Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThe Psychology of Denying Overpopulation, Prof Kenrick, Arizona State
https://theextinctionchronicles.wordpress.com/2020/11/20/the-psychology-of-denying-overpopulation/comment-page-1/#comment-8447
Evolutionary Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Dynamical Systems: Building an Integrative Paradigm
Easy math meets bad behavioral economics.
Sep 13, 2020
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/202009/the-psychology-denying-overpopulation?fbclid=IwAR2MT3-taLBeWLNIWPeolLaOg1dmGUyfEBC32JHDlBNFxP3Yh9g5-govsR8
Lets imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?
International conflict? Racial prejudice? Environmental destruction? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Theres one problem that connects all of those, but politicians are often silent about it.
Overpopulation may not be the root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the worlds other miseries.
Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without roofs over their heads, but no one wishes for a world with more homeless people. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energyto light their homes and cook their food, and when that is achievedto power their refrigerators and washing machines. At higher levels of economic development, people desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and automobiles. At the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, reached by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.
More people means more competition for food and clean water, more demand for places to build homes, and more energy consumed. You dont need a fancy mathematical model, just the ability to add two and two (or two billion and two billion, still second grade math).
The predictable result of all those extra people satisfying all their increasing energy needs is water and air pollution, garbage floating in the oceans, forests being cut down, longer and longer traffic jams, and increasing urban sprawl. Easy math there, too.
You need to do a little multiplication to understand how the different consequences of overpopulation magnify one another. In a recent blog, I noted how Thomas Homer-Dixon and a team of eminent political scientists linked overpopulation and its consequent resource depletion to intergroup conflictwhich follows as people migrate out of blighted areas like Bangladesh into other overpopulated areas, like India, where migrants are unwanted. Homer-Dixon made the case in Scientific American in 1992, when the world population was just over 5 billion. Its now around 7.5 billion and, perhaps predictably, there are now 150 million homeless people in the world, and an estimated 1.5 billion more (thats billion) living in inadequate shelter. The equation works against people living in countries with the least resources, which are growing at faster rates, so theres less to go around but more people needing it.
After I mentioned this topic recently (an open letter to Samantha Power), one reader referred me to the writings of Philip Cafaro, a philosopher at Colorado State who writes about environmental ethics, overpopulation and the preservation of wild nature. I just finished reading Cafaros article on Climate ethics and population policy, and recently began his book, How many is too many: The progressive argument for reducing immigration into the United States.
In the article on climate ethics and population, Cafaro noted that the continuing failure to deal with overpopulation is not solely the fault of traditional religious groups, like the Catholic church (which has actively worked against birth control). Cafaro points out that his fellow progressives often refuse to talk about the problem, and sometimes attack and insult him when he even brings it up. article continues after advertisement
Why would progressives refuse to talk about the problem of overpopulation? Well, the reader who pointed me to Cafaros work also pointed me to an article by George Monbiot in the Guardian, titled Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fuelling. Monbiot rails at middle class Americans and Brits, such as Jane Goodall, who dare to publicly express concerns about overpopulation. Here is a central part of Monbiots case:
Malthusianism slides easily into racism. Most of the worlds population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about barbaric, degenerate people outbreeding the superior races. These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about white replacement and white genocide. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.
That helps explain why people like Cafaro might be reluctant to talk about overpopulation. But Cafaro argues that overpopulation denial is ultimately harmful to the very third-world people Monbiat claims to be defending against the nefarious Jane Goodall.
Indeed, ignoring the consequences of overpopulation is the most immoral thing we can do, whether we are good Catholics or ultra-progressive atheists, and whether we are concerned about people in the first or the third world. The worlds poor are the ones experiencing the worst consequences. It is their forests being obliterated most rapidly, their water being dried up or polluted, their children without enough food to eat, their tribes being driven from their homes by other local tribes who want the same scarcer and scarcer resources.
One temporary solution is to open our borders, allowing more of the worlds desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered my earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in the third world. And if you are a rich or middle class American, immigrants bring benefits, such as cheaper labor and better bottom lines on stock dividends (large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, drastically cut salaries and benefits for employees, and produce more net profits for investors).article continues after advertisement
But Cafaro notes that the benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for poorer Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.
There are other costs to overpopulation, both within and outside the boundaries of first world countries. The destruction of natural habitats to increase farmland and suburbs, combined with overfishing the oceans, has led to the extinction or near extinction of many other species, and diminished the pleasures of finding a quiet natural place to walk and listen to the birds.
To the argument that it is immoral to encourage other people to reduce their family size, Cafaro counters that it is immoral to close our eyes to the environmental destruction, starvation, and future wars that follow from ignoring overpopulation.
