The great red herring of overpopulation - Part 3

The Bodega Brothers sing a song dedicated to the neo-Malthusians: YouTube

Yes, if we're going to carry on with predatory capitalism consuming away at itself, then we will just have to put a stop to the proliferation of human life in general. Apparently the two themes are generally incompatible. We need a good war. A war to end all wars is surely on order and an excellent make work project for the masses.  We are so much gum on the bottoms of their shoes. Something is surely being hatched behind closed doors and in the shadows away from democratic debate. It's much too quiet as it was during that down time between the great wars. The opportunities are limitless.

My God we're like viruses! We just keep replicating. I'm convinced now that people are the enemy. Too many proles. It's time for masters of the universe to cull the herd. I think it was Phil Windsor who recruited Prince Barnyard of the Netherlands to head up the WWF. Bernhard of Lippe-Beasterfield was a Nazi sympathizer, too.

And Al Gore is a great protector of the environment and humanitarian. In the 2000s he linked up with David Blood, a Goldman Sachs investment genie and formed Generation Investment Management. GIM is a hedge fund that makes money by preventing economic development and poverty reduction for hundreds of millions of human beings in the capitalist third world by speculation on carbon credits. Blood and Gore stand to profit handsomely from the Malthusian propaganda. By the magic of free market economics, corrupt representatives for billions of people may trade away any hope for a better future so that privileged westerners may become rich and powerful at the expense of millions.

I'm just jumping into this topic here, but has anyone seen the new Canadian documentary Surviving Progress, sort of based on the book A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright?  I saw it at the Vancouver Int'l Film Fest last weekend and was pretty disappointed to see Wright spouting neo-Malthusian ideas. He said the population of the Earth has to go down to about 2 billion for us to survive. Or rather, some of us, I guess.  Too bad, because I liked his Stolen Continents.  The rest of the documentary is relatively conventional and uninsipring, sadly-- I had high hopes :/

i don't know, i think there's merit in the claims that like economic growth, population growth cannot be exponential.

Especially in a modern resource destroying, people living in cities era.  Perhaps if we lived in a different way, but that's not the case, and if we lived sustainably there probably wouldn't be so many of us.

The thing is the more people the more we burn fossil fuels, the more we destroy land to farm monocultures for food, the more we overfish the oceans, the more species we drive into extinction by taking land, etc.

I think this CAN be racist but it doesn't HAVE to be, depends on who's using the argument.  

link on the blink

You mean a British billion? The one with 12 zeroes? yikes!

Ralph Nader coined the phrase "Unsafe at Any Speed". Capitalism is "Unsustainable at any Population Level".

The Guardian: Why population hysteria is more damaging than it seems

Sorry for being technical but when I divide the land area of the planet (148 million km2) by the population of the world (6.8 billion souls) I end up with roughly 20000 square meters each. That's a 200 by 100 meter lot of land, and that's without deducting the land area that is uninhabitable. 200 by 100 to feed, house and energize one person. Surely at some population level, assuming we don't grow the earth land mass, it becomes hard to sustain regardless of ideology. My math may be wrong?

I live on a quarter acre of land, and I can grow enough vegetables to supply more than one family easily. I've not come close to max'ing out my vegetable garden plots. Most of my property is either green grass, weeds, my house, or gravel driveway. 

We have one billion chronically-hungry people, and none of them live in socialist Cuba. It's a failure of capitalism in democratic capitalist India, Ethiopia, Chad, Congo, Bangladesh etc.

80% of chronically hungry nations are exporting food to "the market" while anywhere from 4 to 10 million human beings die agonizing deaths from starvation and related diseases each and every year like clockwork.

It's a glaringly obvious failure of an economic system that fails miserably to satisfy real demand for food.

Capitalism has been a monumental failure for billions of people whether good economic times or bad.

Well yes, global capitalism has been a monumental failure for most of us.

That does not mean that there are no limits to growth. In fact, hunger and periodic famine were the norm through most of our history, and our population was held in check by such limits.  

WHile there are some connections between capitalism, industrialization and population (for one thing, that they led to a population boom in Europe) the attempt to make an agrument against capitalism by trying to discredit concern over population is screwy and unfounded, IMO.

I don't know, Fidel. I think I could point to some evidence of food and resource shortages in the former East bloc, Kampuchea, North Korea, among other places,  if you think that counts. And no, I'm not trying to attack alternatives to capitalism. I am just pointing out that it is not the only factor.

And I am not sure what you are refering to or trying to say in your last paragraph. I am talking about the fact that Europe's population quadrupled between 1700 and 1900. Much of that had to do with the introduction of the potato, which was done for both in the interests of the public, and in having a more efficiently-fed workforce.

