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How Many People is Too Many People?
The UN has just released its latest World Population Prospects report on population estimates, which is essentially a detailed interactive data base, country by country, until 2050, with a number of very detailed sub-categories under various scenarios which I entourage you to play with.
The 2 biggest headlines are the following:
- Population to increase by 40% (see this BBC summary)
- India to overtake China as the largest country (see the Financial Times, which put the article on its front page this morning).
Demographic studies are often neglected in the political discourse because they talk about events and facts that seem to be so far off in the future that they are not worth bothering about. Yet, as Emmanuel Todd’s remarkable "After the Empire" book shows (as did his previous, The Final Fall, which anticipated the end of the Soviet Union), long term demographic trends have a massive impact on geopolitical evolutions of various countries.
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Europe (except France and the UK), Japan and Russia will have to manage a fall in their population, which is an unprecedented event in Human history outside of times of war or plague. We all know about the problems this will create for pensions systems and health care costs, but have we thought about the consequences in terms of (i) the growing conservatism of the populations (ii) conversely, the diminished requirements for "growth", "speed", "change" that put so much pressure on our resources, (iii) the impact on immigration patterns as older people require labor-intensive care which cannot be provided by younger generations, together, (iv) in countries like Russia, the emptying of resource-rich territories (such as Siberia) which will put tremendous geopolitical pressure on border-crossing issues with heavily populated and resource-poor neighbors?;
- China will face the same aging issue, except that it is still a (relatively) poor country. The Western world has been preparing itself for the past 20 years or more for the predictable aging of its population, and has slowly organized the required resource transfers. In China, the demographic evolution is unprecedented both in its rapidity (less than a generation) and its scale (for the time being, it is still the largest population in the world, with more than 20% of world population). Combined with the gender unbalance (more boys than girls), we have many ingredients for massive instability and upheaval as a society must suddenly learn to cope with a growing number of dependents at the same time as it is busily trying to move from an agricultural society to the industrialized age and manage it in a context of growing resource (oil, water, commodities, even land) scarcity;
- meanwhile, the developing world, where most of the population growth is taking place, is still facing the same old boring problems like poverty, disease and lack of education. Another UN institution,
The UNDPA provided its own report on population growth a few months ago, focusing on AIDS, reproductive and poverty issues (see also a summary here (pdf, 6 pages)). I am sure that others more qualified than me among you can comment on the effects of Bush/conservative policies on reproductive issues around the world…
We are going through the last – and most explosive phase – of population growth, which as we can see, is a mixture of simultaneous growth and aging which will create many tensions between generations within countries and between countries for the allocation of resources and wealth.
as Diamond points out, complex cultures often collapse within a very short time from the peak of their numbers and wealth. they do not generally undergo a gentle, prolonged decay. y’all must be familiar with the Petri dish analogy from way back: everything’s just peachy until the Nth generation. these UN projections I find dubious for this reason: I don’t think we can maintain present trends for that long.
the overshoot of human numbers and resource consumption/extraction as compared to what the planet’s biosystems can sustain, is as central to our current nightmares as the overcapitalisation and excessive efficiency of the industrial process and capital accumulation (meaning that billions of people are “surplus to requirements” for the capitalists in charge, not needed as labour and too poor to be a market).
now mix the very probable peak oil event into the picture, along with grotesque land maldistribution and the deliberate sabotage of local food self-sufficiency — and from where I sit the next 2 decades or so look frankly terrifying. the pursuit of corporate profit is undermining half the tactics and strategies that might get us through a very difficult period with minimal damage; and the pursuit of religious fundamentalism is undermining the rest. the BushCo regime is deliberately sabotaging the provision of contraceptives and contraceptive education worldwide, for example, even as corporate agribusiness deliberately exterminates the independent market-farmer who provides regional food security. fundamentalist Taliban-style regimes are deliberately suppressing female literacy and employment opportunities, when there is a strong correlation between female education and job seeking, and a reduction in family size.
I would not be at all surprised if there were elite “thinkers” (like Kissinger, Huntington, Summers) coolly calculating that killing off about half the world population would still leave plenty of poor people to work for s**t wages in the maquiladoras and mines. meanwhile the world’s poor continue to accumulate in the slums and favelas that Mike Davis documents in his latest book — a critical mass of anger without political consciousness (the primary organising ideologies of the megaslums are Islam and Pentecostalism). concentrated into such slum areas they are even more vulnerable to extermination campaigns than mobile bands of peasants or rebels in the few remaining TAZ. presently existing bioweapons could take out entire slum cities in a matter of months, perhaps even with some degree of plausible deniability.
