Homo Collosus

One thing many people agree on is that the biggest problem for the environment - which means the biggest problem for humanity itself - is that there are just too many of us.

What does "too many humans" mean? 

When I'm reading a book or looking at a computer screen, the image that comes to mind in association with the word "overpopulation" is one of overcrowded, impoverished living conditions on the other side of the planet, either south or east. When you think of human overpopulation, do you picture your own family? Do you think of Saskatchewan as an overpopulated part of the world?

Now that we have the ecological footprint concept, the sense of human overpopulation has become a more complex idea than just crowding, something like,

"people using more resources than can be replaced, and producing more waste than can be absorbed, by the environment around them." 

The environmental concerns of the world have to do with us not being able to continue to live as luxurious a lifestyle as we currently do. There are literally billions of people on the planet who don't live as richly as North Americans do, but who supposedly want to and who are making an effort to increase their resource use. There is just not enough to go around.

The environmentally-conscious person's conundrum goes something like this:

• I don't want to give up the luxuries I've got, because they're not really luxuries, they're necessities. I don't know how to live on less
• I'm just one among billions of people, so what I do makes no difference, unless I can convince everyone I know to reduce their consumption too

That's pretty difficult stuff, but what else can we do? In practical terms, the logic continues like this:

• Since reduction in consumption is at worst impossible and at best painfully slow, we need to make the population stop growing
• The population grows fastest in "developing" countries
• We must get people in developing countries to reduce their birth rates. This requires a massive social program to convince them to stop having sex, to use condoms, and to have hysterectomies and vasectomies.

Simple!

Fortunately - and you can read about this in most of the latest and most up-to-date scientific studies and recommendation reports - there's a way to get this to happen all around the world, all by itself. It's called the Demographic Transition:

The Demographic Transition feels like God's gift to the North American economy. As George W. Bush explained to the people of America and the world, "economic growth is key to environmental progress;" through the magic of the Demographic Transition, economic development is our way out of the converging crises of the twenty-first century.

The way it works is like this:

1. at first, in "pre-developed" societies, the birth rate is high and the death rate is also high. As a result, there is a stable population.
2. then there is a reduction in the environmental resistance to the population and the death rate drops dramatically. The environmental resistance was probably relieved by the introduction of new medicines, and then it was prevented from returning by the introduction of a new and increasing food supply.
3. eventually, with the new, higher standards of living in the society - through education of women, more robust economic systems, and lots of great new gizmos to play with and TVs to watch, people start having fewer babies. The birth rate begins to decline.
4. ultimately, the population stabilizes once again, with birth rates and death rates matching once again, but each at a much lower level. Everyone is happy!

So, the only thing we have to do to solve the environmental crisis is to increase the standard of living in less-developed countries! We just have to get all Asians, Indians and Africans to live the North American lifestyle (which, of course, they're eager to do). Then all the environmental problems will go away because once couples realize that they can be happy through shopping and continuing education, they'll have fewer babies because they don't need them to help eke out the meager living they once had to put up with. Also, abortion and birth control will be available to those women who now have enough leisure time to accidentally get pregnant.

All you need to do is send lots of money to foreign aid organizations. Oh, and write to your politician, letting him know how the global economy works.

Wait a minute.

Wasn't the North American lifestyle the original problem?

And guess what else. The full Demographic Transition never happens. It's another one of those hypotheses upon which most of our institutionalized programs are built.

The only partial demographic transition that has been seen (it's only been seen in its first three stages) is here in North America. When this continent was colonized by Europeans, and after the First Nations populations were decimated, the "empty" continent provided a massive resource supply to the tiny population of white settlers: effectively a human carrying capacity much larger than the human population at the time. In response to the large and growing food supply, these settlers' family sizes were gigantic: ten, twelve, fifteen children were not unheard of. (My own grandmother had ten children, her sister had seventeen, and my great-great-grandfather fathered twenty-one children!)

