism, and the notion of exponential growth as sustainable when constrained by finite resources is a qualitative problem of industrial economics in whatever form you choose, so long as there is a population that grows as well (or tries to maintain an unsustainable level).
Dmitri, overpopulation is a huge problem. Are you to claim that the Earth could, hypothetically, support a trillion people? Of course not. So the population limit DOES exist, the debate is whether or not we are at or near that point. Up until this point we've been able to use the energy from the sun that was built up for millions of years and stored under ground, which hasn't been reduced from the food stock. In the future we are going to have to dip into the food stock for energy purposes one way or another, reducing the per capita food availability. There's nothing we could do to get around that fact. If you want a good study of population problems and the strain it puts on the environment I'd suggest you look into how soil erosion and an agricultural system that couldn't support the population lead to many of the horrors of Rwanda, the same for Darfur now. I'd also suggest reading economist Herman Daly's article "Marx and Malthus in North-East Brazil". It describes the class element to the issue, which you addressed a little, but also articulates well the problems of population growth and the strain on natural resources.
Another is Vladimir Verdansky's "The Biosphere". In that book he talks about how there is a finite amount of resources in the world and when once species, us, tends to outgrow the others that species takes away resources from other species that it depends on for survival. The more people the more area needed for agriculture, the more soil erosion, the more need for energy, the more space taken over by us. When a country now is growing beyond the ability of its agricultural system to feed that population the country tends to attempt to import more food. The more countries grow the less areas they have to import from and the more pressure there will be put on the areas currently not exploited by us to produce food for our survival. If we ignore this it will be to our own detriment and if the planet is a position where the agricultural system can't support the worldwide population the nearest potential planet for inhabitation is about 20 light years away.
If your dog or cat is full of fleas, you would call it an infestation. That is precisely the world's problem, one that the politically correct refuse to recognize, it suffers from an infestation of people. And the problem lies not with the so-called "unwashed" races, but with the "nice" people in the industrialized nations who feel that their wealth gives them the right to brred at their pleasure. The child born in the U.S. today will consume about 5X the world's resources as his counterpart born in a poor African nation.
"That the earth cannot sustainably support 6 billion people is something on which we can all agree (unless, of course, we are among the geoengineering utopian visionaries)."
Actually, with existing equitable distribution of resourses, and no large reduction in arable land, the planet could support 6 billion. With one acre of land allocated to every man women and child, you could fit that number in an area equal to the US and some of Canada.
The 330 million North Americans are already using about as much as equivalent of about 3/4 billion middle-class european-equivalents, or maybe 3 billion moderate-income (not poor) Indians or Chinese-equivalents. So, if Americans started living siutainably, it would have the effect of lowering the world popuation by at least 3 billion.
Now, as far as the population "solving itself" through mass starvaton, maybe I wouldn't mind that so much if it were the wealthy, who are largely the cause of problem, were the ones who were going to do the starving, but it won't be - it will be the worlds poorest and most-exploited by our economic system. As Mr. Monbiot pointed out exploding economies generating plastic crap increase resource consumption at a FAR more rapid rate than population growth.
I percieve, among some of the respondents here, an unwillingless to consider letting go of their privleged positions in this, the most obscenely gluttonous of nations. Please consider reading Mr. Monbiot's article again.
Global climate change is one response to overpopulation and the resulting stress on limited resources. I'd like to see a change in tax laws that doesn't reward people for having children. Free family planning and contraceptives would be a good start to population control. It will probably take a global pandemic to reduce the world population to a manageable size. Not looking forward to that...
Right now, skies outside my building are black. We're having a severe thunderstorm warning. It's January.
Yes, there are too many people. Yes, the rich are more to blame for global warming. These are both true.
dmitri, do you believe that we can stack people like lab rats? Use every last piece of land for cultivation? Use all the water for humans with none left wild?
Yes, it is a problem of distribution, but the more people there are the worse the problem becomes. We need economic justice and birth control.
Actually, when people have a better life, women produce fewer children, unless they are religious nuts.
The top 1% control most of the world's resources. The faster population grows, 1) the more products and services they can sell, and 2) more destitute workers become available to work for them at ever lower wages.
I heard on the news a week or so back that wealthy American families are now having more children than they used to. One can't help but realize that this won't help consumption patterns.
A small point.
Why do poorer nations want to become like western nations?
Have the western systems worked in history?
One of the things they want to escape is their poverty and their fate as being considered to be lower than the haves in those nations.
Have their not been peasants and lords in the west?
Have their not been those who governed from the wealthy classes and those who obeyed from the lower classes?
Perhaps untill the 2oth century, there was a very definite class system from which people chose their destinies. And we are headed their again.
Of course then there is technology.
People in poorer nations believe that technology can be their saviour.
And perhaps, ultimately save the human race, if we can indeed make it out of the third rock from the sun to some distant planet that can subsist our oxygen needs.