MS, can you provide this democratic socialist with any historical evidence? No theory please.

And a PS : "James Lovelock puts the sustainable figure at 1 billion...and not a American billion either."

That was meant to suggest the EArth's bearing capacity of the American consumer, as opposed to, say, the Indian consumer. Bugger all to do with the differing weight given to a mathematical figure. Simply what each national would consume at their given level of lifestyle and expectation.

If you look it up, you will discover that the former USSR was Cambodia's main source of relief aid up to 1988. The capitalist West turned their backs on Cambodia and VietNam after 1975 or so, the same as they did after abandoning Afghans to their own devices when the CIA's and Brits proxies tore that country apart from 1992 to 1996.

The doctor and the madman bombed the living daylights out of Cambodia in paving the way for Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge to takeover. The Reaganauts and Thatcherites insisted that the Khmer Rouge have a seat at the UN and refused to acknoledge the killing fields up the late 1980s. For years the Western world aided and abetted the worst mass murderers  since Adolf Hitler: Pol Pot and his dreaded Khmer Rouge.

If you want to consider other factors, then consider that North Koreans had little trouble feeding themselves while trading freely with the former USSR. It's a country the size of Mississippi located in a mainly mountainous part of the peninsula and suffering inclement weather patterns of which typhoon season can leave the mostly lowland farming districts flooded and crops destroyed by nature. The USA has been at the forefront preventing humanitarian food aid to N.Korea, Cuba, Vietnam etc over the course of a cold war and continuing today. Blocking humanitarian aid is illegal according to the UN.

Same was true of 1970s Yugoslavia, a former country described by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic as having the largest middle class in the world as a percentage of a country's workforce. Free market diktats which the banking cabal and WTO, IMF and Western world neoliberal institutions forced on that country were criminal and led to civil war and very similar to what has occurred in Egypt, Libya, and every other country where economic shock therapy requires military backup to prevent an outbreak of popular revolt, or in other words, democracy.

We have native people of the Andes region to thank for the potato not thieving capitalists. Sorry. 

Where capitalists were influential with the potato was Black '47 in Ireland. Millions starved to death while pork and corn were exported to "the market" from a dozen or more Irish sea ports. British Whigs and Tories argued for two years before any relief was organized for the Irish colony. The Irish famine was one of many deliberate famines caused by a genocidal economic ideology. Capitalism is the dominant economic ideology today, and never have there been more chronically hungry people in the world as there are now.

Capitalism is a colossal failure. It has failed in every experiment since 14th century Italy, and it's failing today. Are you surprised? You shouldn't be.

Poor countries with high fertility rates need freedom, children, and socialism in the form of public pensions, socialized medicine, public education etc

They need socialism not capitalist baubles or promises that never materialize in the capitalist economic long run.

The major cause of anthropogenic climate change is an economy locked into burning fossil fuels for energy (of course the climate change we have experienced over the past few decades is mostly anthropogenic, or anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming natural climate change). Anthropogenic climate change is also caused by deforestation (and historically, reforestation and afforestation may have caused cooling episodes). Also anything else anthropogenic that reduces carbon sinks or turns them into sources. Emissions from deforestation and effectiveness of carbon sinks are more difficult to calculate though.

There is no evidence to suggest that current food production is sustainable and plenty of evidence to the contrary (soil depletion, water use, fishery decline, etc.). That means though that we should be concentrating on what food is produced, how food is produced, and how it is distributed, before we consider how many people it is distributed to.

While a more equitable society can undoubtedly sustain more people with the same resources, that (the same resources) is not an available option given depletion of non-renewable resources, inevitable mismanagement of renewable resources regardless of the economic system, and natural and anthropogenic climate change and other environmental changes. To say that the sustainability of a population or an economy is more of a social issue than a matter of hard physical limits is simply hubris. They are both important.

As for Lovelock, he was obviously talking about one thousand million, not one million million. If he was talking about the population under a capitalist system at average North American standards of living, he is probably overestimating. I don't know how many people the Earth can sustain indefinitely under the best possible economic system and nobody else does either. Which means no-one can say that a population of 7 billion is sustainable under any conceivable system either.

Lovelock was talking about one thousand million. His books sell all over the world. And he would not be imagining the consumption habits of the average American with cash to spare. I don't believe he has any expectation of that being realized. That is why he also writes (wrote) about the effects to be expected from rising temperatures driving populations northward on the continents - and why the British defence ministry, taking his numbers seriously - decided to maintain their nuclear arsenals. Gwyn Dyer reported that on the publication of a new book some five years back.

And of course, belief systems and budgets that rule out measures of contraception - even though there's no sign of dieout of libidinal urges - suggests those northern cottages may become year-round residences. :) (please don't take that seriously, just trying to break the pall of pessimism).

