Food for Fought - How to win the battle against overpopulation
December 25, 2008
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
Back about 35 years ago, a science fiction writer named Philip José Farmer wrote a novella called “Seventy Years of Decpop.” The premise was that a mad-scientist sort released an aerosol that blanketed the entire earth and rendered 99.999% of humanity sterile. The story covered, in jumps, the seventy years following this action, at the end of which humanity’s population was reduced to some 200 million (from nearly five billion at the beginning), and was looking forward to a bright new future on a clean earth with lots of resources and incredible high tech.
Farmer tends to be an annoying writer, but every once in a while he comes up with something that just stays with the reader for life. The first book of his Riverworld series had a similarly unforgettable premise.
The world population will, according to the Census Bureau, be 6,750,819,383 persons as of the end of this month. That’s roughly double what the population might have been had Farmer’s story not been fiction in 1973.
Farmer postulated that humanity, after a couple of decades of turmoil and deep depression, would come to grips with what had happened to it and, by the end of seventy years, and most of the sterile elders having died off, would form a utopian society. That would be nice.
It’s worth noting that many of the problems we blame on overpopulation stem more from greed and stupidity than anything else. Nearly all famines going back over the past 300 years are political, rather than natural. It’s one thing to look at places like Somalia where famine and need are exacerbated by a huge drought, but Australia has an even bigger drought going on, and there’s no starvation there. Conversely, the past century has seen the spectre of starvation in the world’s bread baskets – famine in the Ukraine, India, south Central China, on the southern steppes of Russia, and now, Zimbabwe. These are all areas where the ability to grow crops far exceeded the needs of the resident population. Yesterday, one of the network news shows had a piece on how a group had realized that much of the 70 tons of medical waste America threw away every day wasn’t actually “waste” at all, but outmoded equipment, supplies, and other material that was still perfectly useable and badly needed throughout the third world. As a result, about a hundred tons of such items are being shipped to places that are still using ironframe spring beds (rarely seen outside of seedy flophouses here) as hospital beds. I watched this with a mixture of pleasure and sadness: pleasure that it was happening, and sadness because it took so long for anyone to start doing this, and the realization that the approaching depression will ensure that such supplies will dwindle rapidly as hospitals here struggle to survive. Even our pollution could be cut drastically by reduction in waste and cleaner and more efficient industry.
Even if we stabilized our population at 9 billion (a best case scenario that doesn’t involve such horrors as thermonuclear war or a vast pandemic), we could clean up our act and stop hopelessly fouling our nest while ruining billions of lives, the way we aren’t now.
That said, the only – repeat only – long range answer is to reduce our numbers.
It won’t make famine go away. As noted, most famines are caused by politics, rather than natural causes. And cleaner and more efficient industry is productive, and will be beneficial in all circumstances.
But there is an approach that will address both the issues of political inequity and fear that lead to famine, and, in the longer run, solve the problem of the ever increasing population of humans on the planet.
Back at the dawn of the 19th century, Robert Malthus first recognized the explosive potential of population growth, and studied the phenomenon. He recognized that the population of a species rises to fill the available space and food supply, and recognized that increases in both would lead to sharp increases in population. He was aware of the boom-bust cycle seen in many animal species of good food supply, explosive population growth, and a large die off when the food supply diminished and the number of available predators increased to take advantage of -their- increased food supply. He also correctly noted that different factors would apply to human population growth because of our greatly enhanced productivity from our “civilization,” and a general lack of predators. He assumed different checks on our numbers would come into play, including “misery, vice, and poverty.”
Malthus makes for grim reading, and there’s nothing in this essay to suggest he was wrong, damn his eyes. Indeed, in college we all wore black and told the pretty girls that overpopulation, the Malthusian catastrophe, meant we were all doomed, so we might as well have sex before the gotterdammerüng. That, in itself, speaks volumes about the psychology of the human condition, even if Malthus and other intellectual pretensions didn’t prove the master key to unlock every chastity belt on campus.
But Malthus missed one element that results in human population control, and for this he can hardly be blamed, because the element simply did not exist, not in any human society and most certainly not in nature.
That element could be described as “food security.” It’s simply this: a culture in which individuals are secure in the belief that they will have adequate food and shelter all of their lives simply doesn’t reproduce very much. A family that has adequate income for food, housing, and clothing, and knows that no matter what happens to their job and after they retire those basics will still be there, rarely has more than two children. They don’t NEED to have a dozen children because half will die before they are five and the rest will hopefully live to take care of mom and dad when they are unable to work at the age of 50.
Societies in which all the people are well fed, well clothed, and well housed simply didn’t exist in Malthus’ day, and indeed, didn’t come into being until after World War II.
It shows in the birthrates by nation. Australia and Canada, for example, have vast tracts of land available for population growth, even if you exclude the Outback and the North, respectively. They have food supplies that comfortably exceed the needs of the population, According to Malthus, they should have the highest birthrates in the world. (The world birthrate is about 20.18 births per 1,000 women). Australia has a birthrate of 12.55, which ranks it 145th among the world’s nations. Canada’s is 10.29, 165th, and the Canadian government encourages immigration. The entire European Union averages 10.25, and that’s despite the earnest effort of the Catholic church to encourage fecundity. Japan is the lowest among nations, at 7.87, and Hong Kong, a part of the posterboy for runaway population, China, has a birthrate of 7.37.
These areas all have one thing in common: a population that is well fed and secure, and not living hand to mouth or in fear of starvation when they become too old to work. In the United States, where there is food anxiety and apprehension about day-to-day living, we have a birthrate that is 14.18, which reflects not the overall national wealth, but the vast inequity with which that wealth is distributed.
But the factor Malthus missed, the one that is even kinder – if slower to take effect – than Farmer’s sterilization of the race – is that of life security.
It certainly beats depending on “misery, vice, and poverty” to contain our numbers, and is far better than waiting numbly for an even greater Malthusian catastrophe, such as nuclear war or a vast plague.
Want to control human population without making people suffer?
Feed the world. And make sure the food supply is constant.
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