By Julie Smith
This is a short summary of this chapter. Download the pdf of the entire chapter here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1fzGp_iyqmdiUHjqXs8fL9AUxhTdFn-Ry.
What you will find in this blog post:
Is There a Problem?
To me, it’s been painfully obvious for decades that continuous population growth is probably not a great idea. I never really thought about it at all growing up with three siblings, a nice rounded family of six seemed quite natural. I was actually pretty clueless about the environment in general as I was growing up. But then, sometime in my late 20’s, when I first began to awaken to our environmental problems on this planet, I began to realize that endless uncontrolled population growth would make things worse, if not impossible to fix.
It was about 1990 when I got a clue. At that time, global population was 5.3 billion. Now, after another 30 plus years, we’re at 8.2 billion. And it continues to astonish me that, while it was so obvious to me, that I could easily see this coming decades ago, how this basic problem could be essentially ignored all this time by the general public. We whine about the constant construction, traffic jams, the annoyance of too many people everywhere we go, we fight over water and other resources, we worry in passing about the decline of the monarch butterfly and the whales, without thinking about the absolute fact that continuous population growth is at the bottom of it all.
Population growth is our biggest environmental problem. Every time we add another human to the planet, our carbon emissions increase by 5.26 metric tonnes per year. For every 1% increase in global population, our numbers increase by 80 million and global emissions increase by more than 400 million metric tonnes. Does that sound like a lot? It is. Yet, nobody wants to talk about human population.
Population Connection and Planned Parenthood are two organizations that are dedicated to population reduction. They mainly provide contraceptives and education to women who want to have less children but can’t afford contraception. If all women on Earth had the means to control their family sizes, global population growth would be reversed in a hurry.
The Math
The math in Chapter 3 tells us what we need to do. We need to reverse the population growth into a kind and gentle population decline. If, that is, we want to save some semblance of the life on our planet. And, this is nothing new. The news has been out for decades. And, I guess would be fine to ignore or blow off, as most of us do with news we don’t like, if we weren’t living on a finite planet with finite resources.
Now, you ask, what do I mean by finite resources? After all, even in this day and age, there’s still plenty of open space around, and we are able to feed and house everybody. Right? Actually, sorry, but nope. Not true. Problem is, we’re actually not able to feed everybody. At this time about 10% of people on this planet face acute food insecurity, which works out to 864 million people, including 36 million children under 5 years of age. Also, we’re experiencing more and more problems with water scarcity, which is an obvious problem, since we need that not only for basic survival, but also to grow our food.
As for land, there might seem to be lots and lots of land around, but the sad truth is, that endless as it seems, we humans have already taken far more land than we should from the other life on this planet, basically driving wildlife to the brink of extinction, taking out 73% of wildlife in just the past 50 years. If we keep it up, and grow our population to 10 billion, like the UN predicts could happen, we’ll drive our wildlife down pretty much to zero, as shown in Figure 1. The blue line is our increasing population in billions, and the red line is the wildlife population, which is decreasing, and will be driven to zero soon after 2040.
As if our dominance on land wasn’t bad enough, we’ve also pretty much overfished the ocean. Even worse, the CO2 that we’re spewing into the atmosphere is also dissolving in the ocean, making it more acidic, which weakens and dissolves the shells of shellfish. So far, we’ve driven at least 2270 terrestrial and aquatic species to extinction or nearly to extinction, meaning they’ll probably be mostly gone in the next human generation.
I Know! Let’s Get Another Earth!
One way to view our global overuse of resources is to consider how many Earths worth of resources we’re consuming every year. Sort of like spending more money than you make every year. Eventually it will catch up with you, and you’ll end up homeless and starving. It turns out that, at this point, globally humanity is consuming a quantity of natural resources that is equivalent to 1.7 Earths every year. This means that humanity is using natural resources 1.7 times faster than the planet’s biocapacity can regenerate.
Even worse, if we all lived like Americans we would be consuming 5.1 Earths per year. Does that sound like a slightly unrealistic way to live? A bit over budget? I mean, should we maybe back down from our mansions into apartments, so to speak? Obviously, we can’t live like this forever. Eventually our credit card will get cancelled and we’ll have to declare bankruptcy.
By the way, at our current population, to get in balance with our planet, we’d all have to live a lifestyle similar to that in North Korea or Ghana, or similar kinds of less-developed countries. Sound fun? I don’t think so, but that’s just me.
Back to the multiple planets, yet another way we’re overextending our reach is by using fossil fuels. These fuels have built up in ancient rock formations over millions of years, and now we’ve managed to consume almost 70% of the original fossil fuel resources in just the past century. Think about that.
At this point, we’re dependent on fossil fuels for pretty much everything we do, except maybe breathe and take a walk, though technically to do either of these things, we need food and water at the very least and we can’t get those without (you guessed it, I hope) fossil fuels.
Basically, we’re stealing from future generations, by squandering millions of years of biodegraded ancient life in just 100 years, leaving the next generations with less than 30 years’ worth of fossil fuels. Specifically, we’ve burned enough of the original reserves to release 2.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, with about 1.3 trillion of the original 3.8 trillion metric tonnes still in the ground left to burn.
If we keep on burning away until it’s gone, not only will we have to figure out another resource to suck to oblivion from our planet, the planet will be even hotter than it is now, and the ocean will be so acidic that no life will survive there. Wouldn’t it make a bit more sense to put forth some rudimentary level of effort now to mitigate this devastation to the extent possible now that we know what we’ve done? For our families? For our people? For humanity? For wildlife? If so, then how would we do that without reducing our population? Think about that. If you have any ideas, bring em on!
As The Century Turns
As the turn of the century approached, coral bleaching from high sea surface temperatures destroyed 16% of the world’s coral reefs in a single year and 50% of the reefs in the Indian Ocean, which is too bad, since the reefs are home to thousands of species of fish and marine life at the edges of continents. Which also happens to be a major source of food that many civilizations depend on.
By 2009, world hunger had reached a historic high of 1 billion. So, while the Green Revolution helped to feed millions, it’s not a magic potion that can let us grow population in perpetuity on a globe with a finite surface and finite resources. Also, the need for toxic pesticides to ostensibly grow food more efficiently in limited arable space is killing off non-human life, e.g., wildlife, in unprecedented numbers, leading to the 6th mass extinction. And these pesticides and fertilizers are made from fossil fuels that we’re running low on. Do ya think we might be between a rock and a hard place here? Hello?
We figured out how to extract fossil fuels from beneath the surface of the planet, and convert it into energy, greatly enhancing our quality of life and ability to travel the world. That seemed like a good idea at the time. But now we’re warming the planet in the process, by releasing vast amounts of carbon that were accumulated over millions of years, in just a century. By consuming these fuels at the pace we are currently going, we are squandering it, so it won’t be available for future generations, while heating the planet so it won’t be livable either, for humans or non-humans.
As our population grows, we’re taking land that the wildlife, the vast connected network of non-human life on our planet, requires to survive into the future. Not only is this unethical, it won’t work. All life on this planet has evolved together over billions of years, from the tiniest microbe to the biggest whale. To rip this apart in just a few generations is asking for a disastrous collapse, similar to the extinction of dinosaurs 60 million years ago, only without the comet. This time, we’re the comet responsible for the destruction of our planet. Think about that.
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