Claiming Population Growth is the Big Environmental Issue is Shifting the Blame From Rich to Poor

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/09/29/the-population-myth/

The Population Myth

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 29th Septeember 2009

It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.” But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions.

-snip

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation”. It revealed that “some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly” to decide which good cause they should support. “A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/09/29/the-population-myth/">Read it all here...

:eyes:

Or should I say, the "hottest trend"? That's all it is to you, right?

http://www.truthout.org/article/how-rich-are-destroying-planet

But population is also a problem.
We are running out of resources - like fish.
In order to supply the huge numbers of people with electricity, we have things like mountain-top coal mining.
Etc, etc.

I don't think the article suggests that it's not. It simply suggests that the population issue is being used as a diversion from some of the other real causes of the onrushing death of our planet at our own hands.

The resource Consumption of one wealthy American outstrips probably the resourse consumption of two hundred Senegalese.

It's not the population itself causing the problem - it's maintaining the extravagant lifestyles of the top percentage of the population that's the problem. wealthy nations, even those with managable or declining populations, consume far more resources than poor, expanding nations like bangladesh.

it's about 5% of world's population.

even compared to developed countries like japan & UK, the US, Australia & Canada overconsume. & the rich in those countries consume more even than their share of their country's connsumption.

It isn't the poor of Africa, that's for sure. Tuna stocks are collapsing because of the world wide craze for sushi, which is also not eaten in Bangladesh.

The capitalists do. Things are done, not in accordance with human need but rather according to the profits derived. The waste of human labor and natural resources is mind boggling. And yet human needs are not met, except for the very few.

Why are fish stocks collapsing? It is not the millions of small fisher folk who are strip mining the oceans, though there are local problems. It is commercial fleets of long-liners and drift netters doing the bears share of the damage at break neck rate. Despite this huge harvest most people get no benefit.

This is not to completely dismiss population as a concern, but rather to prioritize. If we were to rationalize our production then population becomes more tractable. It is impossible and immoral to think that population can be 'controlled' by authoritarian methods, people will not go for it, race and class would undoubtedly become criteria in a class society.

It is easier to change society than to change people.

blindpig and HamdenRice making the same argument on an issue.

I love contentious threads. :)

I think it would be fair to say that Hamden feels that this can be addressed within the context of regulated capitalism whereas I consider such a thing to be a chimera and believe it can be addressed, and indeed largely ameliorated, only by the demise of capitalism.

But yes, we are both identifying the same problems.

Eugenics was also popular among the wealthy.

We seem to be going round in circles.

Every single environmental issue can be reduced to the fact that there are too many humans on the planet. That's a species issue, not an economic one.

"One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry." That statement alone tells me that the author is a clueless idiot who is bad at math. 10 billion African peasants burning wood or fossil fuels to cook their food and heat their homes makes the energy usage and waste of a hundred thousand heated pools look like a drop of water in the ocean.

Facts are facts, and the fact is, there are too damned many of us.

The problem, of course, is determining what to do about it. My guess is that we won't do a damned thing, because while we know what the problem is, few people are willing to actually reduce their childbearing. It's too instinctual, and goes against our core evolutionary programming. Humans, at the root of it all, exist to screw and make babies. Everything else we do is window decoration.

100,000 X 100,000. So an energy gluttonous banker would need to use 100,000 times as many resources as an impoverished peasant. Figure one swimming pool at 6k of gas per month and a few private jet flights vs scraps of wood used for cooking. 100,000 X sounds about right to me.

Either way you entirely miss the point.

is either uneducated or completely delusional. I would have liked to have had kids myself, but I seriously doubt that planet earth will have much left to offer any of us in 50 years. It's resources are finite, but most people refuse to accept this simple fact.

It's not only the competition for resources, it's what it's making people do to compete.

That means that environmentally, the footprint of 300 million Americans would be like the footprint of 18 to 30 billion Africans.

Also, consider the remaining resources in Africa compared to the remaining resources here. There are still massive migrations of millions of mega fauna in eastern, central and southern Africa. I haven't seen the buffalo migrations in North America, have you? Despite the poverty of Africa, they are no where near running out of resources. In other words, their poverty is not a result of population pressure, but of a series of complicated other issues. I certainly don't want them to destroy their wild places -- and demographic projections suggest they won't have to -- but to say that the poorest regions are pressing against their resource limits is absurdly counter-factual.

than one child in Africa, India or China. So if we intend to lecture the world about the problems of population growth, we'd better cut our carbon emissions dramatically.

As world industrial resources become more and more limited, our wasteful ways will become more of a central issue.

