Are There Just Too Many People in the World?

This is a column I don’t want to write. Its subject is ugly; it makes me instinctively recoil. I have chastised people who bring it up at environmentalist meetings. The people who talk about it obsessively have often been callous about human life, and consistently proved wrong throughout history. And yet… there is a grain of insight in what they say.

The subject is overpopulation. Is our planet over-stuffed with human beings? Are we breeding to excess? These questions are increasingly poking into public debate, and from odd directions. Phillip Mountbatten — husband of the British monarch Elizabeth Windsor — said in a documentary screened this week: “The food prices are going up, and everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really [that there are] too many people. It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, nobody knows how to handle it.” He is not alone. A strange range of people have voiced the same sentiments over the past few months, from the Dalai Lama to Hu Jintao, from Conservative mayor Boris Johnson to Democratic Governor Bill Richardson.

They start by listing the sums, which are indeed startling. Every year, world population grows by 75 million people — equivalent to another Britain and Ireland whooshing fully-populated from the oceans. At the turn of the 18th century, there were 600 million people on earth. At the turn of this century, there were 6.6 billion. By the time I am in my sixties, there will be more than nine billion — at which point there will be more people alive simultaneously than in the first 17 centuries after Christ combined.

The overpopulation lobby say this will inevitably leave more and more people chasing after a diminishing amount of resources on an ecologically-ravaged planet. At their most pessimistic, they say human beings will, in the long sweep of planetary history, look like a big-brained version of a locust cloud. They eat everything in sight and multiply fifty-fold — until they have consumed everything, when they turn in desperation on each other, munch off their siblings’ heads, and then fall out of the sky dead.

They say with a frown that this global swarming is driving global warming. How can you be prepared to cut back on your car emissions and your plane emissions but not on your baby emissions? Can you really celebrate the pitter-patter of tiny carbon-footprints?

Yet this subject seems to leech out all the dark toxins of environmentalism — a movement I believe is the most urgent and important in the world. There has always been an element of green thinking that viewed humans as a parasitic infestation, wrecking the Eden of planet earth. The philosopher John Gray calls our species “homo rapiens”. The founder of Earth First!, Dave Foreman, called us “Humanpox” and wrote: “The Aids epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population… If [it] didn’t exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent [it].”

If environmentalism sounds — or is — misanthropic, we will lose the argument. Most human beings will never think the world would be better off without us. Nobody thinks they are the surplus human being who should not have been born. These strident arguments hand a huge gift to the anti-greens, who always said we were anti-human beneath the surface.

It also looks like displacement. The places where population is growing fastest — sub-Saharan Africa, rural China and Bangladesh — have virtually no carbon emissions, and pitiful food consumption rates. The gap is so huge that to be responsible for as many gas emissions as one British person, a Cambodian woman would need to have 262 children. Can we really sit in our nice homes, with a fridge-full of food we will mostly chuck away and an SUV in the drive, and complain that she is the problem?

Once this gut-reaction has kicked in, I then think of the horrible history of overpopulation predictions. Most famously, the 18th century demographer Thomas Malthus said mass starvation was inevitable because population increases geometrically while food production grows arithmetically. He didn’t anticipate the coming of the Industrial Revolution. His successors in the 1960s, like Paul Ehrich and the Club of Rome, similarly didn’t see the Green Revolution that was galloping around the corner of history.

So it is tempting to say now that the overpopulation argument will smack into some new technological development. It’s not quite true to say there is a diminishing amount of resources, because the genius of human beings is to find new ways to use what is there. Two centuries ago, nobody could have conceived that the sun’s rays or the waves in the ocean were a resource to be used - but solar and tidal power make it so.

And yet, and yet … why do my own arguments leave me echoing with doubt? A dark voice in my head says: you would accept that, to pluck an absurd number, 100 billion people would be too many. You don’t think human genius is infinitely expansive; there is a limit to what it can solve. So isn’t the question just where you draw the line? If 100 billion is too much, why not nine billion?

Hmm. You should always take on the best arguments of your opponents, not the worst. There are good people — a world away from the British royals or the human-hating fringes — who are sincerely concerned about population levels: people like Professors Chris Rapley and John Guillebaud. They argue that although the swelling billions are not now emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, they will see that we are doing it and will (totally understandably) want to join in the carbon bonfire.

But if this is a problem, is there a solution that isn’t abhorrent? Some people seem to reach instinctively for authoritarian answers. The government of China has bragged that its “greatest contribution” to the fight against global warming has been its policy of punishing, imprisoning or sterilising women who have more than one child. Some environmentalists — a small minority — eye this idea jealously.

There is a far better way — and it is something we should be pursuing anyway. It is called feminism. Where women have control over their own bodies — through contraception, abortion and general independence — they choose not to be perpetually pregnant. The UN Fund For Population Activities has calculated that 350 million women in the poorest countries didn’t want their last child, but didn’t have the means to prevent it. We should be helping them by building a global anti-Vatican, distributing the pill and the words of Mary Wollstonecraft.

So after studying the evidence, I am left in a position I didn’t expect. Yes, the argument about overpopulation is distasteful, often discussed inappropriately, and far from being a panacea-solution — but it can’t be dismissed entirely. It will be easier for 6 billion people to cope on a heaving, boiling planet than for nine or 10 billion — and we will only get there by freeing women to make their own reproductive choices. To achieve this green goal, it’s necessary to mix some oestrogen into the environmentalist palette.

–Johann Hari

©independent.co.uk

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127 Comments so far

merwan May 15th, 2008 1:18 pm

We will never reach nine billion. Mother Nature will see to it that we don’t. But her “solutions” won’t be pretty.

WTF May 15th, 2008 1:19 pm

David Suzuki, noted Canadian social/environmental scientist, states that the Earth can sustain a population of 25 million humans. Anything more is “destructive” to all.

merwan May 15th, 2008 1:25 pm

I don’t know how any CommonDreams readers can have missed this, but just in case you have:

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20198911,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines

Rich Griffin May 15th, 2008 1:40 pm

We simply have to adopt negative population growth patterns, esp. in the U.S. since we overconsume big time. Aggressively promoting 1 child per heterosexual couple, even with incentives for them to do so, is simply required.

But why recoil? It’s sensible, logical, and skillful. Hundreds and thousands of years ago child mortality was such that more children were needed for societies to grow and to flourish; it’s not the case in this day and age.

Betsy May 15th, 2008 1:55 pm

I agree with merwan — the planet won’t allow further expansion of human populations. Water shortages, food shortages, disease, pollution, and war resulting from conflict over scarce resources will all take their toll.

One place to start in the overdeveloped world is to discourage (and not pay for, and perhaps even ban) “infertility treatments” and high-tech reproduction. When animal populations exceed the carrying capacity of their environment, their fertility goes down. I assume that the current apparent increase in human infertility is a combination of petrochemical pollution and overall carrying capacity. Instead of “treating” it, we should encourage those affected to find other kinds of fulfillment in their lives.

