Population, the Elephant in the Room

On edit: Added the bit about the coyote, just for fun.

The article linked here is a fleshed-out version of my post yesterday about population and the role of excess deaths in getting the human community to a sustainable number. The article details my thinking behind the model I developed to investigate this, especially the link between oil and carrying capacity that fixes my interest these days. In addition it gives a full explanation of the model, including a better look at the parameters I chose for the simulation, the reasons I chose the them as I did, and it presents the graphs generated by the simulation.

Here's the introduction:


And a funny analogy:


And part of the summation:

..instantly conveys to me that whoever wrote it spent too much time reading Foucault to have anything important to say about a science-based public policy debate.

Thanks for pointing that out.

I really don't think there's a public policy, scientific or not, that's going to address the shitstorm this simulation describes.

It's not Foucault, by the way, it was the Club of Rome, though on reflection I'm not sure that's much better :-)

Just what we need, fresh from Skep hell -- another "Postmodernism is against Science!" troll.

--p!
Peer Review! Occam! Falsifiability!
</rant>

Is it some kind of French-Canadian rendition of "planetary goat-fuck?"

Yes, it means "planetary goat-fuck", but you can say it to heads of state.

I have lived through enough Republick administrations to make it an easy decision for me to not breed.

This problem is one women have control over. If a woman decides to have twelve babies what's to stop her?

I'd sure like to hear some women chime in with womanly solutions. We men can't do much except starve ourselves of sex, and that ain't gonna happen.

So come on women, give us some solutions.

Women should make sure the man always wears a condom? That would work.

But what if she wants twelve babies?

As I may have mentioned before, Crude Impact is screening in Australia Tuesday night 8:30 — with an intermission for the news. It recommends that we increase a woman's education and career prospects, and give some security in old age. Then children are not viewed as superannuation, and women get other opportunities than just staying at home to have babies. Although that could be a useful strategy for world domination if you belonged to a certain ethnic/religious group.

Here's the main vibe though.... if we give enough women a good education, then it does not matter if SOME women choose to have 12 babies.

Crude Impact said something like, for every 3 years of education a woman has, they are likely to have 1 less child.

I'm totally in favour of it. Keep in mind that it takes a long time to have a significant effect - typically a generation or more. While it will play a role in mitigating the population troubles ahead, I would expect its role will be quite minor due to the time frame we're looking at for the onset of overshoot and the scale of the correction that will probably happen.

It's essential to plant this seed as widely as possible though. If we do that perhaps some of the societies that will spring up from the rubble will be matriarchal and thus pacifist towards both other people and the rest of the planet. That would be a wonderful thing.

And trust me, NO woman really wants 12 babies.

I've spent enough time in 3rd world countries to know that large families are a sign of male pride and female suppression. When women have economic and political rights, family size goes down.

Malthus, a pioneer in mathematical modeling, was proved wrong, mostly because his data set did not include effects for the discovery of fossil fuels.

There's a lot of graphs there, and the nature of the functions can be guessed more or less, but there is not a lot to suggest the data sets suggesting these functions or the justification for their use.

I think population is the elephant on the table, and I think that there will be catastrophic die off, but I also believe that we can minimize it by intervention.

There is no reason to suppose, I think, that if sustainable energy options are not employed that the carrying capacity of the planet will return to pre-fossil fuel levels. It may be much, much, much lower. It conceivably could be zero. That may be improbable but it is going too far to say that it is impossible.

This model has no predictive pretensions. Its main purpose in life is to illustrate another aspect of the issues of scale posed by our industrial society.

For me, the key idea is that our exploitation of fossil fuels increased the earth's carrying capacity massively but temporarily, thereby allowing our population to explode. What the carrying capacity will be when the oil goes away will depend mainly on two things: the amount of renewable replacement energy we can get into play (which will tend to support the carrying capacity) and the degree of degradation of the planet's resource base and waste sinks, which will act to to reduce it.

My SWAG is that the amount of additional renewable energy we'll ultimately be able to muster will amount to 10% or so of the oil energy we're currently using, the resource base is be degraded by 50% due to such things as topsoil depletion, lower mineral concentrations and species loss, and the waste sinks are 75% full with regional overflows (mine tailings, water pollution etc.) and global warming posing massive problems.