Yet we're getting ready for another round of professional bullying paid for by right wing corporate angels to get some of our demoralized, angry desperate people to storm town halls against any reform aimed at reducing our carbon emissions.

That's why I think Democrats' resisting the professional bullying against healthcare reform, by making opening up Medicare to all who want it in 2010 our public option. They need to kick the professional bullies in the teeth or they will roll right along to the next round of bullying against our national interests.

Population growth IS a serious problem.

More serious than other ecological issues? Maybe not - but the truth is, the more people there are, the harder it is on the planet, and the more pollution is created.

Pretending it to be otherwise doesn't make it not a fact.

Sorry.

isn't an issue? :shrug:

This article doesn't say that nor has anyone in this thread.

Thanks for the silly strawman.

then I will answer your question with "The article that was posted."

it's an issue only to rich western white men. What it says is that it's the only environmental issue rich western white men seem to care about. That's a BIG difference.

Monbiot is making a valid point.

"The implications of population growth and urbanization for climate change"
pdf: http://www.unfpa.org/webdav/site/global/users/schensul/public/CCPD/papers/Satterthwaite%20paper.pdf

Around the world, low wage unregulated pollution spewing factories are pumping out useless shit for us 1st worlders to buy.

I would not argue otherwise.

But just because most pollution is made by us, doesn't mean that population growth isn't also a massive ecological problem.

It's not an either/or choice, people.

- as I read it - is that some of the leading advocates for action on population would like it to be an "either/or." They don't want to address the disparities in environmental damage caused by the rich vs damage caused by the poor. The point is precisely that population isn't the ONLY problem.

the fact is population growth is a major factor.

Only facts and what is possible within those facts matters.

Monbiot is engaging in a fallacy, the fallacy is claiming that because the super-rich are the ones worried about over-population that the fears of overpopulation is just classist nonsense. Those people in the developing world want developed world standard of living.

there are only so many resources to go around.

Capitalism creates poverty, which is the driver of high replacement rate.

Capitalism or nature, ya can't have both.

in a highly regulated form, with socialism mixed in to cover the essentials.

Little unclear there...

capitalism is still the best system for providing the best life for the most people- we just need more regulation and an actual social safety net.

They know better.

eh?

socialism.

it easy to use a single word- but precisely how would it be a benefit to the world for the u.s. to be entirely socialist...?

US corporations would be nationalized, the operations and priorities would be changed to reflect socialist solidarity with all workers.

Withdrawal of US military from all overseas posts and missions.

Global climate change would be addressed on a human need basis, not on a cost/benefit analysis.

A foreign policy based upon mutual respect and needs, not on the needs of capitalists organizations.

What's not to like?

how will the people who own the corporations to be nationalized be compensated?

"priorities would be changed to reflect socialist solidarity with all workers"
nice jargon :eyes:- what are some concrete examples?

"Global climate change would be addressed on a human need basis, not on a cost/benefit analysis."
whose needs would take priority? a for instance- how would the water from the great lakes be distributed for the most effective national/global uses?

"what's not to like?"
mostly the conflagrations and wars that would be involved in trying to wrest power from those who currently have it.

Are you saying that it's the best system there has been so far, or the best system there can be?

Very important difference!

Once you've clarified that, maybe we should move on to what "the best life" is...

if there was such a thing as an altruistic world, i'm sure that things could be done differently- but that's never been the nature of the people of this planet, and it's not realistic to think that it ever will be- it's best to plan for reality, than to just hope for a complete change in the long documented and well demonstrated nature of human beings to happen in a very short time frame.

and i also said that it should be a highly regulated form of capitalism- with socialization of the essentials(utilities, infrastructure, public services, healthcare, etc...).

and don't forget the tariffs and the progressive tax structure.

A bold claim, but let's go with that for now. Especially if we're considering socialization of the essentials.

As an advocate for capitalism, you'd most likely have a good definition of it. What exactly is capitalism, would you say?

but we need to practice a much better, i.e. more regulated version.

nobody in their right mind would be in favour of laissez faire capitalism- but that's not what we have now, anyway.

ideally there may be a better solution/system- but reality is not always ideal.
we do not live on a planet of altruists- never have, never will.
highly regulated capitalism, with socializtion of the necessities is really the best we can hope for, given the realities of human nature.

Altruists -- okay, whatever; but here, I'd be interested to know what you're talking about when you refer to "capitalism."

It sounds like we a lot of common ground here, but the term "capitalism" gets slung around so freely, you never really know where you are with it. Maybe that's another conversation all its own...

i guess that i just assumed that everyone knew how to google.

capitalsim:
an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

btw- if you don't think that a highly regulated form of capitalism is our best bet, what system would you support?