Marie Antoinette would have loved the population fetishists. Imagine:

"Your Majesty, hundreds of millions of people have no food security; their foodlands have been turned into monoculture croplands for export to the imperialist metropolises; they are dying of preventable diseases; their water resources are being depleted and poisoned by industrial agriculture, manufacturing, and mining; their forests are being cut down to make way for mining and pasture land; their energy resources are dwindling; their children are maimed and poisoned from working in sweatshops and factories; they can't even afford to buy the electronic gadgets they help manufacture for export to North America and Europe; their fisheries have been decimated by unsustainable factory-ship practices; they can't afford to buy the genetically-modified, patented seeds they need to grow food crops; climate change is devastating their habitats with floods, droughts, and monsoons; they are forced to live in refugee camps because they have been displaced by proxy wars backed by western imperialists."

"Let them stop having babies. Here, give them some of these condoms and birth-control pamphlets. Once they get the message, they'll be able to live just fine on what they've got with fewer mouths to feed. And send them copies of my latest speech on the need to reduce our personal consumption."

And natural gas, which is turned into fertilizer.

Wow. Debate brought to a new hitherto unplumbed level.

I'm sure he just wanted to get that out of the way.

I don't know Unionist. I think we have been here before.

And I don't know who this is directed at:

"It is commonly believed that overpopulation is some absolute phenomenon and will only get worse in the future..."

But I am arguing AGAINST the notion that it is one absolute phenomenon.

Well M. Spector, that might be because my name is not Schwartzman.

In fact I agree with a great deal of what they and you are saying about global inequality, affluent nations over-using resources, and inefficiencies in our food production,

Yes, I recognize that some people (though perhaps not 98 percent of scientists) do blame overpopulation and see it as a single thing, but I do think there are far more people who recognize that there are many factors at play, as I do.

And I also agree (and in fact said) that the best way forward is raising the standard of living, and making reproductive health services and education available to those who want it (as opposed to either coerced sterilization, or denial)

I guess one area where I am not so sure is the assumption that there are no limits at all that we need to be concerned with - that switching to different energy sources is as easy as writing it. The green revolution which has allowed us to keep ahead of global population is, after all driven by oil.

And I am not that sure, either, about the future availability of water - something which is not so easy to move to places where it is scarce, and  which the Schwartzmans did not mention at all as a drinking or agriculture resource. 

And I think I have made my other arguments on this clear enough.

I find this a straw man argument, as Wackernagel and Rees' work on ecological footprints suggests not that the Earth is overpopulated, but that humans are in overshoot because of the modes of production and consumption. Given that we agree that the statement that the Earth is overpopulated is not an absolute, inelastic truth, what is the probability that the current population can be sustained even if the modes of production and consumption were quickly put on a more sustainable and equitable footing? I ask this because environmental conditions are not a constant, and the damage done by unsustainable modes of production and consumption will likely not be repaired quickly. For example, even if humans stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately, there is still a significant possibility that we will still experience a 2 degree global mean temperature rise. And the evidence suggests that the current level of food production is not sustainable even under current environmental conditions.

I don't know the answer to that question, and nobody else does either. What I do know is that the probability is significantly greater than it is under the current capitalist system of production and environmental exploitation, and that's why the fight for ecosocialism is so important.

It is quite possible that capitalism has so despoiled the earth that we have reached (or soon will reach) certain irreversible tipping points - in climate change, soil degradation, aquifer depletion and contamination, and the life in the oceans, to name but a few possibilities - that will make it impossible under any system of political economy to avoid a catastrophic die-off of human populations. It is in fact certain, in my mind, that such tipping points and resultant die-offs (as well as widespread barbarism among the surviviors) will occur if capitalism is not eradicated, and we don't have much time left. Certainly not enough time to make drastic cuts in population levels without committing mass murder and abolishing reproductive rights altogether - and even cutting the world's population in half would not stop the profit-driven plunder of the environment that continues apace in the present system. It could at best "buy more time" - but for us to do what? Continue with the current profligate and unsustainable system, but with fewer mouths to feed, and fewer hands to do the labour?

Humanity needs nothing less than a revolution, and population reduction is no substitute.

It does at that, but in such a way as to avoid as much as possible the reductions that would certainly flow from direct and violent confrontation.

i don't know if poor people have babies to feel powerful...it's more likely connected to the lack of education/access to resources and contraception/access to safe abortion/etc. that lead to a higher birth rate.  Also the need for a large family to work the family business/farm and especially with higher infant mortality rates...

perhaps if we in the west didn't prolong life past reasonable, natural limits to the point where we're alive but can't function or really LIVE, we'd do the earth a favor?