Seen as a carrying capacity problem, the likelihood that we will actually settle at a sustainable level of one billion should be viewed as an optimistic upper limit. It's unlikely to be zero - we share characteristics with both yeast (we overshoot and die off) and cockroaches (you can't kill us all).

Does it? We've pretty much made our bed.

But given that there may be 50 years of oil left at current rates, and that is about 3 generations, kids not born today would have a great impact on what happens 20 years from now.

We need a big negative growth curve, fast. I'm gonna do my part. What about child bearing women? What can they do?

This is an extremely important subject. To me, and to everyone else. I've been obsessed with it from an early age.



My comment is on what I think is the reason why population will begin to decrease. I don't see it as economic. I believe it is a feedback system inherent in the human being. Eyes. People see this mess, and they're sick and tired. They are having fewer kids. I think it's that simple.


edit- I just erased a page of writing. I'm not going to comment any more. Thirty years of studying and discussing. I'm done. You deal with it. I'm going to find my place to live that is relatively unaffected by it. It's hard to do in American society.

Thank you for braving it and posting on this subject. Cars and babies are two very threatening subjects for most people. Keep pounding away. Having said that, just remember that if we stopped breeding we'd be gone in 100 years. That's probably the weirdest thought I've had on this subject.

It's great to see this topic here. Population is indeed the elephant in the room. Part of the reason for that is that a majority of environmental writers have decided it's a bad issue for them to mention. They believe people associate it with draconian, totalitarian measures, and that it therefore hurts the image of environmentalism. So they opt for avoidance rather than truth.

My observation, though, is that commenters under articles on sites like Alternet and Common Dreams bring it up constantly. In time, I think the feature writers will catch up to what seems to be a reawakening to the centrality of population growth in fueling our ecological crisis. I recently wrote an article about this strategy of avoidance which, to say the least, I think is horribly misguided.


Growth is Madness!

Environmentalism is based on the premise that "Things aren't right. We have to Do Something!" The underlying assumption is that we broke it (whatever it is - global warming, deforestation, pollution) and that it's our responsibility to fix it. The premise that "since we broke it in the first place of course we can fix it" is implicit. Without that bedrock assumption the whole notion of "environmentalism" simply can't work. We must be able to fix what we broke.

Enter the population problem. It's enormous, and anyone who looks at it objectively understands that human population growth is the source of all the other damage, and is not sustainable in any way, shape or form. So to an environmentalist the reflex question becomes, "How do we fix it?"

That question is a trap. It assumes that "we" can fix it through some human agency. So the search for solutions begins. As environmentalists, and thus humane to the core, we look first for humane solutions. Economic growth, social programs to reduce poverty, the education and empowerment of women, better access to birth control and abortions.

Then someone who is handy with Excel comes along and says that won't be enough, and the fun starts. The only severe approach that environmentalists are capable of considering is one-child legislation, and then only if they are feeling dangerously draconian.

When the shit-disturber with the spreadsheet responds that even that will not be enough, the ugly suspicions begin to mount. Remember, we have to solve the problem though our action. And if totalitarian measures like one-child families won't be enough, well that means that ... that ... that the jerk with the spreadsheet must be suggesting we kill people! Us, humane environmentalists all, a party to murder? To eugenics? To genocide???? Never! String him up!!! Or at the very least make him stop talking about it and we must never, ever, speak of it ourselves. We are environmentalists - we do life, not death.

But of course the jerk with the spreadsheet wasn't suggesting any such thing. He was suggesting that some problems don't have solutions, at least not solutions springing from human agency. Now such a realization is anathema to the very concept of environmentalism. It is branded as fatalism, hopelessness, and the worst of all the Seven Deadly Sins, Despair. "We must never give up hope!" is the battle cry, and as a result any recognition of hopelessness must be ruthlessly suppressed.

That's why environmental writers may not, can not, must not mention the elephant in the room.

victory... :mad:

When the shit-disturber with the spreadsheet responds that even that will not be enough, the ugly suspicions begin to mount. Remember, we have to solve the problem though our action. And if totalitarian measures like one-child families won't be enough, well that means that ... that ...

