• Recycle world’s protein reserves into human population; it will eliminate the habitat of countless animal and plant species - a terrible, deeply immoral crime. The massive logging of tropical forest can only be compared to a massacre, a modern Auschwitz for plant and animal populations.

• Lead to a final collapse, an Armageddon of thirst, hunger, and cannibalism.

Where might a positive change come from? Could it come from religion, governments or wealth?

• Most world religions are either neutral to, or indirectly advocate population growth – or short of actively promoting it, as does the Catholic Church. Though most world religions demand a certain level of respect for nature and animals, these considerations have little leverage in the context of survival.
  
• Religions seem to give no answers how to control population growth going berserk. Are our religious systems incompetent on this issue?  Sorry, but this is how it looks to me.
  
• Governments don’t fare much better. They think within their own little administrative boxes, and don’t like to transfer authority. That’s why bodies such as United Nations don’t have real power. The only moderately successful birth control program so far is carried out in Communist China – a brutal program, with many unethical elements.
  
• What about wealth? Indeed! Countries that managed to enrich a large part of the population do not have a significant population growth problem. Population in wealthy countries remains stable, or even shrinks. Take Japan, Taiwan, Germany, or Sweden as examples. Potentially rich countries, where money only fills the pockets of the rich elite (Mexico, Algeria, Brazil) have also terrifying and unsustainable growth rates – as do the very poor countries that are deprived from any resources. History has shown that increasing poverty will cause the population to explode, as it happened in China before 1800 during the declining Ching Dynasty (just as a warning for the United States…). This leads to the conclusion that wealth alone, if not properly distributed, won’t be a differentiator.

Making the word a richer place so far seems to be the best bet for a successful temporary reduction of excessive population growth. But there is a catch: getting richer may not come on the back of depleted natural resources. Recent estimates of some 3% of global economy growth/year seem to be balanced with a similar percentage rate of natural habitat destruction. In other words:  Nature is being converted into money.

We can’t do this forever.

What can be done to foster a sustainable wealth creation? Indirect measures to improve quality-of-life could prepare the way ahead:

• Improved education, particularly for women- often shunned from school.
  
• Liberal trade policies allowing a free flux of goods leading also to a significant job creation.
  
• Improved agricultural yield and a functional service sector.

Which also means we have to overcome the stifling effects of:

• Religious orthodoxy
  
• Government red-tape
  
• Nationalism
  
• Egoistic taxation policies
  
• Corruption on all levels

This leaves the question to which degree human populations should be allowed to grow? There are at least two points to consider:

• The size of a given population should be large enough to allow a continuation of a country’s, a tribe’s culture and heritage.
  
• The size of a given population should not out-grow the vulnerable balance between people and natural resources. Global trade can only procure a deceiving balance for a short time – beyond the horizons lurks a time bomb.

Let me give a few examples depicting unsustainable population growth:

• Saudi Arabia: Several millions of people living in a desert, devoid of naturally occurring drinking water and arable land;
  
• Egypt: More than a hundred million people living along the flanks of the Nile River, with limited arable land available;
  
• Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Rwanda, Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria, Brazil… the list.

Is there anything else that could be done? A lot! Appropriate wealth creation and distribution plus improved technology (traditional and modern) could help create a better life for the majority of the human population:

• Instigate and support policies that create and distribute wealth throughout a country’s population, as described above.
  
• Replace firewood use for cooking and heating in the poor countries by solar energy devices, and/or LPG, LNG. Natural gas has only a fraction of carbon compared to firewood and coal. This measure would not only help to preserve forest habitats, but equally to reduce CO2 emissions by some 80 %.
  
• Adjust traditional diet – as the world changes, so do our physical requirements and the amount and style of food local harvests can provide.
  
• Reduce the consumption of energy and natural resources in the ‘developed’ world, reducing the drain on global energy and commodities.
  
• Improve the quantity and quality of drinking water reserves by cutting down on pollution, and by better managing existing aquifers. Both fossil and replenishing aquifers are sucked dry at an alarming rate. Examples in India show, that ‘rainwater harvesting’ can create a degree of independence from wells.
  
• Involve communities in the struggle for natural habitat resources – turn the local population into an ally rather than a competitor.

It is not too late for healthy changes. Policies of wealth creation combined with appropriate technology applications and better education might help stem the tide. Unfortunately, on the long run, there is no silver bullet for reducing the global world population to a sustainable size in ethically acceptable ways. Even worse - at a time when modern, educated thinking is desperately needed, we see people recede to systems of blind, orthodox faith even in the richer and better educated parts of the world. Perhaps the richer world will wake up once corned by problems of a different magnitude – morality issues do not have a loud voice these days.

In absence of a controlled population decline, we can only hope that our raging planet earth will solve the problem one day – with unthinkable and dire consequences for all of us.

As young geologists we mused about the possibility that future archaeologists would call the remnants of our era the 'Homo Sapiens/Coca Cola Bonebed.' I sincerely hope we'll be wise enough to stop the auto-destructive path of our arrogant species.

©2004 by Franz L. Kessler

The author of this article has a PHD in geology, and has worked on five continents in the energy business.