Global population reduction: confronting the inevitable

quote:
Global population reduction: confronting the inevitable
July 13th, 2007

By J. Kenneth Smail

Numbers and consumption

Looking past the near-term concerns that have plagued population policy at the political level, it is increasingly apparent that the long-term sustainability of civilization will require not just a leveling-off of human numbers as projected over the coming half-century, but a colossal reduction in both population and consumption.

It has become increasingly apparent over the past half-century that there is a growing tension between two seemingly irreconcilable trends. On one hand, moderate to conservative demographic projections indicate that global human numbers will almost certainly reach 9 billion, perhaps more, by mid-21st century. On the other, prudent and increasingly reliable scientific estimates suggest that the Earth’s long-term sustainable human carrying capacity, at what might be defined as an “adequate” to “moderately comfortable” developed-world standard of living, may not be much greater than 2 to 3 billion. It may be considerably less, particularly if the normative lifestyle (level of consumption) aspired to is anywhere close to that of the United States....

Link to full article

quote: our default position for the next two or three centuries ought to seek a very significant reduction in global human numbers.

I am sympathetic to the population argument. But I think by and of itself it misses the mark. Let's say we find a way to reduce the earth's population to 2-3 billion. If that 2-3 billion continues to consume and waste as the 2-3 billion that comprise the western world currently do, then a reduced population would not have the desired effect of achieving any sort of equilibrium between earth's resources and consumption nevermind sustainability.

Part of the issue, in my mind, is that scientists and others tend to look at global issues through the prism of their own speciality or focus of interest rather than holistically as an interconnected and interdependent system.

And the same is true for human behaviour and how it relates to these global issues. For example, the way we produce food is not to feed people but is to maximize profits for the corporations and people that control food supply for the people who can afford it.

So rather than Nigeria growing grains and produce for Nigerians and exporting the surplus, Nigeria grows grains and produce for export and dumps the surplus. And the same is true elsewhere.

The same is true for fish. Catch quotas are not a product of fish populations alone, but a product of negotiation between those assigned to measure fish populations, mandarins in Ottawa, and corporate interests looking to maximize profit through economies of scale via massive catches. And that is where there are quotas.

Other fishing practises intended to maximize catch are leaving the oceans stripped of life.

In fact, the cod story in eastern Canada is an excellent case in point of not understanding the systemic nature of the natural world (of which we divorce ourselves). Fished to near depletion and with a near moratorium on cod fishing, cod populations have not recovered. The reason being, according to one scientist, is because cod, once the predator, is now the prey. Cod stocks are so small fish cod once preyed on now eat the cod before the fish has a chance to mature into adulthood.

But, cod would never have reached such low levels if fishing had not been industrialized. And it was industrialized not for the purpose of feeding people but for the purpose of maximizing profits.

With any discussion on sustainability, the discussion often drifts to such topics as population, consumption, and waste but rarely ever addresses human behaviour at a systemic level. We often address human behaviour at an individual level (conservation, mostly), but rarely as a whole because to do so would call into question everything we take for granted in terms of living arrangements, economies, and wealth. And for the most part we are unprepared to do that because it would mean dramatic changes to the way we live our lives individually and collectively.

The author of the article thinks we have two or three centuries to reduce population. I think he is resoundingly optimistic. But that is because, I think, he is viewing the question from the perspective of all other things remaining equal. But that is a false presumption. Not all other things are remaining equal. In fact, we know, all other things are in motion from water depletion, fish stock depletion, energy depletion, the shift to fuel crops from food crops and the accompanying loss of forests and wilderness, and, of course, climate change.

But again, reducing population, however that is accomplished, is an exercise in futility unless it is matched with radical changes in human behaviour on a global scale.

[ 25 July 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

quote:
Charlotte....:
I really don't think population is the problem until we've dealt with consumption.

Both are a problem and it is a mistake to separate them. Current world resources can support a living standard about 75% lower than the current average Canadian standard, somewhat like Paraguay's. Are you arguing that the goal should be to reduce everyone to that standard of living?

Population is a part of the consumption problem.

quote:
Once there's a good amount of stability and equity available to everyone, along with infrastructiure and sound government, you can try to build a social framework that favours fewer rather than more children. I have no doubt that it is possible to acheive this.

I believe that too, but logic also tells me that putting off the population issue will lengthen the time required to reach that state, if not put it off altogether.

quote:
....trying to blame the world problems on the great unwashed masses in Other (poor, brown, foreign) countries is really counter-productive.