An abbreviated version of my reply on Growth is Madness!:

You may be right that there is no real fix, no way to prevent a lot of suffering. (I'm hoping your estimates are too pessimistic, but...) But we can soften the blow. We can do so more than we're doing now, with humane measures, to reduce fertility rates, bringing about population stabilization sooner or, in line with your model, bringing a sustainable population somewhat sooner. The less we add to our numbers, the less they’ll have to drop (i.e., deaths) in overshoot to reach a sustainable population.

And that is why I think environmental writers must start talking about the elephant in the room. :)

I'm guessing we agree on that. :toast:

Who has been the most effective controllers of population?

Bushco and the Hitlers of the world come to mind.

Oversized militaries and nuclear weapons are population control tools.

So there are mechanisms in place to lower human populations. But we enviros don't want to use those tools, but the 'Growth is King' crowd would use those tools in a heart beat, if they thought they could get away with it.

There is a word that describes this situation.

The most effective controllers of population have been famine and disease. Compared to the Black Death and Spanish Flu, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao were rank amateurs.

We won't need to do anything - Mother Nature will look after it all for us.

So try again. What is the word to describe a situation that has such a dichotomous setup?

I venture the question as a way for us to shame the people who don't want to examine the problem. On the one hand these are the people who are against abortion, birth control and environmentalism, yet otoh support bushco and nuke weapons. Stupidity, or what?

Cognitive dissonance is very good at triggering aversive behaviour, as in environmentalists who know a lot of people are inevitably going to die but can't accept the notion of industrial-sized quantities of death for any reason. So they either ignore the question or mentally inflate the ability of humane solutions to solve the problem.

Bushbots deal with their version of it by constructing elaborate sophistries to obscure or justify the obvious moral disconnect.

No matter what you say. We can avert 'your' calamity and that is what enviros stand for, that's why they don't carry your banner or write about it so much.

Look, real active environmentalists are attacked for all kinds of shit when all we are doing is attempting to make our society into one which all beings can co-exist. We don't need this crap; this claiming that we need to worry about things that are out of our control due to the warmongers and machine-heads.

If we stop population growth and stop the more, more, more consumption mentality, we can have a world that improves for all its creatures. Or it all collapses, no matter what we do. So lay off us and go after the real perps.

Nobody is "going after" any environmentalists. GG wrote a post that said: "Many many people are going to die from overshoot, and that is going to happen regardless of how hard we environmentalists work." In response, you are:

1) denying his conclusion
2) Telling him to shut up! shut up! shut up! (tm, Bill O'Reilly)

Which, oddly, is exactly the kind of behavior he predicted in his original post on the subject.

Yes, I think I am denying that all is doomed.

Not telling him to shut up. Telling him to leave environmentalists out of it and go after the real problem makers: the machine heads and the rest.

Frankly, I've heard and read his type of conclusions for years now and it comes in many forms, and his is nothing new. It is as mis-targeted as ever.

Is it true? Nobody knows, so lets stick to what we know. Reduce population gradually and naturally, and reduce consumption: IOW, change lifestyles.

Went back and read the OP. I find the doom carefully couched in non-confrontive terminology without much in the way of what we can do to avert the dilemma. It's all doom, all the time. Even tho the OP doesn't come right out and say it.

I say there is a way to get beyond the mess and in so doing the world's fauna and flora remains somewhat intact. Changes will occur, as evolution proceeds, as always.

Humans will have less portable energy but that doesn't mean we're all gonna die. And shaming the environmental writers into writing more about population control doesn't help environmentalists one iota.

Is that better?

PS. I am now on vacation, finally. See yall in a few days.

Definitely read the article on his site that GliderGuider linked to. I think you'll find it's well reasoned. That he doesn't spend a lot of space on ways to ameliorate the situation doesn't take away from the value of what he does say. I hope some of the assumptions on which he bases his model turn out to be wrong, but either way there's much there worth very serious thought.