I would not put it beyond the ruling elite to do such a thing. the smallpox-infested blanket idea was tried and worked. the Tuskegee Experiment is documented. the unnecessary cremation of two Japanese cities by atomic weapons is documented. the Nazi project of “optimising” the German population is documented. but mass murder still doesn’t solve the fossil fuel peak.
consider for a moment that most of what grows on America’s huge factory-farm hectarage is not suitable for human consumption. it is feedstock for energy-intensive industrial process whose end result is the pseudo-food purveyed at a huge markup to the captive markets of metropolitan America. if the peak oil event disrupts long haul transport in the ways that we might expect, American cities suddenly find their long food supply lines getting very expensive; and the industrial processes needed to transform the low-grade feedstock become very expensive. if we pulled the plug on the whole thing overnight, and the starving masses from the cities rushed out into the countryside desperately seeking food — there would for the most part be nothing they could successfully eat, except in those few regions where the family-scale diversified market-farmer survives.
I am never sure how dismal to be, but the indicators at this present time are startlingly negative. if we accept conservative estimates of the effects of global warming, we will be losing inhabitable surface area on all our continents and islands; extreme weather will contribute to the degradation of agricultural productivity; rising temperatures will increase the range and intensity of disease vectors, parasites and pests (in other words the disadvantages of the tropical belt will move outwards in both directions, covering a wider area). and during this same period we will have squandered billions of barrels of fossil fuel and trillions of dollars on futile, pointless wars over the remaining oil resources, contributing further to the degradation by poisoning agricultural land and water supplies with chemical munitions, DU, the smoke from burning oil fields and all the rest. we will be running out of cheap fossil fuel just at the point where we will need major energy expenditure to build seawalls, repair bridges and washed-out highways, and rebuild storm-damaged cities and towns — not to mention to transport food into areas temporarily devastated by extreme weather.
what I personally see (and admittedly my crystal ball tends to be a sorrowful shade of dark blue) is a confluence of mutually reinforcing negative trends — a catalytic reaction of the same kind that Diamond documents in his studies of collapsed civilisations of the past. the habits and strategies that have made us successful in the past have so strong a hold on our imagination that we will apply them blindly and desperately to an untenable present position in which they only make things worse. more profiteering, more and “better” resource extraction, more and “better” overproduction and hyperconsumption, more war, more megascale technomanagerial hubris, more “success” in other words, will only render us more vulnerable and accelerate the crash.
here’s a somewhat less pessimistic perspective…
one ironically bright note is that in industrialised nations the toxic stew of synthetic chemicals in which we live seems to be reducing our fertility. if we lose the high technology luxury of “fertility clinics,” artificial insemination and all the rest, then our live-birth rate may drop somewhat.
at this point all scenarios are to be feared — our present position is frankly unsustainable, untenable, impossible. I am not sure which is worse — the idea that we will solve our problems (temporarily) by an act of genocide on such a scale that it can hardly be imagined (letting loose bioweapons in the slums of the third world, “ethnically cleansing” the planet of half its people, that kind of thing, all directed from the boardrooms and secret-policemen’s conference rooms of Davos and NYC and London)… or the idea that our species, failing such an act, will find its numbers limited in the traditional ways: sickliness, starvation, intranecine squabbling, infanticide, cannibalism, femicide, epidemics, sudden brushfires of localised mass slaughter a la Rwanda.
one last thought — imho what ended slavery was not merely the heroic efforts of excellent people, but the advent of cheap fossil fuel and mechanisation. the elite substituted energy-slaves for human slaves. if we run out of cheap fossil fuel then I anticipate a slow slide back into the justification and normalisation of slavery. human labour has always been a renewable energy resource. before steam and gasoline engines, teams of hundreds of sweating, miserable men pulled ships upstream on the great Chinese rivers. after fuel becomes “too expensive,” how long will it be before prison-economy nations like the US start using forced prison labour to substitute for expensive oil? or in the mines to extract coal? much of what we call “freedom” and “enlightenment” is the product of material surplus, an easing of the enslavement of human beings because other more “efficient” sources of energy and work became available.