Would I say this if I or my children were the ones affected? Yes, I think so. My grown children have already told me they’re unlikely to have children. That’s OK with me.

JaneM May 15th, 2008 1:56 pm

Mother Nature is already working on it. How many dead the last 2 weeks from the cyclone and the earthquake?

ziggymoonunit May 15th, 2008 1:57 pm

merwan:

My friends and others on the message board at VampireFreaks have been talking about that story for a week. I personally find that woman sickeningly selfish. Yes, it’s her right to have all those children but does she not realize the impact of 18 kids? The way things are going on right now in this world I wouldn’t even want to bring one kid into the world. But hey, it’s God’s will in her mind .

Daniel David May 15th, 2008 2:02 pm

It’s hard to be both pro-life and pro-choice at the same time. But that’s where I find myself—not “liking” abortion and knowing that every woman should always have a personal choice about bearing more (or even any) children.

Three trends I would like to see (in addition to condoms):

1) MEN counseling MEN in our cultures to “be responsible guys” who do not impregnate women at untimely life moments.
(Sorta like “friends don’t let friends drive drunk”)

2) More men willing to get vasectomies, and possibly very early in life. (I’ve had one for 34 years, since age 22.)

3) After-the-fact contraceptives, such as “Plan B” as commonplace and no-strings available as chewing gum.

DaveEriqat May 15th, 2008 2:09 pm

There’s no question that there are too many people on Earth. One has only to look at the consequences to come to that conclusion: oil depletion, ocean fisheries depletion, growing CO2 (if you think that matters), water depletion, species extinction, the present food crisis, novel disease pandemics, and so on. These problems didn’t exist when there were fewer people. Of course, people have always been destructive and harmful to the environment, but when the number of people was below some threshold – I don’t know what that is; perhaps a billion or so – Mother Nature could recover from man’s ravages. Now there are so many people destroying the ecosystem that Mother Nature cannot keep up, so we see depletion everywhere.

Now, if people were truly capable of sharing the Earth’s resources equitably, why then 6.6 billion people might not be too many. Unfortunately, we have proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are utterly incapable of sharing resources equitably. Therefore, population reduction is the only option.

Population reduction is not a repulsive concept; all we have to do is control our natural urges and let the population diminish through attrition! I realize that most people cannot control their urge to spread their genes – that is, after all, what we’re genetically programmed to do. But we are theoretically intelligent enough to override nature’s programming and “just say no” to propagating our genes. I have done so.

As merwan pointed, out, if we don’t reduce our population, Mother Nature WILL do it for us, guaranteed.

Dave

kivals May 15th, 2008 2:27 pm

Daniel David,

I have thought for years that the government should pay males at the age of 18 to get a vasectomy, or possibly even require them to, but in this country it would be deemed racist and classist. They then could get it reversed at the age of 30 for free. If we lived in a more egalitarian post-racial society, maybe it could fly, but not here, not now.

Juliann May 15th, 2008 2:31 pm

This subject is NOT ugly. It is necessary and MUST BE BROUGHT OUT INTO THE OPEN. We humans have glutted the earth with our high numbers. Three things will modify overpopulation: war, famine, and disease.

Got milk?

dustinchicago May 15th, 2008 2:39 pm

1. It’s always somebody else fault.
2. Screw the Pope.

There have been many population studies, the UN issued one 5 years ago and listed the some scenarios:

-We have the ability to get to 100 billion
-We would most likely max out at 10 billion
-Infertility (first among males) due to pollution would take our number to 3 billion

Interesting report. Birth control is a good thing… and so is Feminism.

My next thought (about the pope’s stand on birth control) is…. what about in THIS country?

I keep hearing about teen pregnancy, mostly among the poor, though I have no idea of the numbers, but do they have access to birth control?

flimsysanity May 15th, 2008 2:51 pm

Leafy Spurge and Kudzu have nothing on humans for being a destructive invasive species.

Daniel David May 15th, 2008 2:56 pm

kivals,

I agree with you that we can’t “force” guys to get vasectomies. But you’re right that the fact they are now reversible with micro-surgery is a plus that might help some make a decision—both in marriage and even for single-hood.

I had mine after OBGYN doctors told my wife that it was a “miracle” that our first baby was born okay (at 7 months.)
We didn’t want to risk a future disaster, so I decided it was better than permanent pills for her. I had two doctors try to talk me out of it (What if you get a divorce? What if your wife passes away? Etc.) because I was so young and reversing wasn’t yet an option back then. But I’ve never been sorry. We’re still married, and frankly, I think I would have been okay with it even if I had become a widower at 25 or 30. Our son is wonderful, but I never felt I needed “a lot” of children and neither did my wife. We sort of volunteered for the one child pattern.

(As an aside, my son evidently feels differently. He and his wife now have three kids.)

TheLorax May 15th, 2008 3:07 pm

I don’t think the problem is overpopulation yet, although it is likely to become a problem in the future. The problem isn’t too many people, it’s too many greedy people. If everyone actually gave up lust for money, and learned to help each other, the population would be very small indeed. If people cared about the planet they lived on and the life that occupies it, these “overpopulation issues” would nearly cease overnight.
It’s time for a reality check though. With so many people grabbing for the tiniest scraps of money and power, stepping on their fellow man to get them, “overpopulation” will continually be a problem.

Garvey May 15th, 2008 3:10 pm

I have a serious problem with the very idea that the planet is “over-populated.” To admit that, as the author notes, is to at least implicitly concede that humans are a parasitic organism. That simply isn’t the case of course. Humans have survived for most of our history without being parasites. Many cultures have peacefully and respectfully coexisted with nature for centuries. The destruction began with the rise of European and now Western culture. The supplanting of the social and ecologically-conscious human with the individualistic one ushered in the parasitic side to human beings.

Secondly, the idea of over-population not only seems to deny the real problem of over-consumption but justfies it. If we as a species were somehow able to initiate the types of policies recommended by the “over-population” crowd, curtailing population numbers to their current level, then wouldn’t that mean that we can all continue with our “standard of living.” Wouldn’t that mean that, short of the effect of production and consumption process on the environment, that I can still consume the same amount? Wouldn’t that mean I could reamin individualistic and not share?

In other words, if your widlest corrective policies were enacted and somehow worked to 100% effectiveness, would people change their behaviour, or, rationalize that with stable population growth, they could consume more?

kelmer May 15th, 2008 3:18 pm

Misanthropy is noble.
Humans started losing their harmony with the planet when they began hunting and animal sacrifice. As soon as they picked up tools and use it for violence, they began the steep decline.

Wolves and tigers dont need tools to hunt-and you’ll notice they dont have any of the behavioural problems as humans(pleasure in sadism, etc).

