Tuesday, May 7, 2013

The Population Bomb Turned Out To Be a Dud


The state of the planet scares me. It really does. I don’t just believe in global climate change—I know it’s real, and my family is trying, in our own small way, to be more or less green and more environmentally responsible.

We recycle. We have a composter. It doesn’t really compost, but I’ll get around to figuring that out one of these times. We use those super-efficient halogen bulbs in all our lamps. We installed energy-saving windows on our house. My wife drives a Prius. I recently installed rainwater-catching barrels to my downspouts. We grow a ton of our own food and just got a couple of chickens for eggs.

But—and it may just be the contrarian in me—the one thing I absolutely refuse to get worked up over is overpopulation. I don’t think it’s a big deal.

People get angry if you say this out loud. Overpopulation is an absolutely sacred shibboleth of the environmental movement. I’ve had people look at me, dumbfounded, and say things along the lines of, “But you’re an intelligent human being! How in the world can you not be worried about overpopulation?” as if I’d said something really crazy, like I believe in the Immaculate Conception or creationism or supply-side economics.

But it’s true. I genuinely don’t believe population growth is a problem. And I have good reasons for doubting it.

The overpopulation scare isn’t a new one. Way back in the 18th century, a particularly gloomy (even for a Calvinist) English pastor and amateur economist, Thomas Malthus, postulated that humanity was, very soon, going to reach the point beyond which it could feed itself, and his prediction was, admittedly, based on sound reasoning.  

Malthus pointed out that the human population increases geometrically. Two people can have ten kids. Each of those ten kids could, theoretically, have another ten kids, and so on and so on. Every generation, the population increased exponentially. Whereas, on the other hand, food production can only grow arithmetically. One acre of land can only yield 100 bushels of corn. If you want to grow more food, you need to cultivate another acre. As the human population increases, land cultivation may keep up for a while, but eventually, it’s going to catch up—and then we’ll all be screwed.

But Malthus turned out to be wrong. Almost embarrassingly so. He was wrong for two reasons: first, because he didn’t take into account human ingenuity, and our ability to improve crop yield. Through selective breeding for hardier plants that yield more produce, improved fertilization and irrigation, and other clever improvements we’ve made to the soil and to the plants that grow on it, we’ve also been able to increase our crop yield exponentially as well.

Malthus isn’t the only one to make this prediction. It was famously revisited in the 70’s by Paul Ehrlich in his extremely influential book The Population Bomb. And, like Malthus, many of Ehrlich’s predictions haven’t come true, either. But still, the spectre of overpopulation terrifies us. Ehrlich himself advocates zero-population growth, and people still take him seriously.

But I don’t.

No one is debating that the planet is seriously strained, that there are a lot of hungry people, and that we could be reaching unsustainable levels of consumption. But that’s the key concept right there: consumption. The problem isn’t too many people. The problem is the misallocation of resources.

My country is, without question, the worst offender. Americans aren’t humans, they’re locusts. We gobble up way more than our fair share of the world’s resources. We’re not the biggest per capita meat-eaters on the planet (that distinction, oddly enough, belongs to Luxembourg), but as a country, we do consume the most meat. And meat consumption is a disaster for the environment. It’s incredibly wasteful. It takes more than 2500 gallons of water to put a pound of meat on a cow, and the amount of land it takes to grow enough feed to put a pound of meat on an animal could feed 16 people for a year. The Amazon valley is being deforested largely for use as cattle ranches, all to feed the American appetite for meat.

Likewise with oil. The United States, with 4% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of all the oil produced worldwide. And fossil fuel consumption is, again, a disaster for the environment. And it’s like that for nearly every other commodity on the planet. Americans gobble up far more of their fair share and then they wonder where the planet's resources are going. 

There’s something deeply disturbing about this picture, and something almost racist about it. Essentially, when Americans rail about overpopulation, what they’re saying to the rest of the world is, “You need to quit producing people so that we can continue to consume way more than our fair share of the world’s resources.”

Resource allocation aside, the other reason I don’t lose too much sleep over overpopulation is historical demographics.

One of the things that concerned Malthus was that improvements in medical science were saving way too many lives. Far fewer children were dying in childbirth—far too many of them were living to adulthood. And it’s true, the European population did spike like crazy in the early 19th century thanks to pretty basic advances in medicine. Like, you know, washing your hands.

But then something happened that Malthus didn’t foresee. The European population actually started going down, and has continued to do so. Most European countries are now not only at zero population growth, they’re at negative population growth, and the only ones that haven’t experienced negative population growth are those which have grown due to immigration.

What happened? Industrialization happened, that’s what happened. When people leave the farms and go to the city, their families shrink. You need lots of kids to work the family farm when you live in the country. You don’t when you live in a tenement apartment in the city. Matter of fact, all those mouths to feed become a liability, not an asset.

I can point to an example from my own family. My great-great grandparents had eleven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Oscar, Wolf, Ida, Lena, George, Louis, Maude, Pearl, and who can remember all the rest of them. This was from about 1870 to 1890. Although they weren’t farmers, their livelihood was closely related to agriculture. They owned grocery stores, and I suppose they needed the extra help, much like farmers needed the extra help in the fields. But my great-grandmother, Pearl, only had two kids in her family. Her daughter, my grandmother, likewise had only two children. And so did my mother. And so do I. And my brother doesn’t have any children at all.

That’s a pretty precipitous drop over the course of three or four generations.

That pattern fits not only Europe and the United States, it fits the rest of the world as well. India and China, the two largest populations in the world, are rapidly industrializing. In fact, they’re doing so at a much more rapid rate than Europe and the States did. China’s got its own set of unique and self-inflicted problems. Thanks to its draconian one-family, one-child rule and the rather predictable resulting mass abortions of girls, China is facing a major demographic crisis in the next generation, so watch for their population to take a rather precipitous dip.

Malaysia, Indonesia, and other major population hot spots will also most likely level off and then decline as their populations move from rural, subsistence-farming model to the urban, industrial model as well.

Moreover, more and more girls worldwide are being educated. That’s a good thing, not only for the girls themselves and for the societies in which they live, but for humanity. There's a strong correlation between the number of educated girls and a drop in birthrates. And increasing numbers of educated girls worldwide is inevitable. For every young girl the Taliban shoots in the face for the unforgivable sin against Allah of wanting to be smarter, thirty or forty will take her place. And when they’re studying, and working, and taking their rightful place in the world, suddenly the prospect of having ten or more children is far less attractive.

Overpopulation, like so much else that we worry about, is an oversimplification of the problem. It’s another example of looking for a silver bullet to a complicated problem. Yes, there’s a shortage of resources in the world. But too many people isn’t the cause of it. And as long as we keep ignoring the underlying causes of the resource crisis, it won’t get any better. 

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