I’m sorry if this all sounds a bit like frothing and raving… I could cite chapter and verse, footnotes and refs, but am writing in some haste and admittedly under the cloud of despair that has shrouded my every move and thought for the last ten years and more (ever since I got a grip on the magnitude of our problems). so far the only counterarguments are fantastical ones — fantasies about abiotic oil, miraculous infinite energy sources (uh huh, and we can eat pure energy, right), bold journeys to get resources from elsewhere in the solar system (like Mars is rolling in topsoil, which we desperately need, or oceans that haven’t been stripmined as we have ours), and the ever-durable “some miracle technology will save us.”
one of the most maddening things to me about all this current geopolitical insanity, is that it is all counterproductive. when the ship is sinking, the last thing we want to see is the officers and men in a great big drunken brawl on the afterdeck instead of manning the pumps, readying the lifeboats, etc. and yet here we are, brawling drunkenly on the afterdeck and shooting more holes in the hull in our eagerness to kill each other for a place in the lifeboats that we haven’t even bothered to effin’ launch.
Fortress Atlantica is possible, I suppose. but I am haunted by Diamond’s comments on the folly of elites: that all they win for themselves in the long term is the privilege of being the last to starve.
sorry this got so long, y’all. and so gloomy. but someone has to say these things, if only in the hope of being credibly contradicted. think maybe I should change my handle to “Jeremiah”? I sincerely hope that 10 or 15 years from now, if most of us are still alive and well, one of y’all will send me an email saying, “Well, don’t you feel silly now that all your doomsday scenarios didn’t happen!” I would, at that date or at any time, be gloriously grateful to feel silly.
Posted by: DeAnander | Feb 25 2005 21:05 utc | 3
@Groucho: the second one blows away the first.
@slothrop… OK, where do we start… [quickly condenses the reading list to “canonical” titles]… Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel followed by Collapse. If you read Collapse, then you probably don’t need to read Clive Ponting’s earlier, fascinating book A Green History of the World, though I think the two go very well together. Ponting is a broad-brush painter, Diamond goes for the detailed, specific research. I am forever indebted to Ponting for “the ratchet effect,” which Diamond explicates in far more scholarly detail. Ponting dwells far more seriously on the great C19 hyperexploitation of species in the N hemi. I should warn, perhaps, that Diamond’s 2nd volume may make a political animal crazy in the final chapters 🙂 but this does not vitiate in any way the force or accuracy of his narrative generally.
I assume that the peak oil literature is available and well known enough that no reading guide is needed, but Deffeyes’ book is “the one” imho — his background as an oil company petrogeologist makes it a far more interesting read than most. On climate change, the IPCC papers are the primary source, with additional info from the insurance sector on average storm damage claims per annum etc. Books like The Heat is On imho merely attempt to popularise the original research, and so far no one has done this as successfully as Deffeyes did for peak oil. The cutting-edge research is not yet in book form and is mostly online. Photographic evidence of glacier retreat, for example, is building up like a relentless drumbeat. [BTW, did I mention that the primary source of agricultural water for most of the world is lake, river and stream water fed by glaciers and snowcaps in their seasonal melt? Lose the icecaps entirely, and there’s no water in the river in summer. Watch the crops dry out and die….]
For residual and persistent toxicity in metropolitan populations (and surprising mobility and concentration of POPs and other perdurable toxins in remote populations), Our Stolen Future (despite the sensationalist title) is probably a good entry point. Declining sperm counts are one of many indicators it studies and attempts to graph. (BTW, perchlorate is now showing up in nontrivial concentrations in human milk, and the concentration is roughly indexed to the density of military bases around the affected population — google for “perchlorate breast milk military” to find many recent news clips. perchlorate exposure in infancy may produce mild retardation.) St Clair’s Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green To Me is probably worth a read with its many American case studies and emphasis on environmental racism and the mechanisms of class and caste in environmental “sacrifice”. [Note also that elevated temps may increase the toxicity of certain forms of air and water pollution, increase the growth rate of algal blooms in nitrogen-contaminated coastal waters etc.]