Policies to reduce population size dont need to be coercive. Indeed, Cafaro points to data suggesting millions of people in poorer countries who would be happy to control their family sizes if given access to free or low-cost birth control. Making abortion legal and safe would also help. Some people have reasonable objections to abortion, but if those objections are also accompanied by an opposition to birth control, which could reduce abortions, that is harder to justify given current world population and all the attendant problems of scarcity and desperation facing many children born into the third world. A third solution should be noncontroversial: support education for women, because women who stay in school have fewer children, and those children of educated moms live better lives. article continues after advertisement
Cafaro also points out that having one less child does more for the environment than all of the other pro-environmental choices you could make: buying a hybrid car, putting in solar panels, improving your insulation, driving and flying less are things we should all consider, of course, but they dont add up to nearly the same benefits as a little bit of family planning.
There is another obstacle that stems not from religious fundamentalism or misguided political correctness, and Ive heard it from some of my most educated friends. An ever-increasing population means an ever-increasing market for goods, and is better for the economy. But this is using a short-sighted definition of economic utility, which considers dollar signs in the immediate future but ignores the unequal distribution of those dollars into some peoples accounts but not others. The economic utility argument has multiple flaws if we see utility in a world in which fewer people are desperate and miserable, more people live comfortable lives, and more of us get to enjoy the best things in life (that should be free, like a nearby forest or stream).
Back to the math, there is a point at which cramming the world with more people to generate more profits simply cant go on. That point may already be upon us, and the question is whether we can use our knowledge of human psychology and behavioral economics to rebalance the equation. At the least, we could devote more intellectual and economic resources to getting people to stop denying the problem.
applegrove
(118,006 posts)2 children. EVERYWHERE We need planned parenthoods for the world.
Beringia
(4,313 posts)People criticized it as racist, but I saw it as European women are leading the way by having the power of education and economics and are free to be feminists.
https://dalailamacenter.org/blog-post/western-women-can-come-rescue-world
Western women can come to the rescue of the world
anuary 25, 2010
At the Vancouver Peace Summit last September, the Dalai Lama said something that ricocheted around the globe. He said that he is a feminist. And he opined that Western women will save the world.
(The comments in the article are especially insightful, here is one)
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2011-03-24
It seems obvious that His Holiness chose to say "Western Women" because the Western world is one where women have made enormous progress towards equality and already have the opportunity to help others on a global scale. Women in the west don't face the obstacles of cultural (often violent) oppression and even rigid traditional women's roles the way that women in other parts of the world still do. No doubt this comment was a reflection on these distinctions, progress and the freedom they have earned the "Western Woman." Certainly more freedom to act results in a greater ability to act and effectiveness of action, so His Holiness' comment makes perfect sense.
applegrove
(118,006 posts)women can. Some have no choice who they marry. Some have lots of choice over their lives. I think the insult is that westerners would go to africa to do jobs africans should have been doing. For a long time foreign aid was like that. And it was ridiculous and stopped women and men in africa from getting ahead. Now africans do those foreign aide jobs. Markets grow. And the money stays in africa which lifts up people on that continent. So for the Dalai Lama to say that change would come from western women was some old world thinking. And the Dalai Lama is an older person. I am much younger than him and was taught the old way in the 1980s. Educated african women can show the way in africa. Educated women in asia can show the way their. And they are. But it has to come from within. Point is they have looked at the number of kids educated women, with access to birth control and some guarantee half their kids would not die from disease in childhood, would have in all parts of the world and it is 1.7 or so. So if we keep fighting disease and improve women's health and education the population of the world will start going down in the late 2000s.
Beringia
(4,313 posts)applegrove
(118,006 posts)Western countries used to lend money to nations they bled all the riches from in colonialism and african nations were paying off debt all the time. It is not just africa and asia that had some thinking and strides to take. The West too.
Response to Beringia (Original post)
CatLady78 This message was self-deleted by its author.
localroger
(3,602 posts)When I said no her face fell and she said "Oh, I'm so sorry." When I replied "Oh don't be, it was our decision," instead of being relieved that I hadn't been deprived of a dream she became shocked and baffled. "But... but don't you want to leave a legacy? she stammered.
I have spent nearly forty years building industrial machines. I've done things in that space that many of my colleagues thought were impossible, and I've got a good reputation for making systems that work reliably and perform as expected. One of which I had just installed for the lady who made this comment. A legacy? If you are American the odds that you have eaten something that passed across a machine I designed are nearly 100%. But to this lady who was about to start using a machine I designed, the fact that I had not made a mini-me meant my life had no meaning.
This is far more basic than racism (she and I are both white). I think it is actually connected deeply with fear of death and an idea that reproduction is the closest thing available to immortality. The look of horror on her face when I said I hadn't ever wanted children haunts me, because I suspect there are far more people like her out there than there are people like me.
