BRYAN WELCH

We in the developed world consume far more than we need. We are fat, we drive big cars, we throw away whole households of valuable goods because we’re spoiled and we can afford to buy something new rather than preserving or repairing what we have. Our bad habits damage our environment.

But conservation is not going to save our habitat. Global warming, deforestation, desertification and pollution are all products of overpopulation. The poorest people don’t have the option of leaving the nearby forest standing, or keeping their goats off of an overgrazed pasture. For the world’s poorest people, every scrap of land is part of a thin barrier between life and death. They must use every resource available to keep themselves and their families alive. That’s the grim reality at the heart of human population growth. At some point we all end up there, struggling to sustain our lives regardless of the consequences for our community or our habitat.

Forests consume greenhouse gases and emit oxygen. Deforestation is one component of climate change. And it’s the product, by-and-large, of overpopulation.

The other obvious result of overpopulation around the globe is desertification. I grew up on land that was covered in grass in the 19^th century. We have photos to prove it. By the time I walked there, however, only a few tufts of grass remained between the mesquite, sagebrush and creosote bushes. I’m an eye-witness to desertification. My predecessors moved on to the land with domesticated cattle, sheep, horses and goats. They subdivided it, homesteaded it, fenced it and then tried to make a living on it. There aren’t many animals there today but the grass isn’t coming back very fast. The United States Geological Survey cites the Rio Puerco basin in my own home state of New Mexico as a prime example of desertification. The process is not mysterious. Semi-arid grasslands sustain themselves through droughts by maintaining a dense mat of roots mixed with dormant seeds at the surface of the soil. In natural conditions, a grassland can lie dormant for years. When it is overgrazed, though, the mouths and hooves of the hungry foragers destroy the grass roots. Dormant seeds provide a little sustenance for desperate animals. When the rains come back, there are no roots to hold the soil in place or to regenerate the grassland. There are no dormant seeds to bring forth new life. The rain washes soil away. The land around the Rio Puerco is grotesquely eroded. The river itself is full of silt.

Desertification became well known in the 1930s, when parts of the Great Plains in the United States turned into the "Dust Bowl" as a result of drought, overgrazing and bad agricultural practices. We’ve learned to manage the land better and we reversed the desertification of the plains, but elsewhere the desert marches on, especially where people have no other option than to push their herds to the next patch of grass. The famine that periodically afflicts sub-Saharan Africa is, primarily, the result of desertification, which is a result of overpopulation, which in turn aggravates the severity of the famine. By 1973, the drought that began five years earlier in the Sahel of West Africa and the land-use practices there had caused the deaths of more than 100,000 people and 12 million cattle[1].

Droughts do not cause desertification. Droughts are common in arid and semiarid lands. Well-managed lands with intact root systems and dormant seed cover will revive when the rains return. Continued land abuse during droughts, however, prevents that recovery.

Forests are being destroyed at a pace even with the rate of human population growth. Unless something changes soon, by 2030 we will only have 10 percent of the natural forests that stood on the planet when we started paying attention[1]. Locations rapidly losing their forests are diverse:

Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, Laos, Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, Ghana and the Cote d'lvoire have lost most of their rainforests, according to the biologists of Chicago’s Field Museum. Ninety percent of the forests of the Philippine archipelago have been cut[2]. In the last 30 years, the Rotary Foundation’s Fellowship for Population and Development estimates that two-thirds of the forests of Central America have been cut down. That’s two-thirds of the forests in Central America in just 30 years cut down by local people who need farmland and household firewood[3]. The same basic pattern holds all over the tropical world. If we look at the earth as an island — an island surrounded by outer space — then the experience of tropical islanders is unnerving. When we started keeping track, 60 percent of Haiti was forested. When the International Conference on the Reforestation of Haiti convened in 2007, less than 1 percent remained. The conference’s report is eloquent: “Haiti has become an environmental catastrophe and a human catastrophe ... With the forest cover gone, floods ravage the country at each rainfall. Topsoil washes into the sea. And since the only hope of Haitians for feeding their families is the soil and small scale farming, it is a terrible humanitarian disaster.”[4] 

In Haiti deforestation is both a symptom of overpopulation and a root cause of human suffering. Haiti is an example of what can happen when too many people have too few natural resources in a limited environment. Food for thought.

And in Haiti, as around the world, deforestation is mostly a local phenomenon driven by local needs. There are a few places where big timber companies are driving the process, but not many. In most places, local folks need the space and need the fuel. The wood is going into the fireplace or, tragically, being piled up and burned simply to make room for more poor farmers.

[1] Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. 2003, Vintage ISBN 0-679-76811-4
[2] Field Museum. The Lost Forest. 
[3] Rotarian Fellowship for Population & Development. Population & Deforestation. 
[4] International Conference on Reforestation and Environmental Regeneration of Haiti. Reforest Haiti. 

I read this really interesting article for my Environmental Studies class. Unlike me, you won’t be quizzed over it, but I do think the article is worth reading. It’s about eight pages long, but I promise it’s worth the time.

The article presents the argument that the demise of empires and governments is conspicuously correlated with the depletion of the environment. Jared Diamond, the author of the article, used the Maya civilization in South America as a case study of this argument.