Har Davids May 15th, 2008 3:18 pm

It would be great if there weren’t so many of us, especially for the rest of the animal kingdom of which we are part. But as long as regilious and political institutions think breeding is like an obligation, nature will have to take it’s course: disease, war, hunger etc. will take care of us.

dubet May 15th, 2008 3:20 pm

it’s not the numbers, per se, although enacting a negative birthrate is a good idea…it’s the monkeyish ‘busy’ behavior…humans have too much energy and ego and too little brain…this is where the fantasies of education, economy, jobs and industry arise, and combine to remove us from our natural cooperative interaction with the planet and other living things…instead of simply living as animals and accepting the minimal resources necessary, we appear to be unable to keep from using more than necessary, and that means someone else’s, which we get by cheating, stealing or killing…unless that changes, we’re all dead and gone…we are incapable of managing complexity, and it will be our undoing…

kloro May 15th, 2008 3:25 pm

our basic resource is energy. go nuclear!

revengegirl May 15th, 2008 3:38 pm

Of the 6.6+ billion humans living on planet Earth, over one billion live in slums. This means they live in a cardboard box with a dirt floor, no electircity or plumbing and chronic food and water shortages.

I think that the American woman who just had her 18th child should visit the slums of India, South America or Africa before she has her next child, then re-examine what true Christian sacrifice means (and make a reality show out of that!). If only the generosity and sacrifice of Americans could extend to the people of poverty stricken countries who would welcome family planning, but Bush & Co. has cut funding, and cut them out of the loop for “moral” (political) reasons, and left them to back ally abortions. Thus, many poor women are left with no way to feed their children except prostitution.

hikerwoman May 15th, 2008 3:41 pm

The cause of the recent food shortages is partly due to Big Agribusiness doing its best to take over the global food supply. So, countries that, for thousands of years, have been basically growing their own food sufficient to feed their populations, are no longer able to do so. Their farmers simply cannot compete economically with world agribusiness and are being forced off their farms. There are reports of farmers in India commiting suicide because they are no long able to even feed their families. Companies like Monsanto will not even allow them to harvest seeds for the next planting. This situation will only get worse when it eventually becomes economically untenable to fly food great distances around the world because of the price of oil which can only keep going up in the longer term as the supply diminishes. The solution is to pursue policies which encourage a country’s farmers to produce food in that country. Food (such as varieties of rice and corn) that have been adapted over centuries to local growing conditions. Also it is important to encourage as wide a variety of types of food as possible to prevent a one-variety crop being wiped out by disease (as happened in Ireland with the potato crop). Instead varieties are being whittled down to fewer and fewer varieties.

This is not to say that increasing populations won’t put a strain on local food supplies but at least the local food supplies will be there. At the moment they are disappearing at a fast pace.

hellodarling May 15th, 2008 3:46 pm

The govt. should give financial incentives for people who make sacrifices such as NOT having kids, NOT driving a car, etc.

As it stands, people who choose not to do these things get NO THANKS from anybody. this naturally deters people from going that direction in life.

Eric J-D May 15th, 2008 3:56 pm

I applaud Johann Hari for wading into a notoriously difficult and often (deservingly) controversial subject. As a number of the responses (posted on this very website) to the article on the Haitian food crisis attest, Malthusian arguments and solutions are often the first ones to be sounded whenever the topic of world hunger arises.

Hari certainly makes a noncontroversial point that there is likely a limit to the number of human beings the earth can bear. One can quibble about what that figure might be, but one can hardly deny that there is very likely some kind of upper limit past which life (as it is presently lived) will become unsustainable.

That parenthetical phrase is pretty crucial, because it gets us to the real crux of the issue. Life as it is presently lived (say, in the United States) is sustainable at present in large part because it is not globalized. In fact, it cannot be so and be sustainable. If such a lifestyle were to be globalized it would radically reduce the number of human beings Mother Earth could bear, but something else would happen as well: the style of life would no longer be possible because the lifestyle of the average U.S. consumer in fact requires a fairly large population of people who live in comparative misery in order to supply us with cheap goods, to perform dangerous and health-endangering work, etc. This is, to put it mildly, the Malthusian’s dirty little secret.

So, whenever the population question comes up the question that ought to come up almost immediately is the issue of lifestyle sustainability. Unfortunately, in my experience, that almost never happens.

The earth could almost certainly support 10 billion people if there were significant reductions in our (I mean those of us in what is often called the first world or affluent nations) manner of living. This is all theoretical obviously (since I don’t see people in the affluent nations doing this), but it would possible given substantial changes in our consumption patterns, dependence on complex technology, and so on. Of course, this would have a tremendous impact on the world economy (it would undergo severe deflation) and it would no doubt result in a variety of unforeseen harms. But if the present levels of first-world global resource extraction and over-consumption could somehow be radically reduced, I think we could carry 10 billion human beings without all the disastrous problems the Malthusians predict (since they are alway working within a framework that sees no change in consumption patterns or present global inequalities).

Sadly, however, it often appears easier to point to things like birthrate and ignore the fact that half the world’s present population is getting by on about $2.00 per day. The mantra of the Malthusians would appear to be: “If only there were fewer of these $2.00 a day consumers and if only they could be made to have fewer babies.”

Peskywolverine May 15th, 2008 3:56 pm

Are any predictions of the future world’s population valid? Shucks, what happens if science finds a way to extend our lives 100,200 years to these estimates?

What measures (or mismeasures) are valid (invalid) for assessing the “too many people” argument? Do “we” treat it as a “game” to see just how many people are possible before the “tipping point” is reached? Is our only myopic vision of a future world one populated by 10, 100, 1000 billion people along with holographic and interactive nature?

Among the billions teetering on the threshold of living or dying on a daily basisis overpopulation even a question to ask (without acting upon our overconsumption first)?

Upon reading the article provided by Merwan’s link, is it her choice or her (religious) duty to continue to give birth (the record number of births for one woman is nearly 70)? Dictates of a partriarchial “system” (most religions)?

Are completely independent women a threat to men? If men are not “needed” (there are always sperm banks)and women are assured (until technology permits men to give birth)that the child is theirs (until recently men did not know with certainty), where does that leave men (beyond superfluous)? Extinct?

A frequent proclamation heard/read is “We are not animals!” (then what are we? Ahhhh). This proclamation has at its root, the disconnect from the natural world and an unspoken justification for wiping out other life forms without a passing thought (as well as our own species by declaring them only animals or worse).

forextrader May 15th, 2008 3:58 pm

I reject the Malthusian notion that the world is overpopulated. The real problem is that the world’s population is maldistributed.

ticonderoga May 15th, 2008 3:59 pm

This is a many-faceted problem, although the writer certainly has a point when she blames overpopulation, and states that feminism and allowing women to control their own bodies will be at least part of the solution. And, yeah, religious injunctions against birth control should be dumped.

But there’s also the following:

1. unevenly distributed wealth (and food).

2. dependence on fossil fuels.

3. dependence on eating cows (Americans are just as addicted to this as they are to fossil fuels).

4. corporate greed.

5. corporate control of politics.

6. the love of war (and we do love war; we idolize it, we glorify it, and we rename it as patriotism.

7. globalization, which is a subset of corporate greed.