Can't exactly google what you think -- that's actually what I was interested in.

I wouldn't put too much store by a dictionary when it comes an "ism." Nor the likelihood of people consulting one before they dive into discussions on the subject. It's a pretty big source of confusion, the wide variety of assumptions about what capitalism is.

Just in the definition you cite, for example, there is mention of "capital goods," but that's basically an accounting term quite different from the idea of capital in the sense of somebody putting up capital -- investing -- to start a business, say.

Investment, particularly that with a stipulated rate of return on it, seems to me to be the essential feature of capitalism -- if you don't have it, I'd say you don't have capitalism. Not as we know it, anyway.

FWIW, I don't have a particularly strong opinion pro or con whether a highly regulated form of capitalism is our best bet. Given capitalism, though, I do think close regulation is a very good idea.

As to what system I'd support, I can tell you, but frankly, there's not much chance of it politically: just prohibit the charging of interest, and keep all the rest of it. Subversive little secret: a market economy with private allocation can function just fine without a banker class charging rent on money.

That's just my analysis -- I don't think the "realists" (i.e., the rentier interests currently running the joint) have much to worry about.

it's still the best system for the most people .

Whenever the subject turns to the affluent Duggar family of Arkansas (19 kids and counting), DU becomes practically insane with rage. But oh heavens no, the poor of the Third World must never be criticized for having 6-8 children.

in Third World countries because a lot of them DIE before they get to adulthood. It's not because they are bad and irresponsible, they need children to take care of them when they are elderly, since most of them don't have any Social Security. It's beyond idiotic to compare the Duggars with poor people in other countries...

Thats the reason they have population growths exceeding 3% per year in many third world countries. Infant mortality has drastically declined in the third world since World War II, and life expectancy has increased dramatically. Yet in the third world they are still having humungous families, largely because of the lack of female rights, and lack of education, neither of which can be blamed on the West.

It's funny how some become encrusted with their own spittle when faced with (oh horror of horrors) a family with more than 2 kids in the United States. Yet they would probably make excuses for anyone in a 3rd world nation.

Poor choice of parents, eh? Wrong continent maybe too. Perhaps if these folks were not afflicted by the neo-colonialism, had the benefit of their local resources instead of seeing those resources funneled North by the multi-nationals, they might not be inclined to have as many children, as has long been noted. Improved living conditions, education of women, these are the keys to population. Can't happen in a world economic system which keeps the majority poor.

Kick and recommended.

we need this nonsense. Of course even I have a huge carbon footprint compared to some African or Indian peasant. Or even a Chinese one. Maybe I use 10, maybe 100 times as many resources as any of them do.

But what the fuck is the point of bringing this up? Noble peasants around the world don't cause any damage-- it's just rich white men and their swimming pools. Or even the middle class and their cars and computers and TVs and slow cookers. Or Western industrialized poor people with their stovepots and busses. And TVs.

Uh-oh! Don't go blaming the poor again. Or that middle class. They're pure as the driven snow and suffer under the will of their wealthy masters.

Bullshit! Everybody eats and it's not just carbon footprints it's the condition of the entire planet. It's not the rich who caught all the fish in the sea, and it's not the uber-wealthy who are clear-cutting our hardwood forests for lumber or the rain forests for farmland. It's not the captains of industry pushing the bears out of northern New Jersey of the gorillas out of Ruanda.

Nope. It's just the pressure of an increasing human population that's destroying everything in its way.

If China isn't already the world's biggest polluter it won't be long. It's not wealth driving that-- it's just the population trying to make a living. How's the air around Mexico City, that famous garden spot for the elite?

Every additional human on the planet needs food, housing, and clothing. Give 'em that and soon enough they want vacation spots and entertainment-- and then who knows what else. That means we need an additional hectare or so of farmland for each new person. And, by the way, a job so said new person can afford to exist.

Malthus wasn't wrong in theory, just in fitting facts with the theory. A new "green revolution" might feed the billions of new mouths, but at the cost of everything else on the planet.

Pretty much every civilization in the past has managed to eradicate its resources without thinking, and now we have the technology to really use 'em up. We can now move mountains, fill valleys, and change the course of major rivers. And the Pacific Ocean has become the largest garbage dump in the world.

The answer? Beats me, but some day we'll have to face it.

The collapse of tuna stocks is driven by the world wide craze for sushi. I have yet to see a sushi restaurant in Liberia or Botswana, and I've heard that sushi is not a big menu item in rural Bangladesh.

