Gone Forth And Muiltiplied

It didn't take the Biblical injunction to "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28), for humankind to go about the task of filling and subduing the earth. It did take a few centuries, however, before some people began wondering about the implications of doing so. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, the British political economist Thomas Malthus argued that the future rate of human population growth would increase exponentially while the rate of agricultural food production could only increase geometrically. The result, he predicted, would be an inexorable divergence between population and resources, entailing an inevitable train of grim consequences: poverty, famine, war, misery. The theory underlying this depressing scenario has been frequently challenged over the years, but its haunting power and intuitive plausibility suggest that Malthus was not completely off the mark. Certainly, the implications of population growth exerted a strong influence on the nineteenth-century imagination. Debates about national identity, slavery, westward expansion, urbanization, evolution, and even the possibility of space exploration, were all inflected by theories of human "increase." In his "Thanksgiving discourse" on the U.S. census of 1860, for instance, the American minister Horace Bushnell noted that the American population had grown six-fold since 1790 and estimated that the 1950 census might count as many as 400 million people: "Are we thus to rush up, in a tide, upon the great dike of Mr. Malthus, the dike of starvation, and so come to our limit?" Although he argued that an educated and independent people would never let that happen, Bushnell did stress the fundamental social changes wrought by population growth. "A people greatly increased by numbers is not that same people, simply magnified. They become inevitably another people, in many respects. They pass into migrations, change their modes of culture and production, their polity, policy, character, public bearing, and the whole tenor, in fact, of their history." Perhaps this change would really be one of forward evolution. In his 1859 Origin of Species, Charles Darwin suggested that competition for scarce resources creates a natural limit to population growth and a selection mechanism for the more fit members of a species. In 1876, Darwin's friend and primary advocate in the U.S., the botanist Asa Gray, wrote that evolutionary theory provided "thousand-fold confirmation and extension of the Malthusian doctrine that population tends far to outrun means of subsistence throughout the animal and vegetable world, and has to be kept down by sharp preventive checks." But others, of a less empirical cast of mind, wondered whether there might not exist intriguing safety valves for excess population. The eccentric reverend C. L. Hequembourg, for instance, in his Plan of the Creation (1859) speculated that "the earth may not be spacious enough, under its present laws of reproduction, to contain its future and long-lived populations. In such an event, the families of man may be outspread over the other members of our solar system." Fast forward to the twentieth century, with its countless science fictions exploring such themes and possibilities. There's no end of fantastic scenarios, to be sure, but where there's smoke we should look for fire. The crowded filthy industrial megalopolis of film, with its Malthusian herds lined up for the next shuttle to the Jupiter colony, is not that far removed, when you think about it, from New York, Mexico City, Bombay, or Jakarta. The only things missing are the colony and the shuttle. The statistics of human population growth are sobering. "Although the human species emerged perhaps 150,000 years ago, most of its growth in numbers has occurred in the last 40 years," observes Michael Teitelbaum in "The Population Threat" (Foreign Affairs, Winter 1992/93). "It took scores of millennia to reach the first billion humans, around 1800; over a century to reach the second billion, somewhere between 1918 and 1927; about 33 years to the third billion, around 1960; only 14 years to the fourth billion in 1974; and 13 years to the fifth in 1987." In 1999, the 6 billion milestone was reached, and the current figure is 6.4 billion people, with an average yearly global growth rate of 1.14 percent. By 2050, industrialized nations are projected to increase their population by about 4 percent, compared to 55 percent for developing countries, especially those in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The fastest growing countries include Bangladesh (2.08%), Nigeria (2.45%), Sudan (2.64%), the Congo (2.99%), Indonesia (1.49%), Pakistan (1.98%), and Ethiopia (1.89%). The total global population is expected to reach 9.3 billion by mid-century. (These statistics are drawn from the Population Reference Bureau's 2004 World Population Data Sheet, available at www.prb.org, and GeoHive Global Statistics, available at www.xist.org. These organizations, in turn, compiled their numbers from the U.N. and the C.I.A.). Humanity appears to have already exceeded the carrying capacity of our planet, if one looks at the effect of both population and resource consumption combined. The concept of the "Ecological Footprint" is instructive. According to Redefining Progress, the Ecological Footprint "represents a quantitative assessment of the biologically productive area (the amount of nature) required to produce the resources (food, energy, and materials) and to absorb the wastes of an individual, city, region, or country&..[T]he footprint (i.e., a measure of human consumption), can exceed the planet's ecological limits, but only for a limited time, by using resources more quickly than they can be renewed&.