8. corrupt politicians, which is another subset of corporate greed.

Eric J-D May 15th, 2008 4:10 pm

Well said, ticonderoga and forextrader.

And cheers to revengegirl as well.

I admit that I love children (my own child and those of my friends and family) but I admit that whenever I hear about the birth of another American there’s always a feeling of sadness mixed in with the joy at seeing a friend’s new child. And it has everything to do with our lifestyle and what it requires, not with some antipathy towards kids.

Our way of life (those of us living in the affluent nations)–my way of life–requires the immiseration of huge numbers of our fellow human beings to be possible. Nothing justifies this. It is, or ought to be, an outrage.

thorn3505 May 15th, 2008 4:15 pm

When I was a kid, the oceans were “limitless”. Paying for a bottle of water was a strange concept. And I didn’t have mixed feelings every time there was a new war or natural disaster.

Yes, we can (and will) change our standard of living to make room for more people. Every other living thing on the planet is also making this accommodation as the number of people continue to grow. To the extent that there are only a few thousand individuals left of many species.

Population control is a political “hot potato”. No one wants to touch it, not even the enlightened Al Gore. Maybe when we reach the density of China our government will feel the need to act. If everyone was aware of the problem, there would actually be no need for government restrictions. The restriction only impacts the people who are socially irresponsible.

In the meantime, it is up to us, one by one, to avoid conspicuous consumption, keep our reproductive urges in check, recycle, eat low on the food chain, drive conservatively, turn off the water while brushing! Remember, small is beautiful.

And more importantly, send in that contribution to Planned Parenthood, teach your children well, and hope for the best.

jjohnjj May 15th, 2008 4:36 pm

Overpopulation was not a touchy subject back in the 1970’s after Paul R. Erlich wrote The Population Bomb.

However the “Green Revolution” in agriculture averted the famines he predicted, and the threat of overpopulation was dismissed in the popular imagination.

However, humanity only got to 6.6 billion by the prodigious consumption of fossil energy. Our current population is unsustainable.

So why is it a “touchy subject” today? I blame religious fundamentalists: Catholic, Protestant, Moslem, Jew and Hindu… all of ‘em.

They believe that large families are just “natural”, a God-given right, and even a duty. Abortion is out of the question, and they believe that contraception of any sort leads directly to “recreational sex” which leads straight to hell.

Church hierarchies, of course, want the next generation of the faithful to be larger than the last.

Then there are the racial fanatics. The Soviet Union promoted large families among it’s Russian citizens to keep up with the birthrate of it’s Asiatic subjects. There are similar feelings among anti-immigrant groups here in America.

These people have gained way too much influence in government and the media - so all we’ve heard about for the last thirty years is how the Chinese government punished parents who dared to have a second child. The Bush Regime even cut funding to African AIDS prevention programs that advocated use of condoms!

There’s no rational way to deal with the fundies, but to young people who have yet to start their own families I like to put it this way:

What would life be like today, if our grandmothers and mothers had stopped after two children?

I can’t think of a single current social challenge that wouldn’t be gone or greatly diminished, if there were fewer of us competing for space and resources.

So, have one the old-fashioned way and adopt as many more as you can afford.

tommy_slothrop May 15th, 2008 4:39 pm

This is a good article. While it is undeniably true that the population issue needs to be addressed, there are very few things more offensive than Americans telling people that they have to quit having kids so that they can continue to live the “American way of life.”

There are 2 interdependent issues, overconsumption and overpopulation.

Erynn May 15th, 2008 4:47 pm

How about “you can have as many children as you like — as long as they’re adopted.”

Feminism is a huge part of solving this problem, as is appropriate technology for “first world” nations. Of course, most people don’t want to give up any of their luxuries, and the starvation of billions doesn’t really matter if they’re not staring us in the face. Those homeless, starving people in our own cities? Not really human, right?

*sigh*

JBPM May 15th, 2008 5:13 pm

Daniel David is spot on when he talks about men needing to get vasectomies. Unfortunately, the guys I’ve encountered who need them the most (e.g., an 18-year old with three children by two different women, whose goal in life is, in his own words, to “knock up as many bitches as he can”) are the least likely to get them. Feminism would be a valuable response to overpopulation, and not just for the reasons the author suggests; we also need it to undo the stupid idea of masculinity that equates creating thousands of un-loved and un-needed kids with being a “real man.”

Critiques of overpopulation are welcome and necessary, but I think dismissing it out of hand is absurd. Of course overpopulation is a real issue. To ignore humanity’s overshoot of the Earth’s carrying capacity on the grounds that some folks who discuss it do so for racist reasons or to blame someone else for their overconsumption is to practice guilt by association and to prefer ideology to reality (sound familiar?) Our current levels of consumption are already unsustainable, and that’s with only a fraction of the total consuming like there’s no tomorrow; imagine how bad that will get when everyone wants to consume like crazy.

JBPM May 15th, 2008 5:17 pm

jjohnjj said, “So, have one the old-fashioned way and adopt as many more as you can afford.”

Amen, amen, amen. This is precisely the plan my wife and I have undertaken. As an adoptee myself, I’ve always been infuriated by the people who need to churn out 10 kids or pay $100,000 for fertility treatments when there are literally tends of thousands of kids out there right now who are dying to have families of their own. As usual, though, stupid egocentricity and unexamined life trump actually caring about children and the world at large.

The older I get, the more I think humanity deserves everything it has coming to it. With Uncle Sam leading the way to Mother Nature’s final ass-kicking.

cpotts18 May 15th, 2008 5:31 pm

This kind of talk makes me fear the extremes of the environmental movement. Anytime someone suggests using the government for any kind of population control, I immediately see diaster.

If the government told me I had to get a vasectomy I’d hold onto my junk harder than Cheney held on to his Halliburton stock. That kind of policy is completely unacceptable.

Although I agree that we should collectively have less children in order to avoid reaching terminal saturation, using the government to do it would certainly raise personal libery issues and acting like the totalitarian Chinese would certainly lead to blowback.

Think globally, act locally. Cliche phrase, but its the only possible way to have an impact. Personally, I think that the Earth will control the population by itself… unfortunetly that means many poor people will basically starve to death. Consider yourselves lucky.

Dory135 May 15th, 2008 5:36 pm

I am surprised no one brought up euthanasia of the elderly, mentally ill, and physically disabled as a means of population control.

Recently, a USA government report by a group of “distinguished” physicians created guidelines to prioritize medical treatment of patients during a pandemic or natural disaster when medical resources would be limited.

I cannot honestly say what my opinion on this is, but it appears the report may be another step towards legal euthanasia of the weak who may be perceived as draining resources from the general population.

RoR May 15th, 2008 5:58 pm

You could put everybody on the planet in the USA and they would have a 1/3 of an acre.
Tell me how the planet is overpopulated again?

riddimboy May 15th, 2008 6:01 pm

““The food prices are going up, and everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really [that there are] too many people. It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, nobody knows how to handle it.””