Everyone is to blame, and playing the guilt card like this is a rhetorical ploy to evade the issue. It has no real bearing on the fact that we have an over population problem if we want a better average global standard of living for all.

quote:
FM:
Let's say we find a way to reduce the earth's population to 2-3 billion. If that 2-3 billion continues to consume and waste as the 2-3 billion that comprise the western world currently do, then a reduced population would not have the desired effect of achieving any sort of equilibrium between earth's resources and consumption nevermind sustainability.

True, but the goal is sustainability which requires reducing demand to what the system can replace. That reduction comes from either reducing individual demand to the appropriate level (currently to about on quarter of what Canadians are now making) or reducing the number of those making demands, or a combination of both.

The fewer people the more each can sustainably take from the system. It is possible to have a small population that even given the average lifestyle in the US the system could absorb it and then some.

What we are really debating here is what kind of a life we want our grandchildren's grandchildren to have. A concept that may be difficult in western thinking that struggle to go beyond the next quarter. [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

quote:
For example, the way we produce food is not to feed people but is to maximize profits for the corporations and people that control food supply for the people who can afford it.

You make many good points on things that should be changed.

quote:
But again, reducing population, however that is accomplished, is an exercise in futility unless it is matched with radical changes in human behaviour on a global scale.

That really depends on how much you reduce the population by.

quote:
quelar:
We're already seeing the first stages of wars for survival resources (instead of wars for money), and it's only going to get worse as the world heats up and water goes scarce, then arable soils, etc.

Not to mention the more densely populated we are the more likely we areto have quick spreading virulent diseases, high violent crime rates and natural disasters that kill far higher numbers than before.

And the more dispossed and frustrated people there are the more people they are going to kill, and reducing people with high living standards to those of Paraguay will garner a lot of sympathy among people with wealth and political clout to just kill off the disaffected rather than give up anything.

What we need is a global agreement on how much bio-mass each individual is entitled to, seen as a human right, then set about gradually to reduce populations until that ratio is achieved.

Such an agreement could include maximum allowable densities in any given area, and minimum required open spaces between populations.

quote: That really depends on how much you reduce the population by.

The problem is, let's say we have a bushel of apples and we are on an island with no vegetation and we are hoping to be rescued. The bushel contains 126 apples.

Now, I am eating six apples a day to your two. At that rate the apples will only last 16 days. Now, if I get rid of you, I get myself 5 more days. But if I reduce myself to two apples to match you we both get 32 days.

My position would be, before we even begin to look at population (and let's be honest, when we speak about population we are speaking about people who are mostly brown and live in so-called developing countries) we need to first attack our own, that is western, consumption. Otherwise the project is nothing more than ridding ourselves of the minor competition before we start seriously eyeing each other.

quote:
John K:
The best way to stabilize global population is for less developed countries to raise the living standards and increase the economic and social security of their citizens.

It is one way and not to be discounted. Of course the fewer people that there are in a country the easier it is to raise living standards since there is more to go around.

However, this is not about less developed countries, it is a global issue. Many developed countries, including the US, are overpopulated to the point that their available bio-mass can not support their living standard. In the US case living standards are about 50% more than the bio-mass will support.

However, North America has 17% of the world's bio-capacity and only uses 22% of it, more than its share but not as much as Asia/Pacific which has 24% of the bio-capacity yet uses 34%. Europe (EU countries) has only 9% of the bio-capacity but uses 16%. Adding the non EU countries brings it down to almost even at 20% and 23%.

The only regions in the world not using more than their share are Latin America which has 26% of the world's bio-capacity but only uses 8% of it, Africa which has 10% and uses 7%, and non EU Europe which has 11% and uses 7%.

Latin America could triple its use of bio-capacity and still have surplus with the current population. This would come at the expense of everyone else.

Non EU Europe could continue on as is with a modest improvement in living standards.

Africa, which has very low standards to start with is still looking at population reduction to raise them more than a pittance.

North America could easily reach a comfortable sustainability with consumption cuts, but Asia with its lower standards would need population reductions to raise levels.

quote:
FM:
The problem is, let's say we have a bushel of apples and we are on an island with no vegetation and we are hoping to be rescued.

Except that our island is perpetually renewable if we don't over exploit it. Once we determine the replenishment rate for apples we can allocate how many can be eaten in a day without killing the supply and then limit the number of eaters to match the share per eater that we wish to have.

quote:
(and let's be honest, when we speak about population we are speaking about people who are mostly brown and live in so-called developing countries)

My preference would be to start in California which has three times as many people as it should have. [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

quote:
remind:
This and the outrageous profit margins of corporations and the extreme wealthy who are actually parasites on the working person are the first things that should be changed,...

Large populations hurt the working persons by driving down the value of labour.

Those things need to be tackled, even if there were not a population problem, but fixing them alone will not solve our problems.

