On Human (Over)Population
This topic have been surfacing recently and I doubt it’s going away. Below are the assorted ideas about it that I can contribute.
What causes population to increase?
Sure, overpopulation causes a plethora of problems. But what causes population to jump up? China’s One Child Policy sought to lower the country’s population via force, fines and other penalties. Groups like Population Matters promote education and birth control access as a mechanism to reach a lower population on a global scale. But there’s a simpler correlation that rarely receives mention.
In the Story of B, Daniel Quinn notes that if you make more calories accessible to a species (and without anything to counterbalance its numbers), the species will reproduce and its numbers will rise. Humans are no exception. Certain human societies’ shift from hunting, foraging and “casual gardening” to agriculture oriented toward mass-production had this effect. It produced a substantial, unprecedented surplus of calories.
Calorie availability caps the approximate number of organisms that can exist in an area. (I picture the population as people in a room, and people enter and exit the room through a revolving door. Calories usher people in and out.) Population rises only when births exceed deaths. (More people enter than exit the room, and room occupancy mounts.) Mass-production agriculture’s main effect, surplus calories, made it possible for the birth and death rates to fall out of harmony, such that human numbers increased. This was the primary switch (rather than a mere decision to stop exercising reproductive self-restraint) that set off all the mayhem that ensued.
Current criticisms of growthism accurately point out that capitalism made growth our explicit objective. However, Kudzu, without a capitalist agenda, overtakes large areas. The continuous addition of more calories to our collective plate has been driving population increase since long before capitalism’s emergence. Mass-production agriculture is the more fundamental driver of our growing resource appetite. The shift to a more extractive relationship with land, along with the population boost that it yielded, was already environmentally-damaging behavior, reducing the abundance and diversity of living things. If we were to only get rid of capitalism but proceed with our ever-increasing claim to the planet’s calories, this would still produce overpopulation, suppress diversity and degrade our environment.
Our ambitions did also reach beyond claiming calories. Some societies also brought to this scenario a tendency toward ultrasociality, which Lisi Krall and John Gowdy define as “the social organization of a few species, including humans and some social insects, having a complex division of labor, city-states, and an almost exclusive dependence on agriculture for subsistence.” Because a portion of the society was working on overdrive to produce enough food for the entire society, another portion could focus on materially-intensive, human-centric engineering projects. These generally erased life, both in the places from where their materials came and in the space that they occupied.
Mass-production agriculture + unrestrained reproduction + ultrasociality also enabled the formation of militaries. Quinn points out in Ishmael that any society that embraces this aggressive, ecocidal culture holds more power and it able to absorb, annihilate or displace individuals who wish to live differently. This is why it ultimately spread around the globe - its enabling of aggression, not a general superiority.
Mass-production agriculture and the organization of our activities within the framework of a civilization also “disabled our alarms”. Suddenly, it became easy to think little of one’s food source, having faith that more land and more resources always existed somewhere out there and that someone will always take care of accessing them. We became unique among species in how disconnected we were from the origins of the calories that we consumed.
What a lower human population would “achieve”, and what it wouldn’t
Imagine that you can snap your fingers and painlessly reduce the human population to 1 million. That’s a mere 0.0125% of our current 8+ billion. Almost 99% of the population, gone.
What has been solved?
Surely, there’s less pressure on the planet as a whole.
However, those humans’ culture is still very relevant. Are those 1 million continuing to engage in mass-production agriculture and organizing their activities according the the civilization framework, extracting large amounts of materials for engineering mega-projects? Congratulations, that’s Ancient Rome. Its population was about 1 million and their behavior led to collapse. Ecological devastation would still become a problem, but on a regional scale instead of a planetary one. It’s not just the number of humans; it’s their behavior/culture.
Furthermore, I think when folks suggest that overpopulation is a problem and that a contracting population is the solution, they believe that by mitigating environmental damage, population decline will preserve their way of life. It will not preserve our way of life. (Nothing will.) The products that we take for granted require a complex, global workforce. Furthermore, we’ve designed various systems to require growth. Many of our programs would crash and -at best- be replaced with someone different, which may or may not be to our liking.
Biased Birth Rate Extrapolations
Contrary to UN projections that population will peak much later this century, Tom Murphy analyzes population trends and surmises that we might see global population start declining as soon as 2040. This seems to be coming about fairly painlessly - via culture change and maybe declining fertility.
Near-Future Pressures on Population
In addition to fudging birth rate trends that are already materializing, angle that the UN and other entities fail to recognize the many factors that will increase the death rate.
Here’s a comic by Stuart McMillan about the reindeer on St. Matthew’s Island, a true story that illustrates population dynamics - growth, overshoot, collapse.
In one of my “core posts”1, I cite two “anchoring” numbers: Prior to the Holocene, there were only about 20 million humans. Prior to the industrial revolution, there were less than 1 billion. As a result of climate change, we have now left the Holocene behind, and the industrial era will soon start to fade into obsolescence too. So… (I’ll say more on this in a future post.)
Finally, below is a preliminary list, from another post of mine2, of the trends with which we’ll contend.
Its definitely calories. But if you project agricultural production from its inception 10,000 years ago without the fossil pulse, you get about 2 billion humans. Its the great acceleration that really took off after WW2 with the oil and gas inputs to farming that generated the calories. In effect we ate fossil fuels and made 6 billion extra people.
Great stuff, Andrea and Co. We are descended from humans who lived ecologically balanced, self-sustaining lives of up to 60yrs. in migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands of up to 150 related members including 2 or 3 extended families, or so. Think the 500+ native tribes living in today's USA before the invasion of our European/African/Asian ancestors 600 yrs ago. The Upper Paleolithic H-Gs numbered from 2.6 to 10M worldwide according to the paleo demographers I've read. Populations remained stable due to the requirements of such a lifeway, including the migration necessary for acquiring resources when a local supply is no longer adequate, or seasonal changes demanded. Competition between clans/bands spaced competitors and prevented resource depletion. We made the leap to ever larger populations requiring ever greater energy sources when we learned to substitute symbols for real property/territories. Thus the importance of the 400+ painted caves with their celebration of symbolic realistic art, created during the last iceage, which lasted a good 4,000 yrs. and only allowed life outside at greater distances about 16,000 yrs. ago. The agricultural revolution with the discovery of sedentary grain farming required giving-up the H-G lifeway and our ancestors transitioned to symbolic territories when population growth demanded their playing out territorial rituals in symbols, rather than physical territories. Keep up the great creativity and inventiveness. I'll keep visiting from time to time, if allowed. Greeley Miklashek, MD