Articles like these find a place in CD !! Well BooHooo Hari .. lets just sweep the mudderfukkers under the carpet and they will vanish. That way they can make more space for the only real people who have a right to inhabit the planet - White Westerners. What do you think ? Brilliant isnt it ? Im sure our great Prince Phillip would also rejoice at this and the Queen will bless us and probably knight us as well (as long as she doesnt stick that darned sword up my ass).

pangolin May 15th, 2008 6:01 pm

Look Gaia will take care of the population problem all by herself. Right now it looks like she’s shaking off humans like a bad case of fleas.

Anybody silly enough to think that 6.6 billion humans aren’t going to provide a host for pandemic virus strains or bacteria hasn’t had a conversation with a microbiologist. We’ve had some close calls lately but a replay of the 1918 flu virus would collapse some societies.

Assuming we get the nanotech to beat the disease vectors we should also be able to turn off human fertility as needed. Overpopulation is self correcting.

Snow crab May 15th, 2008 6:03 pm

Finally someone nails it.Women in all the developed countries simultaneously cut their birthrate from an average of five kids to two point five the very moment two conditions were met. Number one, women were given control of their own reproduction via the pill and number two there was enough food and sense of security that most of these few children would survive.

My grandparents came from families that averaged ten children, which is the average now in Africa for very much the same reasons, child mortality was high and parents needed to have lots of offspring to ensure that at least a couple would be able to take care of them when they were old. So in three generations two continents have voluntarily cut down their birthrate because two simple conditions were met. That’s good empirical data, should be repeatable.

It’s just a matter of taking giving reproductive rights to women in those places where they don’t have it and getting enough food allocated in places where there isn’t enough now and women will voluntarily have fewer children. It’s not really rocket science and it has already worked.

hamster May 15th, 2008 6:04 pm

The US government should be using its tremendous resources to help educate people in exploding population areas on birth control (i.e. the opposite of what the pope and the bush administration are doing), as well as taking the lead in the UN and other world organizations to encourage people worldwide to control their own population. Whether these people are rich or poor is another subject. We have to stabilize or reduce the population as well as distribute resources more fairly.

TreeFitz May 15th, 2008 6:14 pm

The elderly, mentally ill and physically disabled are not draining any more resources from the general population than you are, Dory135. Why should we euthanize a mentally ill person to save on some resource drainage . . . when we could euthanize you instead?

I know you say you don’t know what you opinion is on euthanizing ‘the elderly, mentally ill and physically disabled’ but the simple fact that you avoid condemning it is chilling.

Guess what, Dory? I have a mental health disability. And I have paraplegic friends. Would you smoke us out to make sure you get enough drinking water?

Overpopulation is a problem but surely the answer does not in solutions that exterminate people who are already here. Surely all humans already here have a right to life?

I would like to see campaigns to limit children. What I am about to say is going to sound very ethnocentric, and might be perceived as racist to some (I am a Caucasian but, as I already mentioned, a defective onem, if Dorty’s euthanisia idea is implemented, hey, I’m toast).

I don’t know too many white, middle class families that have lots of children nowadays. Growing up in the fifties and sixties amidsts Catholics, lots of families in my neighborhood had six, seven, eight kid. You don’t see much of that anymore in white America. Sure, every once in awhile you read about someone having a crazy number of kids but in my white middle class world, large families are rarer and rarer.

One thing I’m curious about is the seeming (I can’t read everything, I can’t follow every issue closely) paradox that the poorest peoples of the world are the ones having lots and lots of babies. Is there some connection to their poverty and their desire to have lots of kids?

OldBadgertoo May 15th, 2008 6:19 pm

Meanwhile the West prepares its own solution - starve the children of lesser, non capitalist gods to death by encouraging the cultivation of plants for biofuel rather than food. Why waste it on those who can’t speak English, aren’t white, don’t worship the “Judeo-Christian” deity and don’t drive 4×4s. Why, they are hardly human! They don’t deserve to benefit from their own resources.

By the way, I note that the Western media are now rubbing in that China’s One Child policy makes the losses of the recent earthquake all the harder to bear. This represents an implicit criticism of the Chinese for imposing so “unnatural” a law - yet it was a necessary and far-seeing one and one which addresses directly a problem the West is prepared to ignore. Sinophobia is, of course, the inevitable response to China’s new confidence and power - but this illustrates the typical mindset of “Cut me own throat” western capitalism.

WTF May 15th, 2008 6:27 pm

jjohnn wrote: However, humanity only got to 6.6 billion by the prodigious consumption of fossil energy.

I do not agree with that. The most industrialized economies are those with the lowest birth rates. It may be argued that the industrialized nations are using developing nations as sources of slave labor, and it is the industrialized nation’s consumptive habits that require more slaves.

Nevertheless, I heard on NPR yesterday an interview with a Palestinian woman who gave birth to her first child the night before “The Catastrophe”, and subsequently fled what is now Israel. Since then, she has given birth to 17 more children, and has over 100 grand children. This I see as the problem, not industrialized economies.

jclevjr May 15th, 2008 6:28 pm

Somebody needs to hire the great Bush PR machine to hype something positive. For once. Human population already exceeds the earth’s capacity to sustain it. All we have to do to bring about population reduction is educate women. Except for immigration, the populations of North America and Europe are already declining. Russia, without much immigration, is already blessed with a declining population, while its government does everything it can to hype a higher birth rate so it can have a growing population to support the economy. Utterly misguided. Full employment without population growth is not a problem we couldn’t readily solve. All we need to do is… well, a grand PR effort sure would help.

WTF May 15th, 2008 6:35 pm

RoR wrote: You could put everybody on the planet in the USA and they would have a 1/3 of an acre. Tell me how the planet is overpopulated again?

Either RoR is a troll, or does not read newspapers. But let’s take it easy on him/her.

Overpopulation of any species leads to 2 things:
1) A deleterious alteration of the environment in which the species lives;
2) Competition between members of the species for dwindling resources.

In the news today, we can read about:
1) Climate change due to human activity;
2) Wars in the Middle-East (and elsewhere) over oil. And soon to be water and food.

See the connection?

riddimboy May 15th, 2008 6:36 pm

OldBadgertoo thanks for seeing the racism involved in damning developing countries for their population levels. How can we conveniently ignore the fact that WE created the current climate change based on OUR consumption and we continue to do so disproportionately.

We continue to produce 75% of carbon emissions that destroys the planet while comprising of just 25% of its population. And yet we have the temerity to question third world population levels. We need to pull our heads out of our asses and take a deep breath.

Dory135 May 15th, 2008 6:40 pm

Whoa, TreeFitz!

The “euthanasia idea” is not mine. It has been around a long time, and I fear our government is considering it.

I am 62 years old and physically disabled. I may soon be a candidate for a heart transplant.

However, if there were a match available, and a young person with a family needed it, I would gladly choose death.

That is why I do not have a firm opinion on the matter.

I have relatives, who are either elderly or have disabilities, whom I love dearly.