Essentially, the Maya civilization fell because it exceeded the carrying capacity — or the number of individuals able to be supported by the environment without depleting resources — of its ecosystem.

The Maya relied heavily upon corn for their food, and in order to produce healthy crops, the Maya used what we now call the slash and burn technique. However, as the civilization expanded and population grew, more corn was needed. To meet the growing demand for food, they stopped burning the fields and allowing time for regeneration — either as frequently or altogether. Eventually, the fields could no longer produce as much food as the population demanded, and the civilization died out.

The scary thing about the article is the number of parallels between the warning signs of the Maya civilization — follies we all profess to recognize from this side of history — and the current status of the United States. We are at the peak of our power. We have exponential population growth. We have environmental problems ranging from limited water supplies in some regions to vanishing topsoil. So when do we reach our carrying capacity? When do we become too many in number for our environment to sustain us anymore? Are we already there and waiting for the effects to catch up to us?

Diamond also lists three misconceptions that lead people to dismiss these warning signs today.

One is that the environment exists solely to satisfy human needs. Rather than seeing the environment and humans depending upon each other for mutual benefit, people tend to see the environment as a commodity in surplus. Using some of that logic against them, Diamond says, “our strongest arguments for a healthy environment are selfish: we want it for ourselves, not for threatened species.”

The second is that technology will solve all our problems. He points out that all of our current environmental problems are byproducts of earlier technologies and that each new technology comes with its own set of problems that may not be realized until five to 30 years later.

The third is that people tend to view environmentalists as “fear-mongerers” who have overreacted in the past and are doing so now. Diamond makes the point that if you ask an ecologist which countries have the most environmental problems and a politician which countries are the most politically unstable, they will both give you the same list of countries, among which are Afghanistan, Rwanda and Somalia. 

Definitely something to think about …

Climate change fills the news channels right now and arrests the attention of people all over the world. The statistics and, more importantly, the images are startling. The average global temperature has been going up since 1850 and is accelerating. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are all at historic highs.[1] These so-called “greenhouse gases” allow the sun’s ultraviolet radiation to rain down on the earth’s surface, but they trap the infrared radiation emitted by the warm earth. The planet warms up.

Take a look at any historic comparison of alpine glaciers or polar ice caps. They are shrinking. Rapidly.

 Most scientists agree that human beings are causing global warming. We dig up fossil fuels and burn them, releasing carbon dioxide. We blanket our agricultural fields with nitrogen-based fertilizers that fill the air with nitrous oxide. We raise billions of agricultural animals in circumstances that create unnatural amounts of methane. We burn the forests and plow up the grasslands that used to capture carbon dioxide from the air and deposit it in the soil. Rich people are making the biggest contribution to these problems. According to CNN, the average American's annual carbon footprint is about 2,000 times greater than that of the average resident of the African nation of Chad. And the average resident of the UK will generate as much atmospheric carbon dioxide in one day as a Kenyan will in an entire year. Overall, the United Nations estimates that the carbon footprint of the world's 1 billion poorest people represents just 3 percent of the global total. Of all the carbon dioxide deposited in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, 80 percent of the world's emissions was generated by 20 percent of the inhabitants of the world's wealthiest nations.[2]

It is, therefore, tempting to think that we can solve the climate-change problem by tightening the belts of the rich. But I’ll reiterate the conclusion of my rough analysis of this situation: If the U.S. and Western Europe both cut their per capital energy consumption in half over the next 20 years and the developing world holds its per capita consumption steady, we’ll keep on emitting greenhouse gases at the same harmful rate we are emitting right now. Population growth will erase all our progress.

Furthermore, even if none of our planet’s new human residents owns an internal-combustion engine, they will still need to burn wood and plant gardens. Deforestation and desertification are symptoms of human overpopulation, and those symptoms are spreading.

For centuries now Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus has been, on and off, an object of derision because people associate him, unfairly, with predictions of a doomsday scenario in which humanity should long ago have suffered a population catastrophe. In fact, that wasn’t part of his fundamental thesis. He was, explicitly, putting a bee in the bonnets of the enlightenment philosophers who visualized a Utopian future for humanity in which every individual would have enough to eat. Malthus suggested that wouldn’t be achieved as long as population growth continued apace and, indeed, he seems to have been proven right by the events of the intervening centuries.

He was wrong about the arithmetic increase of the food supply. We’ve managed to make food supplies increase geometrically. Even so, someone is always starving.

In Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,”[1] one of his characters warns, “It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh.”

Those who want to take the risk and discredit Malthus might nevertheless point to two “green revolutions.” The first one came during the 20^th century when new science helped create sudden, astonishing growth in our food supply. In 1968 William Gaud, former director of the United States Agency for International Development called the achievement a “green revolution”[2] in a speech. He believed that the growth in our agricultural productivity would revolutionize human life worldwide. In fact, we did increase food production to keep up with worldwide population growth. The innovation that made this agricultural revolution possible was funded by wealthy nations like the U.S. who were concerned that famine in nearby poor nations, like Mexico, could threaten economic security.[3] U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, The Rockefeller Foundation and Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho got the wheels turning. The Ford Foundation and others soon pitched in to provide money to scientists who were working to increase food supplies. The production of cereal grains in developing nations more than doubled between 1961 and 1985.[4] In places like Mexico and India the gains were orders of magnitude more impressive.