On agriculture and food security — yikes — the literature is enormous and much of it is not gathered in book form but in journal and conference papers. Fatal Harvest (subtitle The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture) is probably “the” book on the paradoxes, false economies and shoot-self-in-foot aspects of industrial ag. Manning’s book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilisation is also imho an essential, and feminist economist Marilyn Waring (from NZ) touches on all these themes in her (imho great) Counting for Nothing, as does Christa Wichterich in The Globalised Woman — both authors make the connection between land policy, the destruction of subsistence farming, and the immiseration and impoverishment of women worldwide. Indian activists Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva are two of the most visible defenders of indigenous agriculture in the S Hemi. Jules Pretty’s Agri Culture is a personal favourite, exploring the false dichotomy between “landscape” and “agriculture”. I am a fan of E Ann Clark, a farmer and razor-sharp social commentarian in the US, but don’t know if I can call her work canonical 🙂 There are several good histories of the Enclosures of the 1600s, can’t riff one off top of head right now, maybe someone else can help here?
Mike Davis, James Howard Kunstler, Jane Jacobs pretty much cover the waterfront when it comes to American cities, the politics of, the economy of, the core/periphery relation with the surrounding countryside, etc. Mike has recently gone global with his book on slum cities.
Online and other media… The Suzuki Foundation does a lot of studying and publishing on “sustainability issues.” The Footprint Project offers an heroic attempt to model how many hectares of arable land are required to support each person on Earth based on various lifestyle options and choices. Lester Brown’s Worldwatch organisation has published indicators (agricultural productivity, river levels, potable water availability, salination, fossil fuel inputs per hectare, crop losses from pests, weather-related crop losses, etc) on a yearly basis for many years now. Various papers on sustainable ag (the long work of Jeavons in the 60’s and 70’s for example) offer the numbers on water use, fossil fuel use, pest-related losses and overall productivity per hectare of industrial vs sustainable/organic ag. The Victoria Transportation Policy Institute and the works of Mayer Hillman are probably good entry points into the mathematics of fossil-fuel based transport; UCS (though I have been very angry with them in the past for what I consider facile misrepresentations) publishes some good numbers on the energy math of various “consumer choices.” Canadian TV did a fairly good documentary, “The End of Suburbia” which covered a lot of ground (sketchily, as TV always does) in the peak oil territory. Rocky Mountain Institute (the Lovinses) does some decent research but I remain skeptical about their hydrogen fixation and their belief that wonder technologies will fix fundamentally broken paradigms like the private passenger automobile.
You could dedicate a 24 hour cable channel to this information and never run out of programming. Isn’t it interesting that no broadcaster ever does? [snark]
Isn’t it fascinating how well-meaning people in the West always want to donate solar ovens to “those people in the third world who are cutting down their trees for cooking fuel”? How about if we Westerners used solar ovens, so that we didn’t gobble quite so much oil, driving up the price of kero so that poor women in Africa and Asia can’t afford to cook with kero and have to go out and cut brush? but then we might discover that the time when you most want a good hot meal is when the sun isn’t effin’ shining 🙂 Honestly… sometimes you gotta wonder how this species ever got to the top of the food chain.
OK, enough Jeremiad. I think I’d better go into lurkmode for a while. definite sense of having exceeded my bandwidth quota, not to mention bumming everyone out for the weekend… [but I have to admit a nasty little thrill of satisfaction at seeing the Unadmirable Crichton recently quoted alongside Falwell and LeHaye on a rightwing religious fruitcake anti-enviro site. at last, Mikey is hangin’ with the company he deserves 🙂 ]
Posted by: DeAnander | Feb 26 2005 3:44 utc | 14
9 bio? Frankly, they’re talking out of their asses here.
The current trends would lead us beyond the 10 bio mark. If the UN forecasts were accurate, we would never have come close to a yearly growth of 100 mio, yet we are there.
Then, of course, any demographic that takes the current business as usual, for 3rd world nations as well as industrialised nations, is also talking out of their asses, because there will be crises this century, and they will begin to hit before 2050.
As DeA mentioned, major epidemics will come, massive wars, and famines, everyone of them making the worst previous ones look like picnic. This is how population control has really worked in the past, and of course I’ve always knew that since population can’t grow forever, we’ll be back to this pretty soon. Mankind has had a free ride for far too long, but the time of punishment is coming, at long last, and it won’t be pretty.