And there are many disabled and elderly who contribute mightily to society, like Stephen Hawking and Noam Chomsky.

I merely wanted to bring this topic to CD readers’ attention because I believe this issue will need to be acknowledged and addressed very soon. It is already out there…

dara May 15th, 2008 6:41 pm

I’m in the camp that thinks the world is seriously overpopulated right now and we are in this mess partially due to religion, racism, and the existence of oil. I’d be fine with Chinese style reproductive control right here in the US, but I’m in the minority I realize. But why all these references to China? It is true that they are the largest country in the world to get their fertility under control, but they aren’t the only ones. The CIA (in about their only useful purpose I can see) gathers the important data, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate. In this table the following countries had a TFR (total fertility rate = the projected number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime given the birth statistics of that year) that was larger than 2 in 2000 but less than 2 in 2008. Maybe one of these countries is doing something we can emulate in the US without upsetting too many.

Country 2000/2008 TFR (some smaller countries not mentioned)
Iran 2.2 1.71
Tunisia 2.04 1.73
Algeria 2.8 1.82
Mauritius 2.02 1.83
Brazil 2.13 1.86
Vietnam 2.53 1.86
Lebanon 2.08 1.87
Turkey 2.16 1.87
Kazakhstan 2.03 1.88
Burma 2.37 1.92
Uruguay 2.37 1.94
Brunei 2.47 1.94
Chile 2.2 1.95

Can you imagine if we had made an overture to Iran to help with culturally sensitive reproductive control in post war Afghanistan? Maybe then that countries rate wouldn’t be 6.58 (up from 5.87) and now the 5th worst country in the world.

I know a bit about Iran’s situation since my father is from there - I believe they do it almost exclusively with propaganda (billboards saying 2 is enough and references made in religious gatherings) and with mandatory training (those who get married must take some type of course in birth control, see http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update4ss.htm).

So never accept a false dichotomy of doing nothing (or worse) as we mostly do in the US and doing exactly what China does.

elmysterio May 15th, 2008 6:55 pm

I seem to recall an old movie where people on the 30th birthday were ‘liquidated’ in order to control population… what was that called again???

elmysterio May 15th, 2008 6:59 pm

Part of the problem is “modern medicine”… we’ve been fighting against Gaia’s natural methods of population control and now have eradicated many of her diseases, causing many people to live much longer than they normally would. We fear death so much that there’s no end to the lengths we’ll go to to stay alive. I know one guy that’s had 5 heart surgeries over the years. Don’t cha think that he’s SUPPOSED to die perhaps?

John Sullivan May 15th, 2008 7:07 pm

Of course there are too many people, including in the USA! Isn’t that obvious? It is to the homeless. Because it was overpopulation that drove the cost of housing to such obscene levels. Too much demand relative to supply enables rent gouging. Meanwhile, developers are running out of land to “develop.” Man begets, land does not beget.

WTF May 15th, 2008 7:12 pm

elmysterio asked: I seem to recall an old movie where people on the 30th birthday were ‘liquidated’ in order to control population… what was that called again???

“Logan’s Run”. Another good one is “Soylent Green”. “ZPG” missed the mark.

dara May 15th, 2008 7:23 pm

elmysterio,

The name of the movie is Logan’s Run (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/).

Funny thing about the math of population growth that a lot of people miss. The expansion of life expectancy from say 40 years to 80 years doubles the population once, a TFR of 2.58 (current world TFR) will double the population roughly every 3.5 generations. Exponential growth is way worse than a one-time only doubling.

Note: (0.95*2.58/2)^3.5 = 2.04, with 5% of the the births not making it to fertility themselves due to mortality (an estimate)

bhaati May 15th, 2008 7:33 pm

i have to bite my tongue when i am around american women. i think women are desperate for creation and think the only option is giving birth. i recently listened to an anti capitalist lesbian describe choosing sperm for her pregnancy. “you can see all the pictures from this one guy and how they all looked alike” it was absurd. its a challenge to remain grounded in spirit in those moments. i gotta say the latino women can make me crazy with the reproduction levels.

Earl Simmins May 15th, 2008 7:47 pm

Soylent Green may be the answer after all!

KenAdams May 15th, 2008 7:53 pm

I strongly believe that we need to limit the world’s population and get it below the 6.7 billion that we are at now.

What is often missed in simplified arguments about how to get there is the fact that not only the number of children you have matters, but also ‘when’ you have them.

My fiancee and I are both professionals and plan to have two children later in life.

The later a couple has children the slower the population will grow as the oldest members die, and two children per couple can still lead to a population decline if everyone has them late enough in life. Instead of 4-5 generations per century (childbearing at 20-25 yrs old), how about 2.6-3.0 generations per century (childbearing at 33-38 yrs old).

Think outside the sandbox!

Douglas Barnes May 15th, 2008 7:57 pm

“If environmentalism sounds — or is — misanthropic, we will lose the argument. Most human beings will never think the world would be better off without us. Nobody thinks they are the surplus human being who should not have been born. These strident arguments hand a huge gift to the anti-greens, who always said we were anti-human beneath the surface.”

Misanthropy is not being concerned about the fate of the human race in a world where people consume more than the planet can sustainably give. To be concerned about this is expressing love for Homo sapiens.

Misanthropoy is promoting asinine rot like the following from the late and in no way great Dr. Julian Simon: “We have in our hands now… the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.“

If we take the current population p as 6 billion (a little low), the rate of growth r at 1.4% per year, and take the number of years n at Simon’s 7,000,000,000, then we get the population P in 7 billion years P=p(1+r)[exponent]n, or 6,000,000,000×1.14e7,000,000,000. (Can’t do superscript in this forum, sorry.)

That is not infinity, but it’s pretty damn close. It is many orders of magnitude larger than the total number of elementary particles in the entire universe. To try to tell people his message of “Go about your business, everything will be fine” is to encourage an ugly population correction for mankind and is, in my opinion, misanthropic.

macroscopian view May 15th, 2008 8:05 pm

Speaking only of the good old USA, I have long argued that we are overpopulated. I cringe when I see pregnant women. What are they thinking? Surely not of the child’s future. I believe most prospective parents are dreaming of our brief happy past (the 1950s). Or Sitcom Land. Norman Rockwellia. That is not the real world. The kids in the apartments up the street from me have no place to play outside except for the street. Single family houses are being razed to make way for “townhouses” and other multi-unit buildings. Skinny houses are being shoehorned into the spaces between houses. Yards are luxuries. Growth is considered a given, and, in my area, the idea is to manage it such that we don’t build houses on what’s left of the local farmland. It’s not really working. It’s just slowing the process.

RoR, who gets Death Valley? Do we cut down all the forests to give everyone their 1/3 acre? Does this notion include the infrastructure as it is, or are some of us getting a section of freeway as our plot? I doubt your mathematics, but my point is that not all of the planet is habitable, even if you stretch the parameters of comfort.