This process of "demographic transition" continued until increasing resource use per person (i.e. increasing consumption and need for luxury lifestyle) and increasing population began to hit resource limits. When was that? Well, there was a hint of it in the 1930's - followed by a baby boom immediately afterward. As a matter of fact, natural population increase (that is, more births than deaths) continued right through the twentieth century.

Population stabilization in North America is only starting to happen right now, and it has nothing to do with voluntary birth control or with government vasectomy programs.

Education of women in poor countries and the raising of standard of living is the number one response that our society has come up with for dealing with every single environmental crisis from energy limits to climate change to pollution.

This response has never worked and will never work.

Indeed, it only makes the problem much worse.

But it's a great way to sell things.

What happens when hierarchical societies ("more developed countries") conquer ("contact") tribal ("pre-developed") societies is that there is an immediate introduction of new supplies of food and medicine. The work is almost always done by religious missionaries.

The systemic purpose of this is to get non-hierarchical societies hooked on the power-trip of the global economy, around which our modern true religion is based.

The individuals actually doing the front-line work of foreign aid are usually just trying to help the people to live a better way. But by increasing the effective carrying capacity for the human population in a new area, colonizers prompt exactly the same population boom that happened in North America when European settlers arrived and began to pioneer the wild frontier.

The resulting ecological damage in these now-developing countries is immediate and heartbreaking.

There is one important difference between what happened here in the Americas and what happens on an island community or in a low-carrying-capacity African tribal society when it is colonized by a European or American military force. The difference is that the resource supply in the Americas was truly enormous compared to the size of the European population that claimed it, whereas the increased food supply in these other colonized societies is entirely artificial.

The consequence of this artificial new energy supply is that the increased population in "developing" societies is entirely dependent on the continuous influx of foreign food, medicine and other resources. These societies are terribly vulnerable to the slightest whims of the global economic system and their own often-corrupt governments.

What to Do About Overpopulation
Government and private spending on birth control programs and trying to convince people not to have more than a certain number of kids is about as useful an approach to solving humanity's problems as fueling up in the cool morning hours to prevent peak oil and carpooling more often to prevent climate change.

People will have as many babies as they can afford (in time and money), and rich North Americans can only afford a couple kids because of the massive resource needs of our unbelievably coddled (and, sad to say, incompetent) children. Not that I want to, but in a tribal setting, I could raise 50 kids on the resources used by the average suburban family with two kids. It's far more important that the people in this world have changed minds than that they have vasectomies.

The global population will stabilize (and actually is stabilizing right now) for exactly the same reason that biological populations of any species have always stabilized: environmental resistance. In the twenty-first century, energy limits have been reached and environmental resistance to human population growth has begun to accelerate at all three ecological levels:

1. social limits - the quality of life promised by increasing consumption peaked in the early 1970's and has been declining ever since. This means more and more people are becoming disenchanted with the consumer lifestyle and are withdrawing support from it. This affects resource use per person as well as family size; the ecological footprint begins to decrease
2. biological limits - shh, don't say where you learned this, but global food supply peaked early in the new millennium. We need everyone to stay really, really calm about this, okay? When food supply begins to diminish, population stops growing. Also, the economy collapses and people really freak out.
3. physical limits - modern society stopped being able to conquer new land areas in the 1800's, but that worked out okay because just as we were starting to run out of spaces for more population growth, we substituted space and slaves with fossil fuels, particularly oil. Oil supply peaked in 2005 and our entire global economic system is now unraveling because it is based on a continued increase in oil consumption. There is simply no way to keep growing our food and producing our many products in the same quantities and shipping all this stuff around the world at the same rate as before. As a result, most Westerners' ecological footprints are beginning to decline - whether we like it or not.

It will take a while yet for everyone to acknowledge that something really big is going on, but that doesn't change the forces that are at work. Nature is solving the human overpopulation problem exactly the same way as all natural problems have ever been solved: by never letting up on those laws of thermodynamics.

The important question is only, "Knowing this, how shall we live our lives"?