Many of the third world poor who eat fish, eat fresh water fish -- for example, in China where farm raised carp is probably the most commonly eaten fish. Most of the poor ocean fishermen of Africa and Asia use low tech methods, but watch their fisheries collapse when western industrial scale fishing trawlers invade their waters.

the only fish being eaten, and has nothing to do with Red Lobster, Chesapeake oysters, or the Mediterranean fishery collapse. Or salmon.

Jeebus, here in New York we even have a limit on porgies and bluefish now. Striped bass just opened not that long ago, and who knows what next season's fluke regs are going to be. The local commercial fishermen would all sell their boats if anyone would buy them.

Don't blame it on the rich-- there's a lot more fish&chips eaten than sushi.

It's a north Atlantic fishery. Not many Africans or Bangladeshis eating cod as I recall. Despite its working class reputation, it is a fishery of the highly developed North American and European areas.

I think you are assuming "rich" means individual "rich people", which the OP article somewhat misleadingly focuses on. Generally this is an argument about the environmental impact of people living in "rich countries" versus "poor countries."

as rich countries' overusing resources, you still haven't addressed the primary problem of every human requiring a certain minimal acreage to provide food, clothing and shelter. You also haven't addressed countries like India and China with huge populations that are not "rich" but are steadily improving their living standards and competing for resources.

The environmental destruction is not only because of increased population, but because of increased living standards of the current population. The "poor" are not being blamed, except for their tendency to become less poor when they get the chance.

It's not the number of people. It's their standard of living: "The environmental destruction is not only because of increased population, but because of increased living standards of the current population."

That's the whole point.

as a raw number or too may people competing to exploit limited resources is a distinction without meaning when they are both intimately related and either one leads to the same conclusion.

It's our nature to build and use and make things. As we solve Africa's health and education problems, we add not only to the population, but to the consuming population. As poor as Africa is now, it is still turning vast tracts of wild and virgin habitat into farmland. A wealthier and healthier Africa will speed up the process, but the process goes on one way or the other.

There has been nothing but good news on demographics for the last 10 years. Estimates of global population growth continue to be revised downward every few years, and the world is on a glide course toward zero population growth by the end of this century.

At one time, it was believed that population would grow to something like 16 billion. Then it was revised downward to 12 billion. Now we're expected to reach zero population growth at around 9 billion.

The even better news is that zpg is being reached because of traditional progressive policies. One of the biggest factors is that when infant mortality drops because of better health care for the poor, the poor choose to have fewer children. They don't need to have lots of children to assure that some will survive.

The next biggest factor is the emancipation of women, and giving them the power to choose whether to have children. This also includes educating women and giving them maternal health care.

Food security is another big factor. Famine has the counter-intuitive impact of killing off the children, causing poor families to try to have even more children. Contrary to what the idiotic Malthusians believe, extending food security to the poor has the effect of reducing population growth.

Our biggest environmental problems -- global warming, depletion of the oceans, etc. -- are caused almost entirely by the wealthy countries. The obsession with brown, yellow and black people breeding is ideologically driven, and not really an attempt to fix the looming environmental crises.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1108-global-population-to-peak-in-2070.html

Global population to peak in 2070

* 11:05 02 August 2001 by Emma Young

The world's population may reach a peak of nine billion as early as 2070 and then start to shrink, according to a new analysis by Austrian researchers.

Wolfgang Lutz, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and his team created thousands of simulations of the future world population and evaluated them, assigning probabilities to each range of possibilities.

They think there is an 85 per cent chance that the global population will stop growing before the end of the century - most probably by 2070. More than one third of people alive in 2100 will be over 60, they say. In Japan, the figure will be one half.
...
Lutz thinks declining fertility rates around the world are the main driving force behind the slowing in population growth.

"We hope these findings will help people get away from the apocalyptic view that the population will explode in the future," he told New Scientist. "Humankind can control the future by controlling fertility."

The population will start to shrink when the average number of children per woman falls below 2.1 (this figure is above two to provide for childhood mortality). ..

<more at the link>

Just ask anyone here at DU.

for the environment and that it IS inseparable from the issue of climate change.

It needs to be dealt with. Claiming it's only wealthy white men who make this statement is yet another way to avoid actually dealing with the issue - which NO ONE wants to do. They won't even TALK about it. And this claim is just an excuse to continue NOT talking about it and to continue NOT doing anything about it.

Instead of people of all genders and races in wealthy countries. A poor Chicano family that drives a pickup in Texas still has a much bigger footprint than an upper middle class bureaucrat and his family in Botswana. It's really about infrastructure and resources in rich countries, not necessarily how individual rich people live (although that's part of the problem).

