Cav's Place

It’s Global Population Speak Out time again and, unlike last year, this time around I plan to keep it relatively short and simple. Imagine that we’re sitting down and having a little chat during which I’m trying to explain just why is overpopulation such a huge problem. But first I’m going to ask you to watch a short video, since a graphical representation should put things into perspective better than numbers.

As you can see, while there has almost constantly been a net growth, and while that net growth would have ended up being a problem anyway, the real population explosion came with the advent of modern medicine, proving once again that we are fully capable of immediately turning a good thing into a bad one. Modern medicine has increased the lifespan of people and has greatly reduced the number of children dying at birth or during infancy, but the birth rates failed to drop according to the new death rates.
To give a very simple example, I could say that if a couple had six children before the advent of modern medicine and four of them died at birth or during infancy and the other two would have had children of their own only after the premature deaths of their parents, you’d have no real population growth. If that same situation would repeat itself after modern medicine would ensure the survival of all six children, you’d have significant population growth. But even that’s not enough, since it doesn’t factor in the longer lifespans. In order to do that, I’d have to point out that if a couple has one child, who also has one child, who in turn also has one child, all of this happening before the deaths of the two original couple members, you’d still have some population growth. That should make it easier to understand how low should birth rates now be in order to even maintain the current population levels. And keep in mind that the world is already severely overpopulated, so the population actually needs to drastically drop, meaning that a large number of people need to have no children at all if we’re to have even the slightest chance of success.
Sure, we could reduce population the other way as well, by greatly increasing the number of deaths and reducing the average lifespan once again. It’d be very effective and there certainly are various conspiracy theories saying that it’s already being done, especially considering what’s being put into our food, but is that what you wish? Would you rather have people get sick more often and die younger once again just to be able to preserve these completely unsustainable birth rates that so many people feel they have a “right” to? Would you rather give up your life and the lives of others just to be able to throw other souls into this rotten society we have created for ourselves, only to have them ultimately also share your fate? Ultimately, would you rather suffer for the sole purpose of creating more suffering?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because I didn’t explain why I’m saying that we’re too many. I won’t start with facts, figures and studies regarding the carrying capacity of Earth because I said I’ll keep this relatively short and simple and I’m sure you can find those yourselves if you so desire. I’ll just try to follow a logical path to its conclusion.
Like any other living being, humans consume resources. However, unlike the other species, which tend to be more specialized, humans consume many different types of resources. In addition, human consumption also generates a lot of waste, often in the form of harmful substances. This makes each individual human have a significant environmental footprint, depleting existing resources through consumption and also reducing their potential regeneration through pollution. It also means that, unlike other species, humans are much harder to keep in check through the availability of certain specific resources. When the supply of a certain type of resource dwindles or is exhausted, we tend to start replacing it with another and continue our growth, never giving the ecosystem time to rebalance as other species are usually forced to do.
Yes, a person who is not poor could argue that our consumption patterns are the problem, because people generate too much unnecessary waste and use non-renewable resources when renewable alternatives could exist. But, as I said, that’s only true for those who are not poor and, in fact, most people are poor. If you’re reading this it means you’re not among them and could perhaps have difficulty understanding the full extent of the issue, but the fact is that the majority of the individuals that make up humanity live in poor conditions, being able to use even less than they’d actually need in order to attain anything resembling a reasonable standard of living. So, in all fairness, while the consumption and waste generation of the minority could and certainly should drastically decrease, the environmental footprint of the majority should actually increase. That prevents any significant reduction of the average individual footprint. In fact, it could even require increasing it. And I think anyone who’s willing to look can see that we are already consuming more than our poor planet can regenerate and generating more waste than it can absorb.
It could also be argued that, even under these conditions, a lot of these problems could be solved by switching to renewable resources and adapting our production methods to reduce the use of pollutants. And that is true, but only to a certain extent. For example, we could certainly generate electricity without using non-renewable resources, but we’d still need some of those resources in order to build the systems required for this, not to mention needing the actual space to install them in. We could also switch back to fully organic agriculture and fair and clean practices when it comes to livestock, but how many people could we adequately feed under those circumstances and how much space would we need for all those new farms that’d have to, for example, manage without artificial fertilizers and avoid depleting the soil? And what about something as obvious as space? What about being able to have a house with a reasonably sized yard instead of being squeezed into a towering apartment building, or being able to go for a walk without needing to squeeze through the crowds. And let’s not even mention traffic… All of these things show us that there is indeed a limit for our population and that we have exceeded it even now, despite making use of existing non-renewable resources and expanding in a desperate attempt to delay paying the price for as long as possible.
And I didn’t even mention all the other species that we share this planet with and that we carelessly sweep aside and drive towards extinction as we look for just a little more space, just a few more usable resources, just a little more fertile soil, constantly expanding like any ancient empire you can think of, which couldn’t sustain itself without constantly conquering new lands and which inevitably crumbled under its own weight when there was nothing left to conquer. That’s where we are and that’s what we’re doing: Reenacting the fall of any major empire in our history on a global scale, proving that we haven’t learned anything in all this time.

Lastly, I’d like to counter an argument I have seen used plenty of times so far, namely the idea that perhaps that one child a person chooses not to have would have been the one to figure out a way to solve all these problems. For the sake of argument, let’s ignore everything I already pointed out and assume that such a solution that’d allow for continued population growth, or even for maintaining the current population, could possibly exist. In that situation, it does indeed follow that such a child could potentially be the one who’d figure it out. But the chances of that happening are infinitesimal at best, while the fact that said child would consume resources and generate waste in varying amounts is a certainty.
To put it into perspective, I’ll say that having a child because that child could potentially solve all these problems is something like going into a crowded place with a loaded gun, closing your eyes, spinning around a few times and then shooting at random. Sure, you can’t completely rule out the possibility of somehow managing to hit someone who was just about to start a killing spree or worse, but the odds are so firmly stacked against it that nobody could even conceive of something like that as a viable solution for fighting crime. So why are people thinking that having a child could ever prove to be a solution for this problem?

To end with some numbers, I’ll say that I firmly believe that a sustainable human population is certainly below three billion, and I’d feel much better if it’d actually be around or even below two billion. It’s too late to avoid reaching seven billion now, but perhaps we still have a small chance of reversing this trend and bringing the population down to a sustainable level in time if we drastically regulate people’s right to breed and take a few other measures that won’t cause any real harm. If not, the problem will eventually solve itself in an unspeakably terrible manner.
One scientist was noticing the trend and pointing this problem out over two centuries ago. He was laughed at and silenced. Others were doing the same nearly 40 years ago. They were also silenced, because the general public didn’t want to know. We could have had all this time to act, but we failed to do so. Yet we may still have a third and last chance now. At this point, all solutions are hard and no path is smooth, but maybe, just maybe, if we act immediately, we can still choose to solve this problem ourselves and in a reasonable manner before it will be solved for us in the hardest and most terrible way imaginable. We may still have this choice. The question is, what will we do with it?