I’ll be cynical, but as others hinted at, the problems of aging population are a non-starter. We know how it will end if the burden is unsustainable for the 20-60-y. The 60-75 may still be physically active and able to defend, but of course once you’re beyond 80/85, you can’t defeat a big 30-y old. And Jews and Tutsis were wiped out, including the ones who were physically able to defend themselves. The real question, imho, isn’t if Social Security should be privatised. In Western nations, it’s how to avoid mass extermination of the eldest classes when the shit hits the fan; this is the real challenge of the current aging of population, and this is why the whole pension / SS issue really matters. There is a real threat in the middle and long run, which is far more serious than bankrupting a hedge fund or SS going belly up.
China: I already said this in some Kos thread, Jérôme, but if we look at China, I think the gender imbalance will be the biggest issue there. It’s also worth noting that if you want population control or decrease, killing off the males is moronic; 1 male is enough to get hundreds of babies, assuming he’s got enough women. Killing off the women is the ultimate act of genocide – basically, what Fran said.
DeA: I have to get my hands on Collapse (3rd major one, but both Germs and Collapse are already sketched in “The third chimpanzee”) – and I can easily believe the last one tops the previous ones, given its subject. I amateurishly dabble with that kind of ideas and issues since 15 years, and I’ve come to the same conclusion: the fall follows very quickly the peak. I’ve also come to the conclusion that most of the time, the sharpest the rise, the quickest the fall (think Hitler and Napoleon for the most extreme examples), and the longest a society is high and imperially ruling, the deepest it will sink (notably because it would have had a long time to exhaust pretty much all the resources of its wide empire, with no backup in sight for a very long time).
I fully agree with Diamond’s worthwhile remark that “technology will save us” is pretty limited, since new technologies tend to create new problems that have to be fixed with newer technologies. Well, they’re not always as bad as those they fixed, but in the cases where you have a low-tech easy answer, use it (as with the starvation problem, which is touted by some as the reason for GM food; well, stupid, if people actually stopped breeding like rabbit, it would helpd; only if all else fails should you rely on new untested technology).
I also tend to think that you shouldn’t worry about these greedy elites making it work by killing half the planet and having the rest as slaves. Won’t work. Remember, *they* created most of the current mess; they’re terminally unable to make a sustainable system. And having 3 bio of slaves for a few tens of mio of fuckers still leaves far too many humans for the resources that are left, and still causes too much pollution – since such bastards will still have a pollution level way beyond the average American.
Another thing of note is that when there is a collapse, population sinks below the normally sustainable level, because the resources have been so hurt they take a long time to recover to the pre-population-boom levels, and also because of the sheer inertia of the collapse mechanism. For instance, if the stability level for mankind is 2 bio, then we’d be lucky if we ended up with 1.5 bio humans (I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up with 1 bio in such a case). In fact, if the sustainability level is too low, the whole population may die even if the system would allow a small population to survive.
“Honestly… sometimes you gotta wonder how this species ever got to the top of the food chain.”
Purely accidental. Just a case of bad luck for Mother Earth. Thankfully for her, it looks like this will be over soon.
Last, DeA: pick Cassandra instead. You know you’re basically right and that this will come to pass.
As far as I’m concerned, I have actual very serious doubts about the survival of mankind beyond 2 centuries – and if you may think it’s long, I think the bulk of the species will have died before 2100, but I leave some time for the pockets of survivors to die off until there’s no one left.
Of course, I’m pretty dark about our chances since I basically only see one scenario which would see the species survive and be(marginally) prosperous in a few centuries.
B: Abstinence against AIDS: I don’t know. Maybe, if JP II wasn’t on the verge of death, we could ask him if he’s fine with having caused literally millions of deaths (as Palast said about Reagan, “another proof that only the good die young”).
Jexter: Drown the whole of mankind in Lake Erie, and the water will barely rise from a few inches.
Name: Sure, some had these fantasies. But WWI and WWII mostly killed off Europeans, so these ones weren’t planned genocides by wealthy elites. If they’d been smart, they would’ve sent the millions of Whiteys in a Mongol-like rampage throughout Asie, Africa and S America until all were dead and 2/3 of the planet was open to new colonization. Actually, war, massacres, genocides, epidemics and famines existed for so long that even without some shadowy group acting towards this goal, it would happen in a few decades. Of course, when you have nutcases in power that actively try to bring doom, it only makes things worse, and the outcome seems even darker than it would’ve been otherwise.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Feb 27 2005 0:37 utc | 26
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