All this talk of whether there’s enough food to go around– so we ration it, and everyone gets equal shares and we keep breeding exponentially, as long as there’s a drop of drinking water and a crumb for each… Is this a world you want to live in? Is this the world you envision for your grandchildren? Yes, we could all eat less and share it better. And get rid of all those cows we won’t need anymore when we’re all vegan, like some of you preach. That’ll make more room. Food is not the only problem. Crowding causes social friction. People tend not to behave nicely in crowds. And crowds easily turn into mobs.

There are plenty of children to go around. It’s immoral to add to the population while there are children without families. If all the children of the U.S. had families and homes, then it might be acceptable to consider adding new ones. But babies are cute, fun to dress up in cute baby costumes, and one is fun but we need one of the each sex to complete the set… no matter how many times we have to try. And how could you possibly love a child who wasn’t your own flesh and blood? Anyone who thinks that way probably shouldn’t be allowed near any child.

No more infertility treatments. Besides, there are all those forsaken leftover embryos no one knows what to do with. Adopt them out? Harvest them for stem cells? Dither until we run out of power to keep them frozen?

No more income tax deductions for more than two children. Or maybe only one.

No more cutesy baby clothes and accessories to make mommies and grandmas(and some daddies and grandpas)want to play dress up. In America, too many children are conceived as toys. We like puppies and kittens and babies. The awww… factor. But we throw away grown dogs and cats and teenagers. Not all of them, but way too many.

I contend that in the U.S., and perhaps elsewhere, we do not truly value children, we value the idea of children. Reality is inconvenient.

rtdrury May 15th, 2008 8:29 pm

It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, nobody knows how to handle it.

Capitalists will not talk honestly in public forums about anything. So embarassment and ignorance are side issues really.

ACC May 15th, 2008 8:38 pm

Seriously overpopulated world. Seriously mismanaged resources. Seriously greedy First World. Seriously undereducated and underfed Third World. At least China recognizes the problem and tries to do something about it. You may revile their methods as inhuman, but how inhuman is it to watch your little baby die for lack of food? How inhumane is it to have child after child when you have no credible means of providing sustenance for those children? This is a question directed to all people, in all countries.

Wouldn’t be surprised to see euthanasia. I’m a person with a mental illness — bipolar mood disorder, quite severe even with meds. Some days even with meds I’m quite non compos mentis. I had myself sterilized when I was 22, and between the ages of 17 and 22 I stayed on the pill religiously. The disease is very widespread in my family. Then I fell in love with a man who did not want children and we have been together ever since. I figure I have done my part not to contribute to the overpopulation, but I do fear someone deciding that my being an artist is not compensation enough for my being a tad batshit so when they come for the weak and the infirm I’ll be the first to go. Not fair. I’m very creative. Of course, when the going gets tough, the arts are one of the first things to go. An engineer, a doctor, a nurse, or hell, a mother with a child, can use my space more valuably than I. It’s an easy path to start on.

The stigmatism of being mentally ill in this country defies belief. You should see the look on people’s faces when they find out…

whatfools May 15th, 2008 8:54 pm

There certainly are many comments here.
As for too many people; history reads that nature (or the Gods) will take care of that. The Great Flood in the Saga of Gilgamesh was sent by the Gods because the people were too ‘noisy’ (too many) and not by any disobedience.
Even Dr. Seuss’ Thidwick had a method for shedding his overload.

Bobbi Dykema Katsanis May 15th, 2008 9:03 pm

We are just one of millions of animal species on this planet. And when the populations of other animals exceed the carrying capacity of their environment, they crash - through starvation and disease. One could argue that this is already beginning to happen, since the widely publicized famines in Africa in the 1980s. Deer populations don’t have the skills to see their doom coming - but we do, and we have the resources to do something about it.

Unfortunately, our intelligent response capability has been crippled by centuries of religious teachings based in a fetishization of the fetus and an Aristotelian understanding of conception. (I’d like to note here that I am a practicing Catholic, albeit an unusual one.) As a nation, we cannot talk rationally about human sexuality and reproduction. And while it is mostly in the developing world that human populations are currently in crash mode, it is in the developed world where the problem of exceeding the environment’s carrying capacity is greatest: we account for 7% of the world’s population but 25% of its resource use, and have polluted or destroyed much of that.

So I ask you: is it more compassionate to look the other way on the population problem and let starvation and disease deaths continue to accelerate, or do we use our God-given brains and respond intelligently???

And Daniel David May, a shout-out to you to get the men’s responsible conception movement going. Way overdue.

MiMiCcS May 15th, 2008 9:33 pm

Pope John Paul I in 1978, an ultra-liberal, was planning to do just that (allow contraception), but our globalist elite had him assasinated after just 33 days of being voted in (a magic number), and this gave us the ultra conservative John Paul II who stayed with the conservative tradition banning contraceptives. You see, we want to keep the 3rd world poor so we can dominate it. We have other ways to reduce population there, and have been doing so for over 60 years, but the fertility rates in the 3rd world needs to come down, by choice, and the Vaticans position is simply criminal.

So we have 6.6 billion people. The population fear mongerers have always said we can not feed so many people. Thomas Malthus said so when the world population was 60o million, the Eugenics movement in the 20’s said we could not sustain 2 billion people, now we have 6.6 billion and people say the same thing, yet from the looks of things, people are eating better than ever, until the recent man induced shortages.

As for the US population growth, it is almost entirely immigration driven over the past 35 years. Our Fertility rates have been at replacement level (2.1) or below for much of the last 35 years, as has much of the developed world. China is at 1.7 with a one child policy, which is causing an issue, with young men outnumbering young women, since female babies are aborted at higher rates due to the preference for males.

Science and Technology, with innovation, and governments who serve their peoples interests, and do not destroy them, are the solutions for the future. The food shortages of today are largely a creation of the neo-malthusian WTO and Free Trade Hoax forced on nations to make them dependent of food imports, and gave the agribusiness cartels control over the food supply. Breaking up the cartels and scrapping WTO would go a long way to solving any food shortages today.

Man made Global Warming is another hoax forced on us to support depopulation and reduced consumption (lower standard of living). In the 70’s, people were talking about another ice age. Sure, there has been global warming the past 30 years, but the evidence that it is man made, or that it is an imminent problem, is open to debate. Maybe if they could predict tommorows weather, we could have a bit more confidence in those who wish to predict the weather in 30 years.

If Man worries about energy for the future and Global Warming impact, why have we no Manhattan project developing cleaner alternatives. If Food and Water is an issue, why have we no similar projects to address this. Unlike animals, we have intelligence and the ability to innovate and develop the planet in a way that works for Mother nature, and also Man (including those apple eating baby factories named Eve).

Instead, the neo-malthusians look for justifications to reduce the planets population to 600 million, which will enable them to develop the master race. The depopulation they have in mind is to clean up the genetic pollution, and eliminate inferior races. They recognize that we can support many more people, but say, “why should we turn the planet into a feed lot”, supporting these inferior races.