To add perspective the table below list countries and the maximum sustainable world population in billions if the average living standard was the same as currently in the country listed:

Country - Max World Pop

US - 1.17
Canada - 1.47
Uzebekistan - 6.22
Japan - 2.55
Australia - 1.70
New Zealand - 1.90
Malaysia - 5.09
Chile - 4.87
Paraguay - 7.00
Denmark - 1.93
Austria - 2.29
France/UK - 2.00
Portugal - 2.67
Sweden - 1.84
Norway - 2.49
Haiti - 18.67
Nepal - 16.00
Bolivia - 8.62
North Korea - 8.00

quote:In the US case living standards are about 50% more than the bio-mass will support.

Say what? Standard of living has to do with the quantity and quality of goods and services in an economy and how those goods and services are distributed among the population. How a modern economy can be reduced to a simplistic bio-mass formula is beyond me.

We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer economy thank goodness.

quote:Nor is poverty in the Third World a product of overpopulation. If anything, rapid population growth is a consequence rather than a cause of poverty. In conditions in which poor sanitation and lack of medical care greatly reduce a child's chances of survival to maturity, and in which welfare provisions are non-existent, a high birth rate is often a family's only guarantee of a minimum standard of living and a moderate level of security in old age.

Experience in the industrialised countries in which population growth rates are less than 0.5 per cent (implying a doubling time of more than 150 years), shows that lower birth rates and a state of equilibrium between births and deaths are results of urbanisation, adequate nutrition, improved heath, education and social services, and higher social status for women, all of which accompany industrialisation. As the 1974 World Population Conference observed, "development is the best contraceptive".
....

That overpopulation is not the fundamental cause of hunger and environmental degradation is also shown by the fact that both can occur in thinly populated lands such as the wide tropical forest-steppe belt of the African Sahel, to the south of the Sahara.
....

Rapid population growth is, of course, a serious problem for poor countries, since it undermines their ability to maintain, let alone improve, living standards. In the context of an international economic system that consistently drains wealth from the Third World, deepening poverty and rapid population growth leads many Third World peoples to overexploit their natural resources, resulting in environmental degradation that imperils not only their own survival but that of humanity as a whole.
....

The economic exploitation of Third World countries by transnational capital, and the accompanying military-political intervention by Western governments to maintain this exploitation, is the fundamental obstacle to the social and economic changes required to eliminate poverty in those countries, bring about a decline in their population growth and take pressure off their environment.

The populationist argument, which takes food distribution among and within nations as given, directs attention away from the responsibility of the international capitalist system as the root cause of rapid population growth, poverty and environmental degradation in the Third World. This is why populationism is so popular with the representatives of transnational capital and their apologists. It also infects mainstream environmentalism nationally and internationally: biologic pseudoexplanations enjoy strong support in such organisations as the Sierra Club and the Australian Conservation Foundation; the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, while noting the obvious fact that men and women will, under certain conditions, voluntarily limit their own fertility, still regarded "population" as the core environmental problem. The proposed solution - birth control - merely treats a symptom and leaves the fundamental problem untouched. As Barry Commoner has commented, this is "equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard. One is constrained to ask if there is not something radically wrong with the ship."

This truth is dramatised by the environmental situation of such developing countries, like China and Thailand, which have practiced successful birth control policies: the achieved decline in population growth rates has had little impact on the burgeoning environmental crisis.

While it is true that the Earth's human population cannot be allowed to continue growing indefinitely at its present rate, and measures must be taken to achieve a stable or even declining population, the populationists skate over the main means of accomplishing this: an environmentally benign economic system that can underpin secure living standards for all.

Quelar, I appreciate you seeing this, but I'm now convinced it's even worse than that. We could very easily kill Gaia and send the whole evolutionary expereiment back to the pre-Cambrian tomorrow if there was a major nuclear war, possibility that grows as resourcew become moere scarce. We would go with it OC, but not much of a solution even from a macro-biological perspective. More likely we'll be facing massivie offs within two to three Generations, meaning what our generation does in the next ten years or so is crucial. Once the effects become universally severe it'll probably be too late for most of us.

quote: The confusion about this, induced by strenuous wishing, is such that most people expect the next energy resource to consist of technology itself.

This has been the heart of my beef with the rosy future crowd. Energy and technology are not the same thing, not interchangeable or substitutable. If you run out of one (energy), you can't just plug in the other (technology).

quote: What is a detriment depends on what one considers a fair average standard of living.

quote:Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
I love James Howard Kunstler's bluntness, Fidel, and he answers the question of a technological fix:

What does Kunstler say about the future of nuclear power and scientific efforts to complete the nuclear fuel cycle?. How about nanotechnology that could make it possible to synthesize a cleaner fuel to replace oil and its derivatives ?. Science and tech may be able to fully harness solar energy at some point in future. People like Kunstler will likely be dead a long time before it happens, but I think technology offers some hope for future generations. So far, technological progress is the domain of public spending on R&D for military purposes. This generation has to continue pushing for democratization so that technological change is owned by the people and not used for very undemocratic purposes ie. "private enterprise" for warfiteering agendas. Our economy is basically driven by second-hand military technology paid for once already with taxpayer's money.