But frankly global population isn't "talked about" because the problem is largely solved. Fertility rates are dropping for all the right reasons, and zero population growth is expected to occur pretty soon by historical standards (2070). Resource over use in developed countries and the aspirations of people in poor countries to live as we do in the rich countries in the meantime will continue to be a bigger problem than overall global population growth. For that reason, China's middle class is a much bigger problem than China's gigantic peasant population.

Empower women and the number of children they bear will go down.

when he starts calling James Lovelock ignorant and irrational, I have to think maybe I was wrong about him.

Sure it is developed nations who use the most. But the 'African peasantry' are in a sad shape, many are malnourished, some even starving, many areas have no health care at all, have to walk hours just to get some dirty water to drink. They have to collect wood from the ever-diminishing forests to cook their meagre food. Your carbon footprint is always going to be less if you can't afford to eat and have almost no possessions. I know Monbiot and nobody on this board is suggesting that they themselves are going to give up a relatively comfortable lifestyle (compared to this) but the idea that the population can carry on expanding as long as we in the west cut down hinges on the idea that all these people will live the same as they do now in - let's call it what it is - abject poverty. We can object to people saying they shouldn't have so many babies as long as they agree to live in squalor. Is that really what people in developing countries want? I seriously doubt it.

Again, we in the west use far too much. But us cutting down will not compensate for an ever-increasing population, especially not if we recognise that people in these countries actually have the right to a much higher standard of living than they have now. Food takes land, from what I have read about 40% of agriculatural land in the world in now classed as 'degraded'. We are headed for massive famines in the not too distant future, unless things change and quickly.

I guess population growth is a liberal bugbear - the fastest growing populations are in developing countries (we already had our 'boom' years) and to to tell these people not to have so many children smacks of racism and colonialism. But the earth is a finite planet.

Of course it's the issue.

Just because some rich people side with that as well doesn't make it all of a sudden evaporate as the issue. Turning against a concept merely on grounds that someone you dislike supports it; is generally a sign of a severely ignorant mindset.

In other words, it's a problem that has largely been solved or rendered obsolete. People who obsess over it are obsessing over a solved problem.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6696293&mesg_id=6699837

But then again, all sorts of cranks, nutjobs and fundamentalists get all hung up over that scary thing called "science" and substitute their own opinions -- whether it's about the population crisis or the fossil record being only 6000 years old.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1108-global-population-to-peak-in-2070.html

Global population to peak in 2070

* 11:05 02 August 2001 by Emma Young

The world's population may reach a peak of nine billion as early as 2070 and then start to shrink, according to a new analysis by Austrian researchers.

Wolfgang Lutz, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and his team created thousands of simulations of the future world population and evaluated them, assigning probabilities to each range of possibilities.

They think there is an 85 per cent chance that the global population will stop growing before the end of the century - most probably by 2070. More than one third of people alive in 2100 will be over 60, they say. In Japan, the figure will be one half.
...
Lutz thinks declining fertility rates around the world are the main driving force behind the slowing in population growth.

"We hope these findings will help people get away from the apocalyptic view that the population will explode in the future," he told New Scientist. "Humankind can control the future by controlling fertility."

The population will start to shrink when the average number of children per woman falls below 2.1 (this figure is above two to provide for childhood mortality). ..

<more at the link>

So your two arguments are "Cause I said so" and "Hey, we'll be fine. 8 years ago someone said that by 2070 we're only gonna have 3 fucking billion more mouths to feed than now but ehhh, who cares! That's not gonna affect anything right? Right?".

You crack me the fuck up.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

You seem to be morphing into one of those people who say, "I ain't lissening to no pointy headed scientists. What do they know! My pastor says them fossils is only 6000 years old."

ALL the best demographic scientists agree. Fertility rates world wide are plummeting, and the biggest demographic issues we face is not over population, but the transition era when there will be more old people than young working people.

Or don't you believe in science?

...if you had added a few more rows of smiley faces.

As it stands, your post is fairly persuasive on an intellectual level, but a few more rows would have really sealed the deal. :eyes:

Really? How divine! DO go on...

Fertility rates are plummeting and zpg is on the horizon. The technical solutions of the last decades have largely worked.

What more is to be done to solve the problem? Mass murder?

Even Lutz hedges with an 85% probability that population may stop growing by the end of the century. It's an occupational hazard that futurists face, working as they do with statistical extrapolations and a basic assumption that there will be no discontinuities -- "surprise-free" extrapolations, to use the term favored by pioneer futurist Herman Khan.