Instead, technology threatens to anhilate us before we get there.
The promise of technology for our basic need- food, is also doing more damage to us than assist.
So their aping the west is coming from their need for equality.
Which they dont realize does not exist in the west.
In fact, if you look at eastern values before the were vanquished by the west, they were more like Native American values.
Now the Native Americans are buying The Hard Rock Cafe.
There has been no pause into this headlong plunge of the earth's desecration.
Now has to be the time.
We have to very careful with Synbio and Nanotech, in the next four years.
It has to start with curbing capitalistic greed.
Or we will have nowhere to hide.
best wishes and take care.
Zero
The population problem will solve itself when people are suddenly forced into starvation as a consequence of climate change. No need to worry about it. We won't even reach 8 billion.
This is such a poor article blaming greed for our problems when we are all greedy as well as too numerous. We humans are all in this together; the poor, the greedy and the needy. There is no way out or a soft landing for the overpopulation mess. That said, we should all work to reduce birth drastically to reduce future suffering-especially of children. Whatever your cause it is a lost cause without population control! So lets not contiune ignoring the elephant sitting on the coffee table.
Shadowfax has it right about oil and food. Oil was used to increase planetary carrying capacity for a short time of perhaps 200 years. With more food we get more people, the typical response to an increase in food that occurs in any animal population. We are/were simply not smart enough to avoid the ultmate folly of our overbreeding- a population crash of monstrous proportions is coming this century as oil production declines and economies fail.
The advantage of being rich is that they may be the last to go rather than first in line as the poor and destitute are, but lets stop the blame game-we did it to ourselves despite Malthus, Ehrlich and all those who labored to save us from ourselves including economist Ken Boulding (see my favorite poem below, note the date)
Conservationist's Lament
By Kenneth Boulding
In: Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, 1956
University of Chicago Press, p. 1087
The world is finite, resources are scarce,
Things are bad and will be worse.
Coal is burned and gas exploded,
Forests cut and soils eroded.
Wells are dry and air's polluted,
Dust in blowing, trees uprooted,
Oil is going, ores depleted,
Drains receive what is excreted.
Land is sinking, seas are rising,
Man is far too enterprising,
Fire will rage with Man to fan it,
Soon we'll have a plundered planet.
People breed like fertile rabbits,
People have disgusting habits.
Moral: The evolutionary plan went astray by evolving Man.
kelmer: "Population is a problem. Too many humans is a bad thing. It is part of the problem, but it shouldnt be a distraction from what the West does."
My friend, I couldn't disagree more. Population is THE problem. Everything comes back to it. We're devouring the planet like locusts while turning it's climate into that of Venus ...and we show no signs of stopping (but rather increasing our numbers!)
What the West does? F*ck the West when we're talking about life on Earth.
Managed to not mention the fact the only way we are feeding all these people is by massive injections of oil into the agricultural systems.
Without the oil we cannot support a fraction of the worlds population.
I'm glad to see Monbiot take on this issue. I've long rolled my eyes at people in the US blaming the global poor for the environmental problems, stating that population growth is the largest (or sole) cause. To claim this is ignorant - that is, to ignore the vast mountains of evidence to the contrary, only some of which is presented in this article.
That the earth cannot sustainably support 6 billion people is something on which we can all agree (unless, of course, we are among the geoengineering utopian visionaries). Claiming that large numbers of people who consume little of the planet are responsible for the destruction thereof is, again, ignorant.
Who deforested Europe, North America, and the colonial outposts in Asia, Latin America, and Africa? Who overfished (or vacuumed) the oceans? Who burned the vast majority of all fossil fuels? Who dammed the rivers? Who is driving the conversion of the last remaining intact natural ecosystems to plantations to grow monocrops of grain, meat, trees, etc? That would be the industrial civilizations of the west.
To pretend that the 5% of the global population in the US consuming some 30% of the biosphere is less responsible for environmental problems than the 2 billion living in poverty in the unindustrialized parts of the world is delusional. (No, it's not just the US. It's just the most obvious example. And No, the homeless and impoverished in the US do not shoulder a significant part of the burden.)
Are there going to be problems for the billions of poor people when industrial civilization collapses? Yes. Many will die, and the rest will certainly be forced to relinquish their dreams of living the way that the global rich do. Are their great numbers to blame for these problems? Yes, but only if one is willing to ignore virtually all of the linear history of civilization. Otherwise, we'd really have to blame the civilized, their insatiable appetite for "resources," and their willingness to destroy anything that gets in the way of their consumption.
Yes but the fact is that poorer nations WANT to become like Western ones. They feel they have a right to have whatever Western countries have. Polluting cars, lots of meat, etc.
They dont care when someone says you cant have 750 million people with cars when your country doesnt have the room for roads.
Look at the new car in India.
Population is a problem. Too many humans is a bad thing. It is part of the problem, but it shouldnt be a distraction from what the West does.