Although the "population problem" is rarely discussed in any meaningful way by politicians or mainstream media, on 26 July 2006, the Vancouver Sun ran a column I wrote that generated considerable feedback, some of which I'd like to share with you. You can check out the column here:
It starts: "The most frightening — and fascinating — thing I know is a graph of human population growth over the past millennium. Starting in about 1800 the curve suddenly spikes almost straight upward, and this incredible growth in human numbers continues today. In my lifetime alone, population has increased by over four billion people. And thanks to technological innovations and cheap oil, the impact of each person on the globe has increased even faster.
"Under this onslaught, Earth's vast cradle of resources, including oil, food grains, fish stocks and water, is being severely depleted, and the environment is being trampled underfoot. Humanity's unflagging desire to procreate and improve our lifestyle (read, own more and bigger) is finally catching up with us. It is truly scary, for the graph can only be interpreted one way: dire times lie ahead.
"The fascinating part is that few care. It's the damnedest contradiction! Humans can send people to the moon, split the nucleus of an atom and transplant a heart. Yet we won't do anything about the population freight train that's steaming toward a cliff. Why?"
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The article goes on to show how politicians and environmental groups are ignoring human population growth, which is yoked to a growing economy like two oxen (as I've mentioned in this blog). It also shows that savings made by conservation will be negated by population growth. If we care about the future, we need to drag the issue into the open and start talking about it.
Here are some of the (edited) responses I've received:
1) We fully agree.
"The bad news is that these are baby steps, and are totally swamped by developing countries like China and India, which are charging full-tilt ahead to raise their living standards."
And, indeed, when they look at the West, why shouldn't they? It appears that while China and India are trying to catch up with the West, we are trying to catch up with the Middle and Far East (in terms of population numbers). What an absurd race!
MW, Vancouver, BC
2) It was good to see you raise the issue of the "problem of population growth" in the Vancouver Sun today. I teach an economics course and always start the course with the basic economic concept that as humans we have seemingly unlimited demands for things and our economic systems, at the municipal, provincial and federal levels, all measure their success by the level of growth that has been achieved. Population growth underlies this global growth in demand and, as you point out, is exacerbated by the fact that income levels and economic activity are rising the fastest in the poorer countries where most of the people are located.
I was in Australia recently at a conference on Water Supply and Pricing and there was a speaker from UNESCO who was accountable for strategies on water issues. They have developed a strategy called ‘UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Scientific Cooperative Programme in Hydrology and Water Resources’ which develops strategies for dealing with challenges facing the world in the area of water supply. Not one of these strategies deals with population growth which clearly is one of the underlying problems. If the worlds’ population had not grown by 4 billion people in the last 55 years or so there would not be the same stresses on water that we now face in this world. But the even scarier problem is what impact continued population growth will have on water supplies. I asked this fellow from UNESCO why addressing population growth was not on the list of issues to be addressed and he indicated that while he understood it clearly was one of the underlying challenges to water issues, it was much too politically sensitive to be raised. He suggested that countries like India and Pakistan would never support any such reference to this issue.
I can only hope that more people like yourself raise this issue and that at some point it is taken seriously. Unfortunately history suggests that difficult issues like this are seldom taken seriously until we are forced to by impending dire consequences.
JB, by email
3) Your piece is brilliant … I have been a student and activist concerning what I perceive as major issues, and overpopulation — and its subsequent despoilation of the planet — is one of the main ones, if not THE main one.
NT, by email
4) Hi Hans, I was deeply involved in the environmental movement in the '70s with a group based out of U.B.C.
With growing concern I have also observed the fact that not only do precious few seem to care about the massive impending global trainwrecks rushing at us, I don't know more than a few people who have the slightest interest in even talking about them. Anytime I try and raise the subject of global warming, impending oil shortages or the problems of population growth, people give me an indignant, blank (why would I give a sh-t!) stare and quickly shift the conversation to another topic.
Even more disturbing is the opposition to any proposals to address global warming or population growth if they might have the slightest negative impact on the economy. Even though global extreme weather disasters are fast becoming "reality TV," there appears to be a widespread belief that there is no cost associated with doing nothing. [Even] assuming global warming is a gigantic hoax and that there is no downside to population growth (neither of which I believe), conserving resources would [still] seem to be a logical and reasonable proposition, except for the fact that it would probably negatively affect consumer spending. Here, more is indeed more when it comes to economic health.
Contemporary marketing strategies aimed at turning people into addictive, mindless consumers, and a state information overload might at least partly explain the paralyzing apathy of most. But still it seems odd that people who would normally have enough sense to seek shelter in the face of an (unproven) threat of impending rain or, worse lightning, would not be mobilized to act against a threat whose effects are seen almost daily on the news. Perhaps we as a society have reached a point where we can no longer distinguish fiction from reality.
