Dr. Garrett Hardin: Overpopulation, Survival and Morality

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From now on we'll probably have to sell most of our spare grain to get the money to buy oil, We can't afford to waste a limited food supply on nations that are hopelessly over-crowded.

PLOWBOY: But isn't there a popular theory which states that a society will produce fewer children as it rises-presumably with the help of foreign aid-to a higher economic level?

HARDIN: Yes, and that's a theory without any factual backing at all. The notion is based upon a correlation that can be seen in the history of Western civilizations. In general, as these cultures moved up the economic scale-over the last 300 years or so-their fertility rates did go down. However, the causal connection between the rise in income and the drop in fertility is very obscure. It could be argued, for instance, that the populations became richer because they produced fewer children

PLOWBOY: You contend, in your book The Limits of Altruism, that we should make carrying capacity-rather than human lifeour primary ethical consideration. Now, that's a shocking statement on the surface, and some reviewers have reacted to it at that level. However, suppose carrying capacity were given central importance in ethical decisions. Wouldn't the effect of that change of focus actually save more human lives—in the long run—than our established policy of concern for individual life ... which doesn't take into account the planet's ability to sustain such life into the indefinite future?

HARDIN: That's right. If we could, for example, stop the trend toward deforestation in poor countries and allow the environments to "mend" themselves, those nations would be able to support reduced populations indefinitely ... rather than one great lump of humanity today and then fewer and fewer people as the topsoil is gradually washed away. Again, the simple statement—that carrying capacity should be more ethically valuable than human life—appears to be cruel ... but it is only so if you don't take the needs of posterity seriously.

PLOWBOY: Haven't you speculated—in your writings—that the lack of concern for ancestry in our Western civilizations is one of the reasons that we seem unable to feel concern for a future that we won't live to see?

HARDIN: I have and I base my feelings about the matter on a statement by Edmund Burke: "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors. " The idea seems plausible to me, and ignorance about the past may be one of the weaknesses of our society here in the United States ... we've grown so fast and become so mobile that most of us know very little about our forefathers and—MOTHERS. In Burke's day, on the other hand, it was not uncommon for people to live in family homes: ancestral dwellings that had probably been around for 200 years or more! There were pictures on the walls-of Great-Aunt Gertrude or Great—Uncle Harry—and these paintings represented real people, individuals whose life stories were familiar to succeeding generations. Nowadays, of course, many children don't even have contact with their grandparents.

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