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PART 2

Population
The world’s population went from about 1.7 billion in 1900 to 2.5 in 1950, to nearly 7 billion in 2010. Most of this increase, of course, has been in “developing” countries, suggesting that the term “developing” is less of a euphemism than a misnomer, since a combination of environmental degradation and rapid population growth makes development impossible (Catton, 1982; Kaplan, 2001). It has been said that without fossil fuels the global population must drop to about 2 or 3 billion (Youngquist, 2000, October), although even a number of that size may be questionable. The above figures on arable land indicate that in terms of agriculture alone we would not be able to accommodate the present number of people.

Another calculation about future population can be made by looking more closely at the rise and fall of oil production. The rapid increase in population over the last hundred years is not merely coincident with the rapid increase in oil production. It is the latter that has actually allowed (the word “caused” might be too strong) the former: that is to say, oil has been the main source of energy within industrial society. It is only with abundant oil that a large population is possible. It was industrialization, improved agriculture, improved medicine, the expansion of humanity into the Americas, and so on, that first created the modern rise in population, but it was oil in particular that made it possible for human population to grow as fast as it has been doing (Catton, 1982). When oil production drops to half of its peak amount, world population must also drop by half.

There may be a time lag in the population decline while people manage to get by with less. Any such “bulge” in the middle of the decline curve, however, would not make much difference in the long run. In fact, if we consider that famine is already rampant it is questionable if there will be any spare capacity for such a bulge.

Of course, all of this calculation of population on the basis of oil is largely the converse of the calculation on the basis of arable land, since in industrial society the amount of farm production is mainly a reflection of the amount of available oil.

If we look further into the future, we see an even smaller number for human population, still using previous ratios of oil to population as the basis for our figures. But the world a hundred years from now might not be a mirror image of the world of a hundred years in the past. The general depletion of resources might cause such damage to the structure of society that government, education, and intricate division of labor will no longer exist.

The matter of division of labor might be illustrated by a simple thought-experiment. If we grant that a thousand workers can produce a billion widgets per year, does it then follow that one person stranded on a desert island can produce a million widgets per year? No, of course not. Yet the ratio — one person per million widgets — is the same in both cases. The difference is implied in the words “large scale.” The complexity of division of labor in the modern world is truly staggering: in order to produce almost any of the goods of modern society, there must be very large numbers of people trained in many different roles. These roles must then be fitted together to form interactions of tremendous complexity. In a milieu of social chaos, therefore, what are the chances that the oil industry will be able to use extremely advanced technology to extract the last drops of oil?

Even then we have not factored in war, epidemics, and other aspects of social breakdown. The above-mentioned figure of 2 or 3 billion as a surviving population may be wildly optimistic. In fact, if we assume that agriculture is ultimately unsustainable (Diamond, 1987, May; Ferguson, 2003, July/August; Lee, 1968), we must regard an ultimate global population of 1 million, as existed in 10,000 BCE, as more likely.

Overpopulation is the overwhelming ultimate cause of systemic collapse (Catton, 1982). All of the flash-in-the-pan ideas that are presented as solutions to the modern dilemma — solar power, biofuels, hybrid cars, desalination, permaculture, enormous dams — have value only as desperate attempts to solve an underlying problem that has never been addressed in a more direct manner. American foreign aid has always included only trivial amounts for family planning (Spiedel, Sinding, Gillespie, Maguire, & Neuse, 2009, January); it would seem that the most powerful country in the world has done very little to solve the biggest problem in the world.

The reasons for this evasion of responsibility are many, including the influence of certain religious groups with the misnomer of “pro-life”; left-wing reluctance to point a finger at poor people, immigrants, or particular ethnic groups; right-wing reluctance to lose an ever-expanding source of cheap labor and a growing consumer market; and politicians’ reluctance to lose votes in any direction (Kolankiewicz & Beck, 2001, April).

Overpopulation can always be passed off as somebody else’s problem. It is the fundamental case of what Garrett Hardin calls “the tragedy of the commons” (1968, 1995): although an oversize family may have a vague suspicion that the world will suffer slightly from that fecundity, no family wants to lose out by being the first to back down. Without a central governing body that is both strong and honest, however, the evasion is perpetual, and it is that very lack of strength and honesty that makes traditional democracy an anachronism to some extent.

For all that might be said about their politics and economics, the Chinese have made quite an effort at dealing with excess population growth, but even they have not been entirely successful. Since 1953, the year of the first proper Chinese census and approximately the start of concerns with excessive fertility, the population has gone from 583 million to over 1.3 billion. For that matter, since the official starting of the one-child campaign in 1979 the population has grown by over 300 million (Riley, 2004, June).