Still, true to Malthus’ predictions, poverty and famine persisted. We fed a lot of people, but we never managed to feed everyone. Throughout the last quarter of the 20^th century the newspaper stories about mountainous piles of surplus grain in North America routinely ran side-by-wide with stories about starving multitudes in Africa.

BRYAN WELCH

At the beginning the 19^th century during the rosy dawn hours of the Industrial Revolution the world’s human population finally surpassed 1 billion individuals. [1] After about 200,000 years of evolution our extraordinary intellect and extreme mobility had brought us that far. We had, by then, colonized every continent except Antarctica. Civilized cultures were generally aware of the world as a finite sphere, 70 percent of it covered in water. We lived everywhere, from the sweltering tropics to the icy arctic wastelands.

We dominated everything we surveyed, but we couldn’t survey the microscopic yet, at least not very effectively. The germs still pretty much had their way with us. They limited human population growth. Average Europeans were lucky to live to 40 years of age. Almost a third of babies born in Europe’s cities died before their third birthdays, mostly due to diseases borne by microbes. People flocked to the cities where they found new affluence in factories and textile mills. The crowding in city tenements gave the pathogens an ideal habitat and accelerated the spread of disease.

Louis Pasteur was born in 1822[2] and soon began whipping the germs into shape.  With an uncanny instinct for the nature of disease, Pasteur revolutionized our understanding of the world and helped us train new weapons on the microbes that made us sick. Pasteur gave us the specific tools to fight cholera, anthrax and rabies, but more importantly he revolutionized our knowledge of microbes and their effect on our lives – both good and bad. We had been drinking wine for thousands of years but we didn’t know that bacteria caused fermentation. Pasteur identified disease-causing germs and invented tools for fighting them. Soon, people were living longer. More babies survived. Modern medicine was born, and human population growth accelerated.

By 1900 there were more than 1.6 billion of us, up 60 percent in one century. That population doubled in about 60 years, then doubled again in half the time. I was born into a worldwide human population of about 3 billion people. Based on current United Nations projections and my expected lifespan, there will probably be about 9 billion people on earth when I die.

So far we’ve done a remarkably good job of feeding all these new people. When you think about it, it’s almost miraculous that we’ve kept up with our own expansion. Shortly before Louis Pasteur was born, the English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus made himself one of the world’s most famous thinkers by suggesting that unless we did something about population growth, we could never ease the burden of poverty. His basic thesis was that because our population expanded geometrically while food production expanded arithmetically, and because birth rates increase with prosperity, we would never be able to create consistent surpluses in food supply.

The poor, as Jesus of Nazareth said, would “always be with us.”[3] 

If all the residents of North America and Western Europe cut their per-capita energy consumption in half over the next 20 years (not likely) and the rest of the world held per-capita consumption steady at their current, frugal levels (also not likely), total energy consumption will remain the same. A 50-percent reduction in the developed world will not be sufficient to outweigh population increases in the developing world, even if the increasingly affluent residents of developing countries don’t increase their energy consumption.

Someone’s going to object to my evidence. Maybe it will take 75 years to reach 10 billion population. Maybe the planet can accommodate 12 billion frugal human beings. The rate of population growth is not the issue. Any growth at all creates the same ultimate dilemma. Sure, we might figure out ways of accommodating 10 or 15 or 20 billion people in a crowded world. But why would we want to?

If ultimately we must control our population, 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 through the inevitable environmental fluctuations – the next ice age, for instance? Could we restore habitats now teetering on the brink of destruction?

Couldn’t we create a sustainable healthy planet just because we decided to?

We could take this philosophically, I suppose. A few decades or a few centuries after we disappear there will be a healthy planet here. Or we can see it fatalistically. The damage we are doing is part of a natural process. Our awareness doesn’t change that essential fact. We can even salve our guilty consciences by resorting to the geologic perspective. Eventually this planet will suffer some sterilizing galactic calamity. Scientists tell us our sun will, eventually, burn out.

But it’s not our nature to sit around complacently waiting for the asteroid, not while we have this miraculous opportunity to preserve and enhance our planet. Just as we once visualized the first irrigated field, invented the first wheel and dreamed of machines that fly, we can visualize the earth as a beautiful and productive garden where millions of species thrive. Then we can build it.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that we, as a species, are training our attention on the middle of the decreasing-circumference curve in which we find ourselves. We are not visualizing the successful outcome – a healthy planet. Conservation has captured the human imagination lately and some great new inventions have come from this new fascination – the gas-electric hybrid engine; photovoltaic solar energy, wind-powered electric turbines, the hydrogen fuel cell. This is cool stuff. But it’s stopgap stuff.

The best product of our fascination with conservation is that it has captured people’s imaginations. And it’s the key component in a new human philosophy that values other living things. If we consume less, we leave more room for our biological neighbors. That’s a great thing.

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 where everyone loses. We could hit that guardrail.