Population Decline - Red Herrings and Hope

[GliderGuider]

The linked article is a cleaned-up version of a debate I had here recently. It summarizes why I think the human population is in four a rough time in the near future regardless of efforts being made to control it. I'd like to thank DUer HamdenRice for providing a good summary of the mainstream position and prompting this article.

Population Decline - Red Herrings and Hope

In recent years demographic experts have been revising their peak human population estimates downward. At one time, peak population was feared to be in the tens of billions. Then it was revised down to 12 billion. But fertility rates continued to drop, to the point where our population is now projected to peak around 9 billion sometime in the middle of this century. This decline is being driven by some well-recognized factors:

(snip)

The world has entered a demographic phase of plummeting fertility rates -- in many countries to below the magic "replacement" fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, which implies zero population growth or even "sub-replacement" fertility rates that imply a slow decline in overall human population. Much of Europe is worrying about and developing plans to deal with slowly declining populations. So in the opinion of mainstream demographers we now have an excellent opportunity to have a "soft landing" in population rather than the population explosion and crash that so many have been fearing for decades.

Or do we? Might the rejoicing over falling fertility be, if not a red herring, at least a trifle premature? This article makes a case for extreme skepticism on this issue. Yes, population growth is slowing, and all the factors cited above are contributing to that. However, there are a number of inconvenient truths that are not addressed in this rosy analysis. They change the picture dramatically when they are included.

(snip)

As our ability to maintain a complex high-energy civilization is compromised by the loss of its master resource, Liebig's Law of the Minimum will come into play to stop its growth. Food production and distribution will be hampered or in some cases made impossible, and due to the damage of soil and water local agriculture will prove very difficult in some places. If medical care erodes, so does infant mortality and longevity. The erosion of urban sanitation systems will have an identical, and possibly greater, effect. The effects will be highly variable, with some places like the United States suffering from the catastrophic decline in net global oil exports that is now underway. Other countries like those at the bottom of the list of developing nations will simply be too poor to compete against the developed world for the resources needed for survival. Populations will fall as a result.

Based on my understanding of the oil situation and my developing understanding of man's position within the earth's ecology (especially that we are in at least a 50% overshoot situation without oil's help) I predict that the global population will never rise above 7 billion, and that it will start to decline very steeply within two decades, leveling out at a billion or so by the end of this century.

In the face of our physical circumstances, it matters not at all which demographic theories you prefer. In the face of overshoot and 10 to 20 year time lines they are all moot.

(Snip more about why there is still reason to hope even in the face of such a dire prediction...)

[JacquesMolay]

1. We're past carrying capacity now...

... if you denominate human consumption in renewable resources (products of photsynthesis), we use more than the Earth produces every year. An interesting book which proves this is called Our Ecological Footprint. This is only mad possible by exploiting the stored products of photosynthesis for eons past (i.e. fossil fuels).

You may not get a lot of response, but I'm glad people are posting stuff like this here. We need to wake up and pay attention to the fundamental aspects of our culture's existence - how many people we can support and how.

[glowing]

2. Who's the statistician? And what the mathmatical model based on?

[donsu]

3. I think it will come sooner

nt

[greyl]

4. Great handling of the topic, very well done.

It's so well done that I hesitate to quibble with it at all, but here I go anyway.
I do see one area in your jewel of an essay where I think it's possible to cut another hopeful facet or two, and that is regarding the following statement: "2. Humanity is like yeast. We reproduce and consume until our ecological niche is stripped of resources and poisoned by waste, then we die off."

I'm of the mind that our culture does not represent humanity at large. I see no evidence that our particular civilizational experiment is to humans what the pod is to dolphins, what the flock is to geese, or what the hive is to bees. Those three systems of group organization are the result of millions of years of natural selection, and because of that fact nobody is surprised that they work well for dolphins, geese, and bees. Now, contrary to the rarely examined assumptions of our culture, there is also a system that has evolved over the course of millions of years of natural selection that works well for people, and that is the tribe.
The following graph looks like very strong evidence to me that overpopulation isn't a result of human biology or so-called "human nature", but is more the result of the vision of a particular human culture among thousands of others.