People seem to think we are aliens to the planet, and not part of nature. We certainly are part of nature (unless the alien conspiracy is true). When the deer population exceeds natures capacity to feed them, nature determines the deers fate. So it will be on Earth. Let Mother Nature decide how to handle us if we become too much of a burden. If she has a fever, she will deal with the virus giving her the fever.

But man should not play God and decide who lives and dies, and that is exactly what is going on right now. If man is to decide to depopulate the world, let those with the biggest bank accounts and their families be selected for depopulation first. Start with the top 6 million. Then and only then will I go along with it. The world might be a better place then.
But letting the top 6 million picking the 6 billion who need to go is not an option I can accept.

John Sullivan May 15th, 2008 9:42 pm

Consider the deer studies of Dr. Hans Selye, who found that deer get sick from stress when their populations get too dense, even if there is enough food and water for all.

WTF May 15th, 2008 9:48 pm

@macroscopian view May 15th, 2008 8:05 pm

Hear, hear!

sojrnrz May 15th, 2008 9:56 pm

I am 62 years old this year. I remember in elementary school through college in discussion over the problems of a growing global population and our lack of self-control. At times it was as simple as “stressed rats will eat their pups,” or “in India and China you can see people die on the streets and people just walk by - it’s like water, if there’s a lot of anything, it is less valued.” Simple ideas that can’t seem to register with our self-important, arrogant species. So, we take the whole planet down with us!

TheProf May 15th, 2008 9:58 pm

A single bacterium, such as E.Coli, placed at the centre of a nutrient petri dish will divide every 20 minutes. Prior to its final doubling it occupies only 50% of available real estate and nutrient.

The human population at some time will be at the point where only a single population doubling remains before resources are depleted and a significant die back occurs. The only uncertainty is whether we have already passed that point.

misanthrope May 15th, 2008 10:12 pm

I think we’re missing another important factor in the current crisis, the beginning of “The Long Emergency” and that is Peak Oil. Here’s is a very fact-filled link that gives a broad perspective on the energy problem that is exacerbating the food crisis:

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay08/cycle-depletion.html

Big_Money May 15th, 2008 10:13 pm

Wow, the word “education” appears no-where on this page. Education is a humane, civilized way to curb population growth. Especially educating women. Educated societies and educated individuals tend to produce a sane number of offspring. Education about birth control? EDUCATION? Come on, 66 comments and not one about education? Just sterilization and government intervention?

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_rate

“Developed countries usually have a much lower fertility rate due to greater wealth, education, and urbanization. Mortality rates are low, birth control is understood and easily accessible, and costs are often deemed very high because of education, clothing, feeding, and social amenities.”

Japan is a country with a shrinking population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan
it’s painful, but it’s being done, without any use of force or coersion. Here in Canada, we “fixed” the problem of a shrinking population by bringing lots of people from other countries.

If we could see to it that everyone, especially women, got a good education, and not just about how to use a condom, there would be a lot more hope, and not just for solving the problem of overpopulation.

Education is a human right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights

tweenwaters May 15th, 2008 10:28 pm

Fantastic responses! Congrats, but ….
When I attended a grad seminar on anthropology cum ecology, I decided to do a paper on voluntary dieing. People who appreciated the fact that they no longer contributed to the common well-being…simply dropped out of the trek and sat beside the path (awaiting the polar bear, as it were). Makes a lot of sense. Some of our species “have been there, done that”. Maybe it will happen again, and more frequently. Hope so. Doubt that it will be “enough”.
Yes, I believe in “social composting”: biological systems must break down in order to grow.
Yes, I had a vasectomy after fathering two children.
Yes, I declared myself to be a conscientious objector to military “duty” and have tried to live my personal “moral equivalent to war”.
No, I cannot afford to invest in all of the “green” alternatives to a certain life style.
Yes, I know it’s about time to die.
So, I am building my future on a sandbar, merely 10 feet above the highest tide line.
No, I don´t have any grandchildren, but I would love to!
No, I cannot look forward to any retirement pension to speak of.
No, I no longer live in the United States.
No, I do not think that any past or present candidate for the presidency is going to make a great difference.
Yes, I am in love.
Yes, I am not at all bad with gardens and get along quite well with my “indigenous” neighbors.
Have a good day!

itsaNaziWorldOrder May 15th, 2008 10:30 pm

I think that there is definitely too much IGNORANCE!

Human beings are herbivores. That we continue to ignore the defining significance of this fact justifies every stupidity.

Practicing human herbivores require 1/50th as much land as the Western style meat-eater. Think about it. All this environmental decline rests upon one gargantuan fallacy. That’s it! It really is and there is no way around this.

Overpopulation is not what you think… and like the orchestrated ‘food shortages’, your perceptions are being radically manipulated by junk science peddlers!

But, the end result is always a stampede to justify genocide and more and more police state control. The real answer resides in less militaristic controls and more engagement with ecological reality, beginning with our human ecology.

http://allinharmony.org

So no, we do not need to prune our population, but we do need to reign in our stupidity, especially in regard to human ecology.

“When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores. “

William C. Roberts, M.D., editor, American Journal of Cardiology

JOSO May 15th, 2008 11:30 pm

I lived in Singapore, a small city state of around 3 million population, in the 70s, when they instituted a whole series of programs designed to make their nation prosperous and sustainable. As a model on a small scale for the world, their approach, and its successes, should be studied by those looking at how our world might address the population challenge.

One aspect of this that is relevant to this article was their new government’s awareness that, as a small geographic area with limited resources, they would have to establish a ‘voluntary’ commitment to limit population growth if they were to have any chance of prospering in the long term. Using a combination of societal education and government policy to establish the idea that two children was fine, and that more was bad for the country’s future prosperity and viability, they quickly succeeded in gaining almost complete acceptance for this seemingly impossible proposition. Policies included making education, medical care, and other social supports for child raising free. However, if a third child was added to the family, the family would be responsible for all costs of raising the child, and would not find a place in local schools for the child or in child care facilities. Very quickly, both with the context that population growth would harm the country’s prosperity in the long run, and making it costly and troublesome for raising and educating additional children, it became an accepted part of families in Singapore that two was the right number. I did not find anyone I met while there who thought it anything but a reasonable and necessary part of their contribution to building a sustainable future.

While this is only a relatively tiny portion of our world, they have demonstrated that this can work. It was on the basis of Singapore’s success that China has attempted to reduce population by instituting their restriction to one child (a more difficult challenge that has seem some serious human rights abuses). We are rational creatures, and our reason should be appealed to in this time of resource shortages and environmental threat. Whether the right number is one (to bring about population reduction) or two ( to maintain the population), we need to begin figuring out what combination of education and policies can make us, too, accept what is right for our long term prosperity and sustainability. Without a self-conscious effort to educate ourselves and then institute policies that support our conclusions, we are headed at some point for a terrible collapse caused by the unthinking fecundity of our species and our irrational commitment to our “personal freedom of choice” in this matter.