It may be a little premature, then, to consider the population problem solved.

That said, much also depends on how you define the problem, and indeed, whether it's actually "a problem," in the sense that it is something that can be "solved" by the application of some deliberate technocratic program or policy. I even question that.

However, if you define the problem as "unchecked population growth," then a built-in solution is virtually assured: world population will indeed stop growing, and probably very soon, simply because overpopulation in any context tends to be self-correcting.

It won't be much of a milestone of success for birth control or better-educated women or any of our deliberate efforts, because it will be due the blunt fact that human population has exceeded the carrying capacity of its environment.

So here's another surprise-free extrapolation:

When the population does peak, this is not going to be a very pleasant place to be for a while. Population follows carrying capacity, up as well as down; birth rates and death rates adjust accordingly. No die-off or mass murder necessary: just very slim pickings for most people for several generations, until numbers are down to where there's just enough of the available resources to go around.

From then on, it'll be a matter of just getting by -- a worldwide version of what China, for example, has done throughout the many centuries since its population size reached its agricultural capacity.

Every Malthusian prediction has been wrong, but like a suicide cult, people just change the date of the rapture.

People are not lemmings or Australian rabbits. They have the ability to modify birth rates through things as simple as condoms.

The place where birth rates continue to be high (in some but not all parts) is Africa. But Africa still has areas where millions of mega fauna engage in mass migrations, so whatever problems that continent has, resource depletion isn't it. No one wants to see the wild places tamed as they have been everywhere else, and demographic data suggests they won't be; but to say that Africa is reaching resource limits is laughably counter-factual.

If worse comes to worse, they'll slaughter the wildebeest and plough up the Connecticut sized game reserves, but thank goodness, that won't be necessary.

As for the 85% probability, they are talking about a probability of a specific number -- 9 billion. There is a certain probability that it will be more (10 billion) or less (9 billion) but almost no probability that it will be runaway population growth or even outside a fairly narrow, survivable range.

But "people" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition">is not the same thing as "human population." At a certain scale, population behavior kicks in, largely unaffected by individual behaviors. Can't mix the personal scale with the global scale.

I think we're in "vehement agreement" that human population will indeed level off and decline relatively soon. I definitely agree with you on that -- make no mistake. The natural consequence of overshoot is population decline.

However, if you're arguing that there's no such thing as carrying capacity, or that humans are immune from it, I'd have to disagree.

It's pretty fundamental that population size adjusts to available resources, and claiming exception for the human population just seems like a faith-based exercise.

I guess that disqualifies me from the Technocratic cult...

:shrug:

How would you respond to someone who says, "I don't need to listen to scientists about the fossil record, it's only 6000 years old"?

For that matter, I'm not sure that you're even talking about the same "this" that I am. And those are certainly not my words that you're trying to put in my mouth.

Seriously, you seem to have a real axe to grind with this "Malthusian" label, and in your crusade against it will take the word of anyone in a lab coat as gospel, apparently.

Not all scientists do the same quality of science, and based on what was reported in the article you offered, Dr. Lutz's science didn't seem especially impressive. Just for starters, he calls his computer runs "findings." Forrester did computer runs, too -- but I'm guessing that The Limits to Growth is probably not your favorite work in the field.

I can't help but think that if you were in the field yourself, or at least had more appreciation for what it means to do good science, that your claims would be a lot more modest.

This population predicament, contrary to your claim, is a long, long way from being "solved."

so, no, I guess I'm not a fan of it or any other doomsday predictions, particularly after doomsday has passed and doom didn't happen. Once doomsday passes, and you continue to believe the prophet, then you are in the realm of religious belief, not science or social science.

I cited one article about zpg, but it represents a broad consensus. You can check the UN population statistics or any demographics department at any university that publishes data on the web. 9-10 billion is the global scientific consensus, and to say that prediction is wrong, you basically have to say the global community demographers are wrong. What would you base that judgment on? Limits to Growth?

Dude, where did you miss the part where I said I agree that world population will top out and start to decline?

Focus!

That's not what the experts are saying. It will top out because of reproductive choices, the emancipation of women and reductions of infant mortality -- the opposite of the Malthusian paradigm for why population tops out.

And the places where population is growing fastest -- Africa -- is frankly not anywhere close to running out of resources.