[B]etween 1960 and 2000 the combined Ecological Footprint of nations steadily increased to what appears to be an unsustainable level in the 1970s. Much of this growth has been due to the increase in human population and the concomitant demand on natural resources." The footprint of the United States, on a per capita basis, is greater than that of any other country in the world. (Download details of the analysis). Other species, during periods of successful expansion, can achieve or even far exceed similar growth rates, but what distinguishes human beings is a remarkable (if too often unfulfilled) capacity for forethought -- and a tendency to consume more resources than we need. We need to ask, then, where all this is heading, whether anything can be or should be done, and if so, what the possible approaches are. Not to do so is to fall short of our tremendous potential. So what are the threats posed by overpopulation or excessive population growth? Answers to that question are not far to seek. A strain on natural resources such as wood, earth, water, and food. Conflicts and social instability produced by competition for those resources. Dangerous levels of pollution and garbage. Widespread extinctions of other species. Transnational migrations of poor or starving people. Underlying all of these, as Bushnell suggested, are the subtle, and not so pleasant changes, to the character of a society, whether it is on the "winning" or "losing" end of the struggle. All of our debates about population growth need to be understood in that context. Optimists do exist, however, and their arguments usually rely on the premise that the human capacity for resource production will outdistance resource depletion. Sheldon Richman, Senior Editor at the Cato Institute, told Congress in 1995, "people are not problems; they're problem solvers," and asserted that this problem-solving should involve free-market solutions and economic development rather than government intervention. (Read Richman's full testimony here). More recently, Vaclav Smil, in Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (2000), has argued that if we take advantage of our technology and scientific know-how, it would be possible to feed 10 billion people, which he takes as a levelling-off point for the global population. But why should we expect the global population to stop growing at 10 billion? And why should we expect the problem of feeding more people to be the only or even the most important challenge? Since humanity's impact is a combination of absolute numbers and lifestyle, shouldn't we be looking at both? Isn't it better to get ahead of these issues, and take the vital steps now rather than later? And why think that population stabilization needs to take some dark form of government "intrusion" into reproductive freedom? That mis-characterization is just one of a number of obstacles to developing effective policies for population stabilization. Others include religious prohibitions against contraception and women's rights; charges of racism (given the lower growth rates in Western countries); the economic importance of children in agricultural or developing societies; and the simple fact that people are hard-wired to make more of their own kind. What we have is the familiar, and too often predictable, clash between short-term needs or desires and long-term thinking. It is also an example of the "tragedy of the commons," a concept describing the conflict between individual and communal interests. The idea is that if every individual serves his own needs (such as taking more than his share of the common land, or having 10 kids rather than 2), the collective result is not that every individual benefits, but that everybody ultimately loses. The problem of excessive population growth is a real and very difficult problem, and it is deeply linked to questions of economics, environment, religion, and psychology. Effective policy approaches, therefore, need to be broadly and carefully conceived. Among the most important:
Access to family planning information and resources. The United States must rescind its "gag rule" against aid organizations that discuss contraception and abortion. We should instead help people here and around the world understand the various options that parents or prospective parents (especially teenagers) have. This is not a costly undertaking, and it is not tyranny. It is simply informational. Going along with the information, we should make the resources for fertility control available to all who want them. Promotion of women's education and women's rights. A formidable barrier to sensible population growth is the fact that in many cultures, women have few professional opportunities and insufficient legal protection. A strong correlation exists between the status of women in a society and their ability to determine their own reproductive future. Economic assistance. A strong correlation also exists between the economic health of a country and its ability to reach a sustainable population growth rate. Intelligent economic assistance does not mean "throwing money" at the problem, but managing the aid in such a way that it contributes significantly to a society's infrastructural, educational, and institutional strength. Reduced resource consumption. The industrialized democracies, which consume far more than the rest of the world combined, must do several things. First, in the words of Lester Brown, founder of the World Watch Institute , develop a "comprehensive reuse/recycle economy" rather than our current "throw-away economy." Second, accept the possibility that our current standard of living may need to be lowered. Third, develop cleaner, more efficient technologies. Fourth, encourage the adoption of these technologies by developing nations. More enlightened attitudes toward life. For their own good if nothing else, people should recognize that human beings exist in a complex web of interdependence with other people and other species on this planet, and that we have a moral imperative not to grab more than our share or to live parasitically. A respect for life means a commitment not just to the quantity but to the quality of life, and a commitment not just to human life, but to all life. These approaches would represent vital steps toward a livable and sustainable future for humankind and our fellow species. What is important to recognize, moreover, is that these policies are good and worthy whether or not they help to reduce or stabilize the global population growth rate. Standing in their way are inertia, ideology, denial, ignorance, and self-interest. But -- and here's the real optimism -- we as individuals are also able to come together with others to discuss and take action. As a topic of public conversation, it is time we address what we want the future of our world to be, and how to make that vision a reality. We need to take our heads out of the sand and get our act together -- lest we discover that by going forth and multiplying so successfully, we have lost our granted Eden.