DM, Sechelt, BC
The United States, the world's third most populous country, is increasing its population at just under one percent per year, almost 3 million new Americans each year. In Canada, with a similar population growth of just less than one percent, immigration plays an even bigger role, contributing 66% of total population growth.
This is robust growth, especially when compared to the birth dearth in western Europe and Japan, and not a good thing since (northern) North Americans are the most profligate consumers on the planet and we are already well past the Earth's carrying capacity.
About 35% of the US population growth is by immigration, with more than a million immigrants receiving permanent resident status annually (not to mention illegal immigrants).
Sadly, population (and immigration) are virtually never discussed in rational ways and certainly never by our policy makers. E-The Environmental Magazine broke this awkward silence with its May/June 2008 issue that tackles the issue head on and in depth. It states that immigration is an environmental concern because "America's rapid growth makes it nearly impossible to achieve sustainability."
Clearly, what is desperately needed is a national policy that assesses the big picture and integrates immigration, family planning, foreign-aid policies as well as including economic factors.
We need to start talking openly about immigration and how it fits into an overall population policy. What do you think? What kind of policies and practices would you like to see?
What makes me despair is that society faces a formidable double whammy, the growing population and the growing economy. We don't seem capable of slowing either. It's like an ever-accelerating treadmill. No matter how fast we run, we keep falling behind. Take the car, for example, a wonderful invention that greatly enhances our productivity and enjoyment of life. Over the past three decades there have been enormous strides in making them cleaner and more efficient. Yet deadly domes of smog hover over all major cities of the world, exacting a huge toll in deaths and health care.
The reason is simple: there are far more cars on the road than 30 years ago, and they are being driven further. In spite of the enormous technological improvements in cars, air pollution has worsened. The fundamental reason is that the population has grown, and because the standard of living (read economy) has improved, we can afford more and bigger cars.
This argument applies to virtually all technical improvements. Television technology has greatly reduced energy consumption, but now we buy bigger and bigger giant-screen TVs. Where is the savings? And so it will be with hybrid cars and other energy-efficient products. With an expanding economy, the savings we make on some items will simply be spent to buy more or bigger other items. And with the population continuing to grow, there will be more of us doing it.
This treadmill is unstoppable unless we tackle the fundamental forces driving it. How do we do that? I don't pose this question rhetorically. I'd like to hear your ideas. How do we tackle the treadmill of increasing population and economic growth?
Just read Steven Earl Salmony's take on some recent population research in Environmental Health Perspectives. This research shows something that not many of us have the stomach to contemplate."According to the empirical research (Hopfenberg 2003), human population growth is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this growth in human numbers gives rise to the mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more."The more we increase food production, the more the population grows, and the more hungry people there are. So we increase food production, which leads to an increase in population, and again there are those who go hungry.In other words, if the population grows, then the population of hungry people grows, too."The evidence suggests that the remarkably successful efforts of humankind to increase food production to feed a growing population results in even greater increase in population numbers."According to Salmony, the researchers call the perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population "a misperception, a denial of the physical reality of the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment in time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing, and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane — the produced food arrives too late."But this does not mean that human starvation is inevitable, says Salmony. Living within the Earth's carrying capacity is the secret."We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many civilized human communities today, because these nonhuman species are not annually increasing their own production of food."Among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like nonhuman species, 'primitive' human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and other ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food."Before the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment's physical capacity to sustain them because human population growth or decline is primarily a function of food availability (Hopfenberg 2003; Hopfenberg and Pimentel 2001)."I'm not sure I've wrapped my head around the ramifications of this research, but it certainly says something about unintended consequences.
. . . And vice versa. This is why, despite growing eco-awareness and myriad new ecoproducts on the market, the environment is wilting. These two juggernauts — human population and the economy — go hand in hand.
Last year in my province, the population grew 1.4 per cent while the gross domestic product (GDP) roared ahead at over 6 per cent. Our new arrivals need homes, schools, jobs, food, transportation and energy. And everyone wants a higher standard of living.
Population and economic growth are steamrolling over green improvements, yet no politician dares curtail them. The two juggernauts will continue to steam ahead until we understand the vicious circle.
The graphs below (from www.hans-hass.de) show just how in sync global population growth and global economic growth have been for the last 140 years, since the industrial revolution really began impacting the world.
According to William Rees, a University of British Columbia professor who co-developed the ecological footprint concept, "Almost everything we are willing to do is aimed at keeping our SUVs on the road."
"We protect economic growth at all costs," he says.
His research, which is supported by United Nations analyses and other studies, shows that human consumption far exceeds what the planet can sustainably support. As Rees says, we need to "face the beast in the lair." Drastic measures are needed.