And shaming the environmental writers into writing more about population control doesn't help environmentalists one iota.

I'm not sure "shame" is the best term, but I do believe those writers who have adopted the stance of actively avoiding the population topic because some may associate it with draconian measures, are doing exactly the wrong thing. (See the article I linked to in my first post in this thread.) They need to rethink that strategy, and write about the truth rather than avoiding it -- as unpleasant as that might be. Something I didn't mention in that article is that by avoiding the topic, they're doing precisely what the promoters of population growth want them to do. I'd say that's a clear sign their employing the wrong strategy.

This is in response to the full comment by JohnF http://www.growthmadness.org/2007/04/20/when-environmental-writers-are-part-of-the-problem/#comment-1027">here

Yes, you have understood my argument correctly: petroleum was the primary factor in raising the earth’s carrying capacity over the last 100 years, and as oil supplies decline our expanded population will find itself driving deeper and deeper into overshoot, with the usual consequences. My position is that humane measures will not reduce the population to match the earth’s oil-free carrying capacity. This will require a frank reduction in population in a short time that will far exceed the current natural death rate. I’ll go so far as to say that even inhumane measures such as nuclear war will probably not suffice, because one-time death tolls in the tens or even hundreds of millions will not be sufficiently corrective. IMO, only the traditional natural remedies of famine and disease will have enough power.

I put the sustainable population at a billion and the time frame at 75 years in my model. Even if I’m off by 100%, and the number turns out to be two billion and the time frame is 100 years, it really doesn’t alter the essential drama all that much.

I think that we will strive mightily to produce alternative energy sources to maintain the carrying capacity, but I am convinced we will ultimately fail. This is due to issues of scale (no alternatives we have come up with so far come within an order of magnitude of the energy required), issues of utility (oil is so multi-talented that it would take a large number of products and processes to fully replace it), issues of unintended consequences (as is currently being recognized with biofuels) and issues of human behaviour (a lack of international cooperation is predicted by The Prisoner’s Dilemma, and comfort-seeking, competition for personal advantage and a hyperbolic discount function are planted deep in the human genome as explained in Reg Morrison’s “The Spirit in the Gene” and in my article on Hyperbolic Discount Functions.

While there are not many of us out here sounding the dieoff alarm just yet, I am by no means alone. Jay Hanson is a well-known proponent, and his site http://www.dieoff.org has accumulated a large number of papers by such luminaries as Albert Bartlett, Garrett Hardin and David Pimentel. Rather than try to précis this impressive body of work, I’ll commend to you one page that addresses most of the same issues I do: http://dieoff.org/page171.htm. The rest of that site is invaluable for considering the population problem from a variety of perspectives.

On the question of whether fertility reductions alone can achieve a sufficiently soft landing, I’m not aware of any papers that would directly support my pessimistic conclusion. This is primarily because the analysts I’ve read have failed to grasp a key set of fundamentals: first, the link between petroleum and carrying capacity; second, the imminence of Peak Oil; third, the possibility of a rapid decline in post-peak oil supply (starting at 2% per year and ramping up to 10-20% per year over the course of twenty years), fourth, industrial agribusiness’ utter dependence on petroleum for yield maintenance. The failure to put this puzzle together has lulled most population commentators into a false sense of security regarding time frame and carrying capacity, and has hobbled their analysis. IMNSHO, of course.

The “Green Revolution” which is held out as the mitigator of this dire trajectory is a chimera. First off, let’s drop that greenwashing naming pretense, and call it what it is: industrial agribusiness. This travesty is supported by the tripod of mechanization, pesticides/fertilizers and genetic engineering. Of those three legs, the first two are directly dependent on petroleum. Genetic engineering generally has four goals: drought resistance, insect resistance, pesticide resistance and yield enhancement. That last factor invariably requires mechanical irrigation, which again depends on oil.

Ironically, industrial agribusiness may provide one mechanism for a much-needed fertility reduction. This is coming about because of the unholy stew of pesticides, fertilizers and industrial chemicals (not to mention traces of pharmaceuticals) in which we are marinating ourselves. The mutagenic, teratogenic, carcinogenic, endocrine-disruptive and especially fertility-disruptive effects of these chemicals, alone and in combinations are just now being urgently recognized. As the slyly-named “Green Revolution” is pushed into Africa by well-meaning but clueless idiots like Bill and Melinda Gates we can expect these unintended consequences to follow obediently along.

