Letters to the Editor: archive
You are viewing post number 5 from the archive.population
(posted on 2007-05-27 05:17:28)
Let's keep this environmental thread going for a bit. Our politicians and media are, rightly, showing concern, though this usually manifests as mud-slinging and exhortations to build more stuff. There is an 'elephant in the room' here. Environmental and infrastructure overloads fundamentally are symptoms of out-of-control human population growth. This is acknowledged in most analyses (the documentary Crude Impact, recently aired on SBS in Australia, illustrated this in a chilling way). There are other factors of course - the existing population, guided by an aware government, can reduce its impact on the planet. But progress will be nullified if the population continues to balloon out of control. Yet some left-leaning environmentalists* are uncomfortable acknowledging the role of over-population in the disaster we are witnessing. I'm interested in why this is a difficult issue for us to deal with.
To take an example, every city in Australia now faces severe water shortages. This appears to be permanent. The populations in these areas increased by factors of two to five during the past few decades - and of course by a much higher factor since European settlement began. During this time nature didn't increase the amount of rain falling. If you have a rising population sharing an unchanging quantity of rain, you're going to have water shortages. You can build more dams, divert water from somewhere else, or build energy-consuming purification and desalination plants, but these create new environmental problems, and, if the population continues to grow, only buy us temporary breathing space anyway.
Basic biology - arithmetic really - says that if you increase the number of animals in a population without increasing their resources, the resources will run out. Typically what happens next is that the animals fight over what's left, until the population returns to a sustainable level. When animals do this we shrug our shoulders and say that nature is taking its course. When humans go thorugh this experience we realize that the "fighting each other" and "population reducing" parts of the cycle are horrific. We need to prevent this scenario.
It's inherently difficult for people to grapple with over-population. For a society to look at itself and say, 'we are too many', is difficult even to describe in a properly grammatical sentence. Who is commanding whom to populate less? To reduce the size of a city means to say to some or all of the people in it, 'You must have fewer children'. This is unpalatable. And you can't "undo" population like you can an ill-advised freeway or skyscraper - we need to act in advance of the problem. I think it's this unpleasantness and ethical complexity, relative to the simple pleasure of attacking political opponents, that stops us from addressing the population issue. However, sensitive environmentalists afraid of being painted as "anti people" and so on can take solace in a critical analysis of the pro-growth position that shows that the latter are the real bad guys in this story.
While population causes the environmental disasters we read about on the front page of the paper, the business section at the back spouts the mantra of endless growth**. This is because owners of real estate, mines and other finite resources want there to be increased competition for those resources, in order to raise prices and rents. Resource owners get away with pro-growth rhetoric because many environmentalists are afraid of responding, for the reasons outlined above. In particular, environmentalists are afraid of angering the religious right, or conversely, being painted as anti-immigrationist. Critically, we need to realize that a desire to prevent a population disaster is not an attack on any group, nation, religion or anything of the kind. This is a cheap accusation and we have to get past it if there is to be genuine action on the environment. The whole world is in this together. I'm not saying the solution to these complexities will be easy, but I do think it is time to face this sacred cow.
Rhetorical / logical failures like the pro-growth argument share a common sleight-of-hand. People in positions of power, for whom the poor are a resource to make a living from, want there to be more poor. It's easy for them to make this desire look like support for the poor. "We want there to be more of you!", shout the landlords over the parapets to the desperate throng outside. When the throng realize they would be worse off were there more of them, the landlords silence the dissenters, accusing them of being anti-church and the rest of it. This sneaky manoeuvre makes resource owners look like supporters of People Power. But they don't really want People Power at all - just more people.