Overpopulation, however, is a problem that occurs not only in poor countries. The evidence is also clear in the US:

. . . Mounting traffic congestion; endless disruptive road construction; spreading smog; worsening water pollution and tightening water supplies; disappearing wildlife habitats, farmland, and open spaces; overcrowded schools; overused parks and outdoor recreation facilities; the end of small-town life in communities that until recently had been beyond the city; the impending merging together of separate, unwieldy metropolitan areas into vast megalopolitan miasmas; and the overall deterioration in quality of life and the increasing social tensions of urban dwellers reflected in such phenomena as gated communities and road rage (Kolankiewicz & Beck, 2001, April).
Discussion of overpopulation, however, is the Great Taboo. Politicians will rarely touch the issue. Even the many documents of the United Nations merely sidestep the issue by discussing how to cater to large populations, in spite of the fact that such catering is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

To speak against overpopulation is an exercise in futility. How likely is it that the required massive change in human thinking will ever take place? Even in “developed” countries, to broach the topic of overpopulation is often to invite charges of racism and elitism. And after living in one or two “developing” countries myself, I must say that there seems something both naïve and presumptuous in the common liberal American belief that people in such countries are waiting to be “enlightened” to American ideals. On the contrary, my impression is that inhabitants of poor countries are often quite determined to hang on to their present systems of politics and religion, no matter how archaic and oppressive those systems may seem to outsiders, and would prefer that any proselytizing go in the opposite direction. Indeed, there is the frightful possibility that one reason why the US government gives so little aid to some countries is that the problem of overpopulation there is regarded as hopeless, and any assistance would be just money down the drain (Kaplan, 2001). Instead of dreaming of ways to reduce a population of several billion to a reasonable number overnight, therefore, it might be more sensible to think in terms of the medical system of triage: let us save those who can be saved.

One solution that is sometimes proposed for the dilemma of fossil-fuel decline is a global campaign for the humane implementation of rapid population decline. With all due respect for the attempt to find a satisfying answer to the question of overpopulation, such a proposal would conflict with the available data on the rate of decline in fossil fuels. The annual rate of population decline, in a civilization in which fossil fuels are by far the most important sources of energy, must roughly equal the 3-percent (if not greater) annual rate of fossil-fuel decline.

Unfortunately there is no practical humane means of imposing a similar annual rate of decline on the world’s population. If we allow the loss of petroleum to take its course, a decline of 3 percent would result in a drop in world population to half its present level, i.e. to 3.5 billion, by about the year 2030. The only means, however, would be a rather grim one: famine.

A deliberate global campaign of rapid population decline, even with the immediate implementation of an utterly hypothetical fertility rate of zero, i.e. the implementation of a “zero-child policy,” would have far less dramatic results. The rate of population decline would exactly equal the death rate. This is true by definition: “growth rate” equals “birth rate” minus “death rate”, and we have already postulated that the “birth rate” would be zero. The present death rate is only about 1 percent (CIA, 2010). At such a rate of decline, the global population in the year 2030 would still be more than 5 billion. (With an aging population, the death rate would increase slightly over the two decades, but not significantly.) There would therefore be no means for a program of planned population decline to work before the effects of fossil-fuel depletion take their own toll. Such figures, of course, disregard any other possible catastrophic future events such as famine (the above-mentioned means that is likely to prevail), disease, war, and a thousand other side-effects of societal breakdown.

Like so many other species, humanity expands and consumes until its members starve and die. The basic problem of human life has still never been solved: the imbalance of population and resources. As a result, the competition for survival is intense, and for most people life is just a long stretch of drudgery followed by an ignoble death. It is ironic that birth control, the most important invention in all of human history, has been put into practice in such a desultory manner. There is still no intelligent life on earth.

In view of the general unpopularity of birth-control policies, it can only be said euphemistically that Nature will decide the outcome. It is St. John’s Four Horsemen of war, famine, plague, and death who will signify the future of the industrial world. Nor can we expect people to be overly concerned about good manners: although there are too many variables for civil strife to be entirely predictable, if we look at accounts of large-scale disasters of the past, ranging from the financial to the meteorological, we can see that there is a point at which the looting and lynching begin. In fact, the basic cause of warfare throughout history and prehistory has been, quite simply, a lack of food (Harris, 1989). The survivors of industrial society will have to distance themselves from the carnage.

The need for a successful community to be far removed from urban areas is also a matter of access to the remaining natural resources. With primitive technology, it takes a great deal of land to support human life. What may look like a long stretch of empty wilderness is certainly not empty to the people who are out there picking blueberries or catching fish. That emptiness is not a prerogative or luxury of the summer vacationer. It is an essential ratio of the human world to the non-human.

REFERENCES

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Catton, W. R., Jr. (1982). Overshoot: The ecological basis of revolutionary change. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

CIA. World factbook. (2010). US Government Printing Office. Retrieved from http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook

Diamond, J. (1987, May). The worst mistake in the history of the human race. Discover. Retrieved from http://www.environment.ens.fr/perso/claessen/agriculture/mistake_jared_diamond.pdf

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——, & Pimentel, M. H. (2007). Food, energy, and society. 3rd ed. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press.

Riley, N. E. (2004, June). China’s population: New trends and challenges. Population Reference Bureau. Population Bulletin, 59 (2).

Singer, S. Fred. Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate. (2008). Chicago: The Heartland Institute. Retrieved from http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/22835.pdf

Spiedel, J. J., Sinding, S., Gillespie, D., Maguire, E., & Neuse, M. (2009, January). Making the case for US international family planning assistance. US Agency for International Development. Retrieved from http://www.jhsph.edu/gatesinstitute/_pdf/publications/MakingtheCase.pdf

Starr, C. G. (1991). A history of the ancient world. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

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