They could decide to circumvent democracy altogether, and this is already a concern with accusations of covert public spending in the U.S. on what are colossal wastes of time and money on star wars missile defence and secrecy surrounding biological weapons research making use of publicly-funded research and universities. And it provides justification for developing countries with military capabilities to focus away from the tasks at hand. The job for this generation is to avoid ecological crash and burn and to continue the struggle for democracy. If we don't do that, then I think we're looking at more wars of conquest, chaos and tyranny in general. Capitalists have doffed their masks as predicted already with fangs now exposed to the world. I'm just saying the future is not written in stone yet, but it does look bleak unless a significant paradigm shift happens at some point.

quote:
ETHR:
The problem is Jerry, we can't "fix" others population problems, so this is really a waste of time....

The problems certainly won't get fixed by anyone but nature if we do not keep them in the forefront, and if we don't fix them the alternative is worse. Defeatism is not a wise choice.

quote:
To tie this back into the previous thread on this, third world poverty, not wealth, is actually more of motivater for small things like the destruction of rain forest and unsupportable families.

Motivators of course are not set in stone, they change and can be changed. Also, when contemplating much of the destruction in the third world, rather than looking to the impoverished one might more profitably look at the customers if one wants to make changes.

quote:
If the root causes are addressed, rather than the feedback, then we just might might make our way out our present bottleneck

The root physical cause is demand. Population and demand go hand in hand. If one wishes to argue that more people mean less demand, go ahead.

quote:
More likely we'll be facing massive (die) offs within two to three Generations, meaning what our generation does in the next ten years or so is crucial.

What we are facing if the population continues to rise is more than ugly. Playing around with the economic structure and shell games like carbon credits and the like is akin to fighting a forest fire by pissing on it. It might make one feel good, but the long term effects will be negligible.

quote:
I don't think we can focus on overpopulation on a global scale so much at the moment. We're going to have to focus on consumption. In general, a sustainable level of consumption is about 75% below what nations such as Canada and the US consume now.

Without a parallel focus on reducing population level sustainable consumption will continue to drop as the population increases. Everyone against dealing with the population issue and willing to accept a living standard such as the one in Haiti, raise their hand.

The fact of the matter is that we have to address all aspects of the consumption issue, including lifestyles, economic patterns, and population size.

[ 26 July 2007: Message edited by: Jerry West ]

quote:Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
I think you are missing Kunstler's point that technology is not a substitute for energy.

Several of Kunstler's predictions about near future events have been flat out wrong. I'd prefer to hope doom and gloomers like him are wrong about the coming singularity.

So the questions that must logically flow from that is what standard of living are we aiming for? What is the carrying capacity of the planet at that standard of living? And how many of the current population becomes too many?

quote: Several of Kunstler's predictions about near future events have been flat out wrong.

quote: I'd prefer to hope doom and gloomers like him are wrong about the coming singularity.

quote:
So the questions that must logically flow from that is what standard of living are we aiming for? What is the carrying capacity of the planet at that standard of living? And how many of the current population becomes too many?

The standard of living that we are aiming for must be one that most of us agree on.

As for the rest of the question, refer to an earlier post in this thread where I listed exactly that by giving a range of current living standards and the population level that would be the maximum allowed to sustain them.

If you want to make your own calculations the planet has a current (2003) bio-capacity of about 11.2 billion global hectares (gha). Divide that by population and you get the individual maximum average foot print which indicates maximum average standard of living.

Canadian average foot print in 2003 was 7.6gha, European Union average was 4.8gha, Uzbekistan was 1.8gha which was also the global maximum average for sustainability. Unfortunately the actual global average was closer to 2.2gha, an overdraft of the ecological account.

We have four choices, three of them address the problem:

1. Forget population and reduce living standards to one fifth of what the Americans currently enjoy;

2. Reduce population to allow for present living standards;

3. Reduce both population and living standards to some point which means neither gets reduced as much as 1 or 2; or

4. Don't address the population and consumption problem at all and get overwhelmed by it.

People who think that we can address the consumption problem alone, or find salvation in technological tinkering don't understand the problem or are naive enough to think that people in the developed world are going to willingly reduce their standards to those of Uzebekistan or less.

I wonder what they propose for the masses of people who will not give up half to three quarters of what they have?

The facts are there, the solution (reducing consumption) is obvious. Only how to achieve it is debatable.