On edit: One of the things I would like people to understand is how misleading our images of poor regions are because we see them through a Malthusian lens. I would like people to understand the true nature of Third World poverty, so we can better help end it. Here's a post I wrote a few weeks ago about poverty in Tanzania you might be interested in:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=202006&mesg_id=202006

How too much agricultural land leads to hunger in Africa (a critique of Malthusianism)

It's somewhat distressing to read the constant malthusian explanations and predictions of hunger and famine. No one who specializes in these areas -- agricultural economists, development analysts, farmers, etc. -- believes this stuff. Malthusianism has all the intellectual respect among the people who study this as creationism has among paleontologists.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his life's work explaining, among other things, famine and hunger as caused by economic forces rather than by lack of food production.

There are an endless number of diverse reasons why people go hungry in any particular region at any particular time. There is no single reason such as lack of land. The world is not anywhere near running out of land to grow food -- although the environmental cost of growing more food on more land is unacceptable to most reasonable people. But give yourself a reality check: I've read countless times here about Africans starving because of population pressure, but do you ever stop to juxtapose that with the massive amounts of megafauna still existing in Africa or the scale of the wildlife parks of East Africa?

Africa is the "hungriest" continent. It is also the one with the most countries with low population densities, empty lands and Rhode Island sized game parks.

Food production is much more a function of how people are organized to produce food on land, not how much land there is, and on what they bring to the task (capital, technology), and what their incentives are (markets, prices).

Just to show you how counter-intuitive these problems can be, let me summarize the observations of Goran Hyden, who wrote a ground breaking book on Tanzania in the early 1980s. Hyden had lived in East Africa for many years, spoke the local languages fluently and spent many years just talking to African farmers about their problems and perspectives. He was socialist who was originally from Sweden (Norway?). He wrote a book as a result called, "Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania," about that country's development efforts, and it was so influential the Ford Foundation hired him as their official representative to east Africa, specializing in development, for a few years.

Many parts of Tanzania were blessed with abundant land and relatively low population density. Yet food production was low and the government (which was quite benevolent by African standards at the time -- headed by Julius Nyerere) found it very difficult to increase production.

Hyden noted that in many areas, because there is enough land for everyone -- it is generally distributed by local authorities to farm families for free -- every family is a small scale farm family. The average family is quite cash poor, but has land.

The problem with that situation is that everyone is basically doing the same work. No one is landless. That means that all the labor that a family can muster to work its farm has to come from within the family. There are no people to hire as farmworkers if the family wants to expand production. The number of able bodied family members is an absolute limit on production (it's not land because they can get as much land as they can justify asking for), and that limit is usually pretty low. Because production is low, people remain too poor to buy capital goods, such as the simple human powered machines that are so common in poor rural parts of Asia.

Also, because everyone does the same thing, no one is specialized. Because no one specializes, there is no trade between farm families, or between various parts of the country. Because there is no specialization, there are no efficiencies. Everyone is trying to produce the same thing -- a little maize, some vegetables and milk products from animals. While this usually suffices to feed the farm families, the products are too monotonous to interest many urban dwellers, so there is little farm to town trade.

Also, because there is abundant land, people spread out to use it. Because Tanzania is a poor country, there is little money for roads, which means that even if a farmer somehow produces a surplus, there is no way to get it to the market at a decent price. So they don't even bother trying.

Looking back at the political history of these areas, Hyden found that many were stateless -- that is, they were politically organized in small chiefdoms. Because the chiefdoms were small and land was abundant, the "ruling class" of chiefs had no power to extract rent or taxes from the peasants. Hyden called Africa's peasant class "uncaptured" because unlike the peasant classes of Europe and Asia, they did not have to provide anything to their rulers in exchange for land. But that also meant that there was no class accumulating riches in the form of rent and taxes to fund collective projects like irrigation. Perhaps more importantly, there was no collection of rent and taxes to force peasants to produce surpluses. Contrary to local politics in Asia and Europe, political leaders, the chiefs, had to "bribe" peasants to stick around and boost the leaders' prestige by "giving" out land, which the chiefs themselves barely controlled. Some have speculated that Africa's modern states are so corrupt and weak because of the pre-colonial heritage of rulers bribing followers rather than followers paying rent and taxes to leaders; rulers become the centers of enormous informal chaotic flows of bribes rather than rational collectors of surpluses.

I'm not saying that this is why there is hunger in Africa, but it is why there was hunger and low food production in one part of Tanzania in the 70s when Hyden was doing his field research.

You can repeat, however, findings of idiosyncratic causes of poverty and hunger across much of Africa. There are places with serious land shortages -- Ethiopia, Malawi, etc. -- but what you generally find are perplexing complexes of problems that often have nothing to do with absolute resource scarcity.