Beringia
(4,313 posts)She felt like my life was not fulfilled since I had no children. And then my mother, who had 8 children and then blamed us for ruining her life later when there was the divorce and she was adamant they she keep all of us, "to keep us together", but later kicked me and my sister out. She got a masters in psychology but she always felt like since she entered the field late, she never got very far. And then I took her to Loyola Hospital for some tests when she was in her 80s and she was asking this nurse, "do you have children", like that was the main thing for a woman, to have children.
Beringia
(4,313 posts)applegrove
(118,006 posts)Last edited Sat Nov 21, 2020, 11:02 AM - Edit history (1)
are the greatest people in her life and the best, most vital thing she ever did. That she will live forever through them too. That gives her meaning, love, meaning, love, meaning, love and she can't think of finding that in another way. So she looks at you and sees emptyness which would be her with no kids and it is not you. She is projecting her fears onto you. People do that all the time. For sure you are missing important things having children gives you but she doesn't have the good things in your life like the thrill of invention. So you are both missing things. But both of you made choices that worked out a rewarding life. So don't look at what you are missing. Look at each others gifts. At least while you are aquaintances. If you got closer it would be good to look at both the good and bad in people and see if it is a match. But having kids is good if you have them. Inventing things is good too. Not doing either of these things is not bad. i didn't learn about evil until i was much older than i should have. I let people project on me in horrible ways. Hope your week goes better.
Response to applegrove (Reply #10)
CatLady78 This message was self-deleted by its author.
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Response to Beringia (Original post)
CatLady78 This message was self-deleted by its author.
Beringia
(4,313 posts)I looked up Subliminal Man, what a nightmare. I remember going on a family vacation and for some reason the new ideas about subliminal seduction in advertising was out there and we were commenting on the billboards as to what might be subliminal in them. Of course advertising likes to put in sex to help sell things.
Response to Beringia (Reply #14)
CatLady78 This message was self-deleted by its author.
Beringia
(4,313 posts)and a person who the Catholic church canonized as a saint. They direct people's ideas of a hero to a woman who served the poor and the lepers, but the church promotes having as many children as happens naturally. They certainly don't promote birth control.
So you live in India, Wow.
I have read a lot of books and essays by the Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton and he did address the ideas about the American myths of conquering the wilderness, which I thought was good he had some opinions on this. By the way, he was my father's novice master at Gethesemane monastery in Kentucky and also my Godmother is Dorothy Day, a good friend of my father's who knew her well and she visited our farm in Missouri in the 1950s. Dorothy Day is being considered for canonization too.
From Thomas Merton essay in The Catholic Worker 1968 called The Wild Places
excerpt
Now one of the interesting things about this ambivalence toward nature is that it Is rooted in our Biblical Judeo-Christian tradition. We might remark at once that it is neither genuinely Biblical nor Jewish nor Christian. Nash is perhaps a little one-sided in his analysis here. But a certain kind of Christian culture has certainly resulted in a manichean hostility towards created nature. This, of course, we all know well enough, the word manichean has become a cliche of reproof (like communist or racist.) But the very ones who use the cliche most may be the ones who are still unknowingly tainted, on a deep level, an unconscious level. For there is a certain popular, superficial and one-sided "Christian worldliness" that is, in its hidden implications, profoundly destructive of nature and of "God's creation even 'while It claims to love and extol them.
https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=CW19680601-01.2.8&srpos=1&e=-------en-20--1-byDA-txt-txIN-thomas+merton+ecology------
Response to Beringia (Reply #16)
CatLady78 This message was self-deleted by its author.
Beringia
(4,313 posts)at least, that is what she thinks. She gave up trying to find her birth mother. Her husband worked for a big international company called Bechtel, and I am almost positive he got his education at Stanford and why he lives in California.
I never knew Dorothy Day, but was always fascinated by her story. She is the one who connected my oldest sister in the orphanage in Pennsylvania to my parents on their farm in Missouri.
Your story of the way Stanford wanted to investigate your marriage reminds me of Mean Girls. I have never worked for a company that is nosey about that, but have come across many girls in college and in workplace who want to know really personal stuff, when it is none of their business.
This is probably way too much information, but if you are curious, here is my sister's story in Ebony Magazine from 1974. Page 85
https://books.google.com/books?id=Jd4DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA85&dq=judy%20lijesen&pg=PA85#v=onepage&q=judy&f=false
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CatLady78 This message was self-deleted by its author.
Response to Beringia (Reply #18)
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Hi CatLady78, that would be fine. But I am not that on top of political issues. I am more of a casual participant. And I post about wildlife occasionally. I have been watching DU pretty steadily during this time of the election. I hadn't thought about the future of DU. I surely hope it stays in the hands of an independent person who is of like mind as Skinner and the others.
Response to Beringia (Reply #21)
CatLady78 This message was self-deleted by its author.