POPULATION: THE GREAT TABOO

Common Misperceptions

Our unprecedented population growth is the force behind many very real problems in the here and now. But, as we discuss elsewhere, there are deep fears that keep people from seeing the links.

Like any addict in denial we have invented rationalizations as to why it's okay to just ignore the problem. Four of the most widespread of these are that:

Somehow none of these really helps matters much, and none offers any real hope for our future.

Population will top out "automatically" at 9 billion.

That's just a guess.
Current "estimates" say that population will stabilize at 9.1 billion in 2050 (some put the high end at 15 billion). That’s what they’re saying this year. Two years ago the estimates were 10 billion in 2100.

But each guess is based on assumptions that may prove false, such as the true shape of the growth curve. In the past, many respected estimates have widely underestimated population growth. In the 1970's several writers, such as David Roper and Lester Brown, estimated that world population would top out at 6.0 billion or less. Projections made today are no more trustworthy than those made in the past.

For example, the widely-cited U.N. "Medium Growth" projection has population topping out around 9.1 billion in the year 2100. What they only mention in the "fine print" that few people will ever read is that for that to happen, birthrate in all countries will have to drop to below replacement levels by 2050. That seems outlandish. Most of the time, the safest prediction for the future is that things will keep going pretty much as they are today. If population growth continues at the rates it is going today, there will be 12.8 billion people on the planet by 2050, 43.6 billion by 2100 (in the lifetime of our grandchildren) and 1,775 billion by 2200. You may dismiss those numbers as impossible, but there is an awful lot of money to be made in a speculative economic system by inventing and promoting the technologies to make it possible.

None of these projections takes into account the effects of new developments. If a bio-engineered virus were to attack all grasses on the planet, and there was much less corn, wheat, and rice, world population would crash dramatically. Or if a truly cheap form of energy were discovered, on the order of "cold fusion," all of a sudden we could irrigate desert lands with desalinated water pumped in from oceans hundreds, or thousands, of miles away, then world population would climb to the hundreds of billions. If you think those are unlikely, you may be right -- but think of how much money could be made selling grass-killing micro-organisms for gardeners and vegetable growers. But there will be no dark hills from which to see the stars, with 1.7 trillion people packing the planet. Is that the future we choose?

9 billion people: Is that the best we can do?
Even if the UN predictions were to be on target, and unchecked population growth were to level out at around 9 billion, is that the best world we can leave for our grandchildren? We can see the limits of our environment being reached all around us today. At 6.5 billion, we are already plagued with famines, wars, overcrowding, vast economic divides, and dwindling natural reserves. Nearly one billion people go to bed hungry at least part of every year, while 10 million people die of starvation or malnutrition-related diseases. Energy companies are trying to drill for oil in the last unspoiled regions of the Arctic, building new pipelines that will cut in half the remaining wild areas of our country. Every year we humans cut down or burn an area of the oxygen-giving rainforests the size of Pennsylvania. Water is scarce in many regions, and a few drought years could have devastating consequences.

Adding 3 billion more people to the planet is sure not going to help solve any of these problems.
Maybe 6.5 billion is already too many people. Some experts have estimated that our planet could sustain a population of around 2 billion people living a comfortable Western lifestyle. If we keep overfilling the planet, then life for most of those 9 billion people won’t be as good or healthy or prosperous as life is today. Maybe we can choose to have fewer people living better lives.

New technology will fix all our problems.

Some people believe that we can just keep on growing our population and that new technologies will feed, house, and cloth all these people. Even if that were true, would more people make life better, or will it just add to the number of undernourished and ill-housed, as well as reducing the margin of error between us and a total disaster?

One great technological revolution of our time was the so-called "Green Revolution" in India during the 1960s and 1970s. Due to new technology, wheat production doubled in just a few years. But population kept right up with it, and doubled also. Now more Indians are malnourished than before. And there is little free land left to absorb growing population, or for the endangered animals of the region.

For 200 years, advocates of technological innovation have been saying technology will lead us into a utopian future. Yet there are more malnourished people in the world today than ever before. And the land is filling up with more people, leaving us with harder problems to solve, and fewer resources per person with which to solve them. And we are causing the greatest mass extinctions of other species since the dinosaurs went extinct.

Perhaps in the future, someone will invent a way to process algae into a tasty food source, a cheap abundant energy so that food and desalinated water could be transported everywhere, and new pharmaceuticals which prolong life an extra 100 years. Perhaps that would allow 60 or 100 billion people to live on Earth, packed into gigantic high-rise megalopolises, paving over the countryside, unable to see trees or wild animals except in theme parks. Is that a worthy goal for technological progress? Or would everyone be happier on a green planet of only a few billion people? That's the question we have a responsibility to ask.

Shrinking population is more of a problem than growing population.

People in highly developed countries are living longer while having fewer children. Birth rates have declined in most of the world’s most developed countries. Lately, "birth dearth" has become an economic catch phrase. The concern is that there will not be a sufficient population of younger working people to support a growing population of retired people.

In the first place, the world's population is growing at a rate unmatched in human history. A decline in population growth rate is not the same as a decline in population. Every year there are 134 million births and 57.5 million deaths, a growth of 77 million people. Since there are now so many young people in the world, it will be at least 3 generations before population growth stops, even if birth rate drops to replacement levels.

Some people are concerned that Social Security will not be sufficiently funded in the future, but this issue is quite complex. Whether a person thinks it will be solvent or not in 20 years depends on assumptions about growth rates, payout indices. And the United States is not experiencing a "Birth Dearth" at all. Our population is growing far beyond other developed nations. If there were expected a falling population, one very obvious solution to preparing for that future would be to set aside money and resources now while times are good to provide against leaner times ahead.

Even if there are temporary problems arising from the so-called "birth dearth", they are not nearly as serious as those caused by encroaching on the limits of the resources of our planet for supporting life, and of leaving our children and grandchildren a dirty polluted world of asphalt and concrete.

There is nothing anybody can do about it anyway.

Perhaps the most pervasive reason people avoid discussing population is a sense of helplessness. Many people believe the situation is so vast and complex that no one can do anything about it, so we might as well just ignore the whole thing. Others believe the only thing we could do is to adopt the draconian Chinese model and make it illegal to have more than one child.

We think there are many things we can do about it and that coercion is not one of them. This issue is so important that we've devoted an entire page of our website to it. Please click here to read our suggestions of things you can do about it.

While you're there, tell us your suggestions too.