Balancing this effect and in my opinion much more significant is the fact that much of the Muslim world has an extremely young population. One estimate I just read was that in the Arab oil-producing world fully half of the population is under the age of 15. There can be no starker illustration of the collision of population and Peak Oil than that. I doubt that family planning will penetrate very far into these ultra-religious nations. The only thing that may constrain their future fertility is if Virginia Abernethy was right, and that people do restrain their fertility as their economic opportunities contract.

I agree that we must do what we can to soften the blow. Mainly that involves reducing the incentive to reproduce by whatever means are available. Taking this position to its logical conclusion, though, can lead to such interesting outcomes as opposing micro-credit – that shibboleth of liberal multicultural empathy – on the grounds that it encourages reproduction among those who will be at first risk in the coming collapse. That’s an antinomious conflict between head and heart if ever there was one.

My main reason for supporting efforts to soften the blow comes from my understanding of the idea of adaptive cycles. While we share characteristics with yeast (we overshoot and die off) we are also a bit like cockroaches – you can’t kill us all. There will eventually be a resurgence of some form of society from the rubble of this one, and it’s our duty to make sure they have the knowledge, resources and opportunity to survive and enjoy what remains of the world.

Talking about the elephant is the first, crucial step.

Paul

Your premise is screwed up to begin with. As an example China and India have huge populations that are surviving on far, far less consumption than the western world.

It is arrogant to surmise that humans can't live with less and that we can do anything about helping our survivors survive if your total collapse scenario comes about.

Worry about today and tomorrow will be fine. Hurling doom will not solve our dilemma. Cutting back on consumption and population growth would.

Most of it is surviving on much less overall consumption than the USA, but our civilization is now so interconnected that the effects of disruptions in one corner of the planet are transmitted virtually instantaneously to other places. Even regional supply disruptions in key resources like food will have planetary reverberations.

And I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but "Worry about today and tomorrow will be fine" is what got us into this mess in the first place. We desperately need to examine the long-term implications of what we've done and are still doing, and then act ahead of time on our conclusions. Overshoot is hard to foresee and easy to ignore because of those hyperbolic discount functions I mentioned.

We will certainly end up living more like Indians in the relatively near future. The problem is that Indians could then end up living more like Zimbabweans, and the Zimbabweans will end up ...

That shows a complete lack of understanding the world's ecological systems that are diverse and evolving. Stick to what you know, would be my advice.

Wine from Australia (though perhaps not for much longer) Argentinian beef, Vietnamese rice, German cars, Chinese bath toys, Korean computers, Saudi crude oil, Egyptian cotton, American corn, Canadian lumber ...

This is the level of "ecological niche" I'm talking about, not just the flora and fauna of a rain forest or pampas. William Catton's "Overshoot" has an excellent explanation of this interpretation of ecology.

We can live without. What you are talking about is a human centered niche which is luxurious; not elemental to the world as a whole.

From a food production/distribution perspective we are in a global situation where disruptions in the transport networks are going to make a lot of difference to a lot of people. You can do without a BMW or a new rubber ducky, but bread made from grain that must be imported is another matter entirely. The conventional wisdom is that every calorie of food incorporates ten calories of fossil fuel for production and transportation. Think of the implications of that in the context of a global food ecology.

One of the things we must do is to promote the world-wide resurgence of localized, small-scale food production. This is one of the things that environmentalists can and should be doing, and it's one of the actions that is useful whether or not you accept my premise about the inevitable consequences of an oil-expanded carrying capacity. Local agriculture with low levels of fossil-fuel inputs is crucial to being able to cope with other disruptions. It would increase the resilience of human civilization tremendously, would make it possible for as many as possible to survive even the horrid scenario I've painted, and is within the capability of individuals to influence.

Join a CSA, plant a garden, join a grass-roots farmer's union like the NFU. Everybody wins when food security is increased.