We have environmental and cultural problems at all scales, from the local to the global. From water shortages, drought, plastic pollution, overfishing, and species extinction, to global warming, authoritarianism, social fraying, anti-immigrant fervor, and gridlocked traffic and real estate markets. There is a common thread, which is that there are way too many people. We have (at least in some places) remediated some of the worst practices we used to take for granted, like killing whales for oil, using explosives for fishing, or dumping chemical wastes into rivers and soils. But there are are few practical ways to remediate our carbon emissions, water scarcity, or need for vast farmlands. We need to take a long look in the mirror and realize that the Earth can't take it, and we are the problem- the shear number of us.
Consider the range of problems like housing costs gone wild, traffic choked to a standstill, rising education costs and competition, and political gridlock. Are these related to overpopulation as well? I think very much so. Real estate is self-explanatory. As the old saying goes, they aren't making more land. Even while plenty of land is worthless, the need for people to live near other people means that we need to live together in what have become increasingly choked megalopolises. While rich metropolises like San Francisco and London struggle with traffic congestion and decaying public services, poorer ones like Lagos, Sao Paulo, and Mumbai had few services to start with and attract ever widening circles of destitute slums.
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| Lagos |
A deeper issue is why our political systems are breaking down as well. Public services are decaying for a reason, which is that solidarity has weakened. Half of the US electorate has checked out of communal projects of good governance, rational and positive foreign policy, and caring for others. After two centuries of extraordinary growth, first sponsored especially in the US by a marvelously depopulated New World, and then again by bounding over technological frontiers such as fossil fuels, electricity, and the green revolution, we seem to have reached a general growth plateau, (barring development of robots who will do everything for us, but burn ever more fuel in doing so), and the expansive mood has ground to a halt. One consequence is that the elites of the culture, principally the rich, no longer subscribe to an egalitarian ethic. Growth can not be relied on to lift all boats, rather it is now every class for itself. Which class wins, when money runs politics and the media, and has been turned into "free speech" by the supreme court, is obvious.
It used to be, in the "population bomb" 1970's, that we thought that famine would be the limit on population. But it turns out that, given enough fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer production, machinery, and clearing new arable land, plus a green revolution in crop breeding, food is not the limiting factor. It is a thousand other things that we are doing to the biosphere and to our societies. The tide against immigrants is clearly borne of fear, that the number of the poor who want to flee their wretched conditions is essentially limitless, and thus that prosperous countries, i.e. Europe and the US, can not offer the relatively free immigration conditions they have heretofore. The US gained vast goodwill throughout the world over the last couple of centuries by admitting countless immigrants and playing a central role in many of the technological improvements that have allowed populations to grow everywhere.
But that process seems to have reached an end point. We have picked much of the low-hanging fruit, and have come up against insurmountable barriers. Fusion power has not happened. Space colonization is completely impractical. Even electricity storage is presenting tremendous difficulties, making a large scale switch to renewable electricity virtually impossible. And the biosphere is being degraded every day. We have come up against Malthusian limits that are more subtle than famine, but need to be heeded, lest we relentlessly immiserate ourselves.
There are two general political responses to all this. The Left response is to cooperate as best we can and tighten our belts to fit in a few billion more. Open borders, save the children, conserve water and reduce electricity usage, so that all can have at least a share of whatever resources are left. The Right response is to deny that there are significant ecological limits, cast whatever limits there are in economic terms and compete to take what we can while we can, and devil take the hindmost. Neither response is very forward-looking. One can make the argument that development is the only proven way to reduce demographic growth. Therefore, we should promote development, and bring everyone up to first world standards of resource consumption, which will in turn bring birth rates down to what in Europe and Japanare less than replacement rates. But the Earth can't take that policy either. Global heating is already having dire effects. The biosphere is already decimated and impoverished.
Thus we need an even more impractical, impolitic, and direct strategy, which is to aim to dramatically reduce the human population. A rigorously enforced one-child policy over three generations would get us from the current 7+ billion people to 1 billion, which, I think, given the current technological state, is reasonably sustainable. China did an amazing thing with its one-child policy, nipping in the bud its most significant problem- that of vastly too many people for its capabilities and resources. China is now reaping the rewards of that policy, though it hardly went far enough, and China remains heavily overpopulated and rapacious as it ascends the ladder of development.
If combating climate change is a problem from hell, structurally diffuse and resistant to responsible policy, then population control is far more so. National power is to a great extent dependent on economic and population size. We have for centuries had a mania for growth, embedded in every fiber of our economic policy and national outlook. We are Malthusian to the core, and our major religions are even worse offenders, propagating the most Darwinian of reproduction policies, even while they so ironically decry Darwin's intellectual bequests. No, it is not an easy problem. But at very least, we should not fear declining birth rates as some existential catastrophe and sign of general decline. No, they should be welcomed as the least we can do, and a small part of our path to a sustainable future, for ourselves and for the biosphere that is our home.
- Jupiter flyby.
- Accounting for Iraq.
- What the Kochs and their ilk have wraught.
- Are the Taliban more trustworthy than Donald Trump?
- Have richer people have become more handsome?
- Bonus quote of the week, from "If We Can Keep It", by Michael Tomask.
We are in trouble. Our political culture is broken, but it is not broken for the reasons you often read that it's broken- because Washington is 'dysfunctional' or because politicians have no 'will'. No. It's broken because some people broke it. It was broken by the people who pushed the economic theory on the rest of us that has driven trillions of dollars that were once in middle-class people's pockets to the comparative few at the very top. Who refused to invest in the country anymore. Who will not even negotiate real investment. Who have been telling us for years that the market will take care of all our needs, while the market has in fact left thousands of towns and communities strafed and full of people addicted to drugs- the drugs, by the way, tht the same free market is pumping out in vastly greater quantities, and for vastly greater profits, than it did twenty years ago. And who have built up a parallel media universe in which any of these commonsense assertions are dismissed as socialist, and in which anyone who doesn't endorse the thesis of Donald Trump's greatness is denounced as un-American.
They broke it. They broke it to gain power and to remake society in a way that was less communitarian, explicitly less equal, than the society we were building from 1945 to 1980. And- let me not forget this part- less democratic. I wrote earlier of Donald Trump's contempt for our institutions, our processes, put another way, for the democratic allocation of power. Many observers (me included, sometimes) have wondered why this didn't make Republicans recoil. The typical explanation has to do with fear of his base, but I've come to believe that the simplest explanation is the best: They didn't recoil because they're not especially bothered. They find him embarrassing at times, and they disagree with him here and there, but his demagogic approach doesn't really trouble them on the whole. They- not all of them, but certainly a critical mass of elected officials, operatives, and billionaires- no longer want to compete with and merely defeat liberalism on a level democratic playing field. They want to destroy it. This is why they do things like aggressive gerrymandering, the voter suppression laws, the attemt to change the way we elect senators, the blocking of Merrick Garland- all of which preceded Trump. They want to change the rules so they they never lose. And if destroying liberalism requires breaking the system- as it surely does- then so be it as far as they're concerned.
