Planning for a Sustainable Human Future: Conservation, Population and Economy
(Page 4 of 5)
April/May 2009
By Bryan Welch
The best product of our fascination with conservation is that it has captured our imaginations — the key component in a new human philosophy that values other living things. That’s a great thing.
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On the other hand, short-term thinking distracts us from the underlying problem. At current rates of population growth, there will be 10 billion people on the planet in about 60 years. When there are 10 billion people on the planet, it won’t matter what they drive or if they’ve all committed to vegan diets. The planet will be under human assault in a battle in which everyone loses. We could hit that guardrail.
Someone’s going to object to my evidence. Maybe it will take 75 years to reach a population of 10 billion. Maybe the planet can accommodate 12 billion frugal human beings. But the rate of population growth is not the issue. Any growth at all creates the same ultimate dilemma. Sure, we might figure out ways to accommodate 10, 15 or 20 billion people in a crowded world. But why would we want to?
If ultimately we must control our population, then why not plan for a rich, healthy planet?
What if we decided, by mutual consensus, that a stable worldwide population of 4 billion people is our goal? Could we then live on a planet with clean air and water, plenty of food for everyone, and the environmental resilience necessary for us to prosper? Couldn’t we create a sustainable, healthy planet just because we decided to?
I think it’s time for us to start visualizing the future we desire. I’m not pretending it will be easy to get there.
Three Mountains
We have three tall mountains to climb. Conservation is, indeed, the first — if smallest — mountain. We need to forestall the effects of global warming as much as possible while we attempt to get our act together. We’re on the lower slopes of this mountain.
The next climb is longer and steeper. Population control is perfectly unavoidable. Eventually, we must stabilize human population or we’ll make a mess of our habitat and then nature will exert the control we abdicated. I’m not advocating anything Draconian, but if the international moral consensus were that each human being should reproduce himself or herself once — two children per couple — populations would slowly begin shrinking. It’s a simplistic solution, but the ultimate solutions are often the simplest.
I’m optimistic that we’ll reach both these goals. We already have the tools we need to reduce per-capita consumption and control our population. That leaves the third, and tallest, mountain.
As our economies are now structured, we depend on population growth to support economic growth. If demand for all goods and services were shrinking, values of all goods and services would also be declining in our current models. Imagine a world in which demand for all the fundamental human necessities — food, shelter, etc. — was shrinking every year. Imagine a world in which, let’s say, 5 percent of all houses on the market had no buyers because fewer people lived in your city. We’ve never seen this, and we probably don’t have the means of creating prosperity in a shrinking population. To sustain our population at lower, healthier levels, we’ll have to invent an economy that creates prosperity without growth. We will need brand new economic tools.
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