I found this quite a thoughtful reply. We must assume/hope that the probability that an increased population can be sustained if the modes of production and consumption are put on a more sustainable and equitable footing is non-zero, or at least if it isn't the result of doing that will result in a gradual reduction in population rather than an abrupt die-off. This probably does mean an ecologically-oriented economic democracy, whatever form that takes (and it will likely take and need to take different forms in different places).

Putting production and consumption on a more sustainable and equitable footing may eventually produce population reductions in a gradual way, with a viable civilization, whereas business as usual will likely produce a population crash with widespread barbarism amongst the survivors, if not extinction.

Humanity does need a revolution, which doesn't necessarily mean a violent one, but more of a social one.

I agree, Policywonk. On the last point, history unfortunately shows that the ruling classes do not give up their wealth, power, and privileges without a fight. In the case of capitalism, they will resort to fascism if necessary in order to do so. And we are looking at the most powerful ruling class that has ever existed on earth, in terms of wealth and weaponry. They don't have all those cops and soldiers for nothing.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/blogs/science-matters/2011/11/is-seven-billio...

David Suzuki actually doesn't answer the question, and he seems to agree with and link to an article by Angus and Butler, which I find excellent. Exponential population growth is occurring, but the rate of growth is decreasing, and population can only be stabilized by concentrating on improving human welfare, not profits. Under business as usual (concentrating on increasing profits at the expense of human welfare and environmental sustainability) a die-off will likely occur and human populations may never stabilize (extinction).

http://www.grist.org/population/2011-10-26-is-the-environmental-crisis-c...

That article has generated some buzz, both pro and con, and it's been translated into French.

Ian Angus has followed it up with a further article on his website, Climate and Capitalism, to respond to what he perceives as a "blind spot" that many greens have about class: Population, consumer sovereignty, and the importance of class.

Couldn't agree more. The Occupy movements might just be the seeds of such a social revolution.  Only time will tell.  

I watched a good documentary on coyote control a couple of years ago. I think the "Trickster" has lessons to teach us humans. Apparently the best way to control a population is to feed them regularly. The birth rate of the females then drops naturally to sustainable levels.  However if the coyotes populations are under attack the female reproduction cycles and number of pups increase quickly to offset any decline.

Subject people to an economic model that attacks their families ability to prosper and humans fertility rates sky rocket. The more equitable the society it seems the easier it is to control population growth. The Trickster model of birth control doesn't require anything except sharing the resources and there is no doubt as poverty decreases in human societies so does the birth rate.  

An example of an officially "voluntary" sterilization program:

— World Hunger: 12 Myths, p. 37.

From a review of the book Too Many People?:

Labeling all discussion of the three central issues as "apocalyptic thinking", ignoring the work of scientists while suggesting it all flows from the fundamentalist and evangelicdal camps, is distortion on a grand scale. Sort of a red herring, as it were.

And someone really should advise them to change the Dresden date from September, 1945.

I'm fairly sure the low end of the range 2 to 147 billion is too high (actually other sources quote a range of half a billion to 800 billion!) and high end ridiculous in any realistic scenario. I expect that the assumptions used to allow a carrying capacity of 147 billion are questionable. I think that without the present economic system we wouldn't have 7 billion people in the first place, and we can't support 7 billion people (let alone more) sustainably within the present economic system. It doesn't merely depend on how efficiently resources are used and for what purpose; it depends on how efficiently they have been used and for what purposes up to now.

World population explosion not to blame for environmental crisis

A rabble.ca "podcast network" interview with author Ian Angus.

Facts for Working People

William Ryerson Still Perpetuating the "Overpopulation" Myth

"Scarcity" as political strategy

The information in that graph is offensive and disgusting. It's no wonder they hate us for our freedoms.

Judy Deutsch reviews Too Many People? in Canadian Dimension:

It does assume that each person is an equally consuming unit, which is pretty much the same thing.

As discussed in the free excerpt from the book that is linked to in post #6 above, the "A" in I=PAT stands for per capita affluence, income level, or consumption, expressed in per capita share of GNP. By using a per capita average, it treats each person represented by "P" as an equally consuming - and thus emitting - unit. And the proponents of I=PAT use it falsely to "prove" that as population increases (or decreases), consumption (or "affluence") increases or decreases in the same proportion.

As the book says:

The book also points out the fundamental fallacy of I=PAT, which is that A is a "per capita" GNP number, so that P × A simply grosses A back up to the total GNP.

If A = GNP ÷ P, then P × A = GNP

Thus "population" drops out of the I=PAT "formula" altogether, and it becomes I = GNP × T !

India's Sterilization Camps See Rural Women Treated Like Cattle April 3, 2012

Uk Aid helps fund forced sterilisation in India

From the same article: