To Reduce Over-Consumption, Limit Population Growth

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With luck and contraception, world population might stabilize, but consumption is growing, almost exponentially.
With luck and contraception, world population might stabilize, but consumption is growing, almost exponentially.
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“Countdown,” by Alan Weisman, looks at the global impacts of immense population growth and how to prevent it from becoming unmanageable.
“Countdown,” by Alan Weisman, looks at the global impacts of immense population growth and how to prevent it from becoming unmanageable.

Countdown (Little, Brown and Company, 2013), by Alan Weisman, details the burgeoning effects that human population growth has on our environment. Weisman reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable way of balancing this impact. This excerpt explores the reality that although population control is a possible solution, consumption growth is projected to continue.

Mass starvation was what Paul Ehrlich began to fear back in 1966, after he, Anne, and their daughter, Lisa, found themselves on a mobbed Delhi street, their taxi marooned in an ocean of humanity. This was before the Green Revolution; as a population biologist, Ehrlich knew the mathematics of doubling times, and when he and Anne compared the human race’s spiraling numbers with crop data, they concluded that by the 1970s, famines would kill hundreds of millions of people — unless, as they wrote in the prologue to The Population Bomb, dramatic programs to increase food production stretched the Earth’s carrying capacity.

“But these programs,” they said, “will only provide a stay of execution, unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control.”

Even as their book was published, Norman Borlaug’s miracle hybrids were coming to first harvest in India and Pakistan, and the famines the Ehrlichs predicted for the 1970s were averted. In subsequent decades, pro-growth economists made Paul Ehrlich and his forebear Thomas Robert Malthus their favorite punching bags, never missing a chance to ridicule them. Except, among scientists, no one was laughing. Ehrlich is today one of the world’s most esteemed ecologists, winner of the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, given in disciplines where there is no Nobel Prize, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, a Heinz Prize (with Anne), and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the British Royal Society, among many others.

Neither was Norman Borlaug among his detractors, issuing the identical warning in his Nobel acceptance speech that Green Revolution crops were only buying the world time, unless population controls were implemented. Yet Ehrlich’s name has continually incited derision outside of scientific circles, especially after a famous wager with economist Julian Simon of the Cato Institute, a free market think tank.

  • Published on Mar 11, 2014
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