* such as me, and, I'm guessing, you
** the sport and entertainment sections help us forget the whole thing
(added June 08: Sian Watkins at the Age has written an op-ed conveying a similar argument - and received some positive feedback in the letters page.)
reply 1 from Ms .45: Just a thought - when immigrants from cultures that have lots of babies come to countries that don't have lots of babies, in a couple of generations people from that culture are adopting the less-babies strategy. As a result, immigration is good for a net drop in the world's population as people adopt lower family sizes, and Australians (etc) should not fear it. I don't think it's unpalatable to say "You SHOULD have fewer children", or even "Having fewer children will mean oil and fresh water will last longer and there will be less pollution" (which allows people to make their own choice). We can't force anyone, but we can show and tell, and I think that many people will make the right decision. Still, I thank you for bringing it up - not enough people are tackling the Growth Fetish in a serious way.
reply 2 from jim: Hi Greg, check out the writing of James Howard Kunstler - "The Long Emergency" is a good place to start; its like Tim Flannery's "Weather Makers" but informed by hard science & much better written (Kunstler was a staffer for Rolling Stone thru much of the 1970s - he has a great way with colourfully acerbic metaphors). His webpage is at < http://www.kunstler.com/ >. The uncanny thing about this book - I read it about 2 months back - is that Kunstler identifies the sub-prime mortgage racket as the weakest component of the USA economy... it was written in 2004.
reply 3 from Greg: Thanks Jim. I found a precis at http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency . It's a sobering read that makes you rethink what 20th century progress really meant. His view of suburbia is punchy - basically a waste of farmland. He offers little in the way of solutions, and one suspects it is because he feels there isn't one.
reply 4 from Indifference Engine: Greg, yes, many people commenting on environmental problems fail to understand the basic malthusian logic you have laid out. But what we are seeing is not a simple malthusian population-versus-production/resource situation. In Australia, the population has not increased all that much, rather water supply has declined during a ten year drought. This may be due to changed inputs to the environment by humans, but a malthusian diagnosis is inaccurate. Similarly, China PRC has used very unpalatable methods to stabilise its own rampant population growth. But its resource consumption and pollution inputs have ballooned in spite of (no, because of) the stabilisation of the population. People in power/with wealth (i.e. those with a proportionately larger slice of the economic pie) do not usually want to increase poverty, they want their slice of the pie to be bigger. This can be achieved by increasing the proportion, or by increasing the overall pie size. The landlord-masses dichotomy looks increasingly silly in an age when many people live in rental accommodation while owning investment properties; as far as I can tell, my landlord wants my wages to increase. In my opinion, the indicators that we should use to predict or alleviate environmental damage are consumption of resources and waste production, which are only indirectly effected by the quantity of population. In the developed world, we are more efficient in the sense that our ratio of productivity/standard of living to environmental damage is higher, although in total we produce more environmental damage. I.e. we may pollute twice as much as an individual in a developing country while enjoying four times the standard of living. Once you accept that environmental degradation is not directly and irrevocably connected to population, then there is the possibility that we may be able to reduce our ‘footprint’ without draconian measures on population (whose growth has been slowing for some time anyway) or standard of living. Several model cities that are projected to have low or nil net environmental impact are currently being constructed in - of all places - the Middle East, so there is some glimmer of hope (although the technologies required will all come from technologically advanced, developed societies that can spare productivity for technological research - so productivity itself is not the enemy). Please don’t get me wrong though. In the medium term (100-200 years), I do expect increasing pollution and resource consumption, and a worsening of the deleterious environmental effects we are currently seeing (such as changes in climate patterns). But we will not offset this simply by reducing human population. [PS Forgive me spamming your blog with my essays. We have too many interests in common!]
reply 5 from Greg: Thanks for contributing to this thread IE. It's an important topic which I believe is becoming critical. I have to take issue with your assertion though that the population has not increased much. The world population has *tripled*, and Australia's doubled, since WW2 - living memory for many. This has been achieved by more intensive methods of farming and energy consumption - in effect, "taking out a loan from the environment" which we are now beginning to pay back. It's disturbing to see human population treated as some kind of post-modern abstraction, as though our species is not subject to real-world constraints. (Not accusing you of this, but I've seen it a lot.) This isn't my field and I won't repeat the arguments of others. Good explanations can be found for example at http://www.population.org.au .
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