Two hundred thousand years ago is when a new species called Homo sapiens first began to be seen on this planet. As with any young species, there were not many members of it to begin with. Since our subject is population, I’d better clarify what I mean by that. We have an approximate date for the emergence of Homo sapiens because we have fossil remains—and we have fossil remains because a sufficient number of this species lived around this time to provide those fossil remains. In other words, when I say that Homo sapiens appeared about two hundred thousand years ago, I’m not talking about the first two of them or the first hundred of them. But neither am I talking about the first million of them.
Two hundred thousand years ago, there was a bunch. Let’s say ten thousand. Over the next hundred ninety thousand years, Homo sapiens grew in numbers and migrated to every continent of the world.
The passage of these hundred ninety thousand years brings us to the opening of the historical era on this planet. It brings us to the beginning of the agricultural revolution that stands at the foundation of our civilization.
This is about ten thousand years ago, and the human population at that time is estimated to have been around ten million.
I want to spend a couple minutes now just looking at that period of growth from ten thousand people to ten million people. As it happens, what this period of growth represents is ten doublings. From ten thousand to twenty thousand, from twenty thousand to forty thousand, from forty thousand to eighty thousand, and so on. Start with ten thousand, double it ten times, and you wind up with about ten million.

So: Our population doubled ten times in a hundred ninety thousand years. Went from about ten thousand to ten million. That’s growth. Undeniable growth, definite growth, even substantial growth . . . but growth at an infinitesimal rate. Here’s how infinitesimal it was: On the average, our population was doubling every nineteen thousand years. That’s slow — glacially slow.
At the end of this period, which is to say ten thousand years ago, this began to change very dramatically. Growth at an infinitesimal rate became growth at a rapid rate. Starting at ten million, our population doubled not in nineteen thousand years but in five thousand years, bringing it to twenty million. The next doubling—doubling and a bit—took only two thousand years, bringing us to fifty million. The next doubling took only sixteen hundred years, bringing us to one hundred million. The next doubling took only fourteen hundred years—bringing us to two hundred million at the zero point of our calendar. The next doubling took only twelve hundred years, bringing us to four hundred million. The year was 1200 A.D. The next doubling took only five hundred years, bringing us to eight hundred million in 1700. The next doubling took only two hundred years, bringing us to a billion and a half in 1900. The next doubling took only sixty years, bringing us to three billion in 1960. The next doubling will take only thirty-seven years or so. Within ten or twenty months we’ll reach six billion, and if this growth trend continues unchecked, many of us in this room will live long enough to see us reach twelve billion.
The Story of B - Daniel Quinn

So, why does understanding this lead to hope? Because we don't need to change humanity, we only need to change one culture - us.

__________________________________

False, but pervasive mythological understanding of human evolution:



True:


A simple proof of this, is that those thousands of other human cultures don't need to hear your message, or Al Gore's message, or Rachel Carson's message, or David T. Suzuki's message, or Daniel Quinn's message, or GreenPeace's message, or Dr. Alan Thornhill's message, etc.

[GliderGuider]

5. I don't mind a nitpick at all

It's one reason I put it out here, to see what critiques it might inspire. Thanks for taking the time to do that.

I'm skeptical about your jump from the premise of an increasing growth rate to the conclusion that it's a single culture that's responsible for our current dilemma. Either that or I don't understand the point. Are you saying that there are 10,000 cultures that are coexistent with us today that don't share our growth imperative? Or that there have been 10,000 cultures before us that didn't share it but have been subsumed by ours?

My counter-argument would be that the single thing that has made H. Sap. the most successful species on the planet is our ability to remember what worked in the past, abstract a lesson about why it worked, and then pass that knowledge along so future generations could build on it. As we gained communications and synthetic memory skills (first as spoken language 100,000 years ago, then written language 10,000 years ago, then the ability to translate between languages about 2,500 years ago, then the printing press 550 years ago) our capacity to accumulate and transmit knowledge accelerated dramatically.

I think it was this development that was directly responsible for the acceleration in population growth. One reason for this would be that it enabled knowledge about the exploitation of resources, technology, agriculture etc. to be compiled - first through successive generations, then across cultures; first orally, then hand-written, then printed for wider distribution. In fact, if you look at the human population curve, the year 1450 when Gutenberg invented the printing press marks the foot of the major upward acceleration we are on today.

Rather than a single culture's values being responsible for our growth, it can be seen as the natural outgrowth of the accretion of knowledge. This knowledge made the exploitation of our ecological niche possible at ever-increasing scales.

As an aside, if it is culture and not biology or genetic programming that is the driver, I don't see how that helps the situation we're in. Our behaviour seems pretty impervious to change, no matter what the mechanism is.

[HamdenRice]

6. Sorry I dropped out of the debate ...

I had a little emergency last Friday that kept me busy much of the weekend:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=6715449

I'll try to respond to your thoughtful post in the original thread some time today.

[GliderGuider]

7. Wow, I just read the thread on the accident

That is one lucky little old lady! No wonder your mind wasn't on Internet debates over the weekend...