No, what you mention is just what "the" experts in one ideological camp are saying -- those who advocate demographic transition theory. You've apparently thrown your lot in with that particular camp, and that's fine. But don't imply that there's any unanimity among all of those who are trying to suss out the future of world population, because that's just not honest.

Your study and analysis of the Africa situation seems very thorough and considered, even though extrapolating the results from that open system onto the larger, closed system of the whole planet does leave plenty of room for debate.

But insisting that your projections for the future have some kind of exclusive lock on the truth is immodest at best, and works against any good science that you might be doing. Demographic transition is only one view among several, including ecological overshoot, and each of them has its merits.

Simply labeling your opposition with the broad brush of "Malthusianism" is counterproductive, and frankly, seems a little desperate.

Even if it is not #1, it is wrong to minimize its importance.

Funny, but I don't hear Beck or Fox News trying to blame poor people for fucking too much. If it's a diversion, it's a bad one, since the entire point of a diversion is to get people to stop looking at something.

This sounds to me more like someone saw that wealthy people are getting behind some cause or another, and decided to write an opinion piece about why it's bad, rather than apply any critical thinking to the issue.

you take the lead in relieving the situation.

That's where all talk of 'controlling' population hits a wall, 'who chooses'?

It bears noting that Malthus was a shill for the rich, his pithy thesis was not written as an ecological statement but as a reactionary pitch against laws which would ease the suffering of the poor.

Overpopulation is a self-limiting problem.

When there's not quite enough to go around, numbers just naturally decrease over time until there is.

Takes time, though. Several generations. Birth rates go down, death rates go up. People don't live quite as long.

So we'll even be robbed of the drama: no big die-off, no "soylent volunteers." Just a lot of not very pleasant not-enoughness until Granny can't remember when.

A small population creeps outward to the edge of the dish, consuming everything in its path. Soon everything is consumed, and the population crashes. Remnants may survive for a long time on whatever food may have escaped the initial increase, and on the decomposing bodies of the dead excess population. I'm sure if they were cognizant of there situation in the beginning a number of them would have shrugged their shoulders and said "things will take care of themselves in time - don't worry".

We should be able to do a little better than mold in a petri dish. One problem with humanity reaching a theoretical maximum and then a natural decrease is that our "food" is all the other species on the planet, and we are already in the midst of an extinction event. How many more species have to go to make room for how many more of us, before we hit the wall?

From Nature's point of view, things do indeed take care of themselves, but from humanity's point of view, we should make no mistake about how unpleasant that "care" will be. Extinctions such as you describe are a particularly unpleasant part of the mess.

Yes, we should be able to do better than some mold in a petri dish. The accomplishments of individual humans gives us a lot of confidence in the notion. It's frustrating, though, to see how few realistic proposals have actually come forth, and to note the even smaller likelihood that anything on the necessary scale will actually be implemented. There's a surprising impoverishment of ideas about it.

I think a big part of the problem is that the usual statement of it is poorly framed. People think of "we" in terms of individual human beings, with faces and talents and abilities. The human population, though, is not the same "we" humans -- it's a population that behaves like populations behave. With a predicament on this scale, the efforts of individuals or even large groups of individuals just don't scale up sufficiently to have an appreciable effect.

Unfortunately, a more accurate statement of this particular problem doesn't seem to lead to any more workable proposals. It may even prove not to be a "problem" in the interesting sense of the word, i.e., a "solution" may not exist. In that case, it's more like a predicament, and the best response possible is just to manage it and muddle through, sort of like a chronic disease that can be managed but not cured.

An unappealing and humbling prospect, yes, but we can count on Nature to see to it that our numbers are suited to what our environment can sustain.

is summed up in this sentence:

"A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa."

It is unfair to blame the poor for climate change just because they have large families. They and their large families are not the people producing most of the world's human-generated carbon dioxide, their carbon footprints are small.

Monbiot also addresses the point some made here, that people in poor countries want to live like we do in the rich countries. The poor want to consume more.

Monbiot writes, "People breed less as they become richer, but they don’t consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock’s words, “hiding from the truth”. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich."

"So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where’s Class War when you need it?"

"It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich."


While those of us who are neither rich nor poor, and who have an environmental conscience, are recycling, turning down our thermostats, installing energy-efficient light bulbs, and buying Priuses, the rich are buying superyachts that burn 3400 liters of fuel an hour, heating their outdoor pools all winter, and laughing up their sleeves at our earnest efforts to save the world.

Consumption of resources is the real problem. The rich consume the most. They think they're entitled to consume as much as they want to, while Lovelock and others point fingers at the poor. What about pointing fingers at the rich for a change?