Inspiration for this essay was an article in the NPG Forum by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I am astonished at the similarity between the thrust of Dr. Bartlett’s message and my own instincts on these subjects. Dr. Bartlett's article and other NPG publications can be found at http://www.npg.org/forum_num.htm

In the nineteenth century the word “consumption” was used to describe a deadly disease. Lately, it has come to mean “the use of economic goods to satisfy needs.” But the word still has its original meaning, as we shall see.

The view of demographer/economist Thomas R. Malthus that human numbers would outstrip the means for subsistence was not popular among social reformers of his day, nor of those who came along in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He touted the idea that God would use this “supply-demand imbalance” mechanism to punish the lower classes for having too many children — little wonder he didn’t get a warm response from the public.

Malthus’ detractors believed that with proper social structures, the ills of humanity could be eradicated. These largely non-scientific academic types discredited Malthus theory with a vengeance — how dare anyone suggest that humanity’s numbers could not grow indefinitely. Improving technology would always remove the limits to society’s access to resources.

Alas, the reports of the death of the Malthusian theory (minus the God part) have been greatly exaggerated. There are limits to growth and it is obvious to objective observers that we humans are in the process of reaching those limits. More and more members of the public are absorbing this recognition. In this essay I will analyze prospects for the “descent of man,” another phrase with a different meaning than when used in its original Darwinian context. More on this later.

The world is overpopulated — that is, the current number of human beings on earth cannot be sustained. Global warming may only mean radical climate change in the short run, but it means extinction of life on planet earth if the trend does not reverse relatively soon. 

“Per capita footprint” is a term that identifies the quantity of land resource required to sustain a single person. Due to the variance in standard of living from country to country, the value of per capita footprint varies greatly. In India it is .4 hectares (hectare=100 ares, or 2.471 acres) per person, while in the United States it is 5.1 hectares. The global value of all these individual footprints added together in 2007 is 1.3 earths. These calculations could change, and may do so as undeveloped countries aspire to a standard of living more like that of the people of the U.S. Barring breakthroughs in agriculture of an incredible magnitude, these footprint calculations will continue moving upward at a fast pace.

A demographic study shows that the anticipated growth in the economy and population at sustainable levels over the next four decades will require the resources of an additional six to twelve planet earths as all citizens aspire to the same standard of living as that of the U.S.

World population is growing at a little over 1% per year. Birth rates (per woman) are gradually reducing (a notable exception being the U.S.), but with compounding of this net growth, the global totals are expected to rise — totalling 9 to 12 billion later this century. This begs the question of whether ecological/agricultural systems can support these numbers, particularly as reserves of petroleum (the base of our food supply) decline across the earth.

As an example of the other side of this same coin, a reputable study expresses the conclusion that the people of earth are no longer living on the earth’s interest, we are devouring its principal. This is because we use resources faster than they can be replenished. This applies to timber, oil, gas, metals, and many other non-renewable resources and so far, the renewable resources available are tiny in comparison to what the non-renewables have been. Just as in the laws of monetary interest and principal, erosion of principal is an unsustainable practice.

Shortages are real and will be felt with increasing urgency in the U.S. and throughout the world over the coming years. Newsletters with even short to medium investment horizons advise clients to bet their money on shortages. One wonders what their longer range bets would be:

“The uranium shortage has seven or eight years to go. The oil shortage will gradually get worse. Carbon fiber will fall short of demand for at least five years, but it could easily be 10 or more. Water shortages tend to be local. That's true overseas as well as here in the U.S. But the overall trend is a deteriorating water supply, especially overseas. Nickel and copper will be in short supply for at least another four or five years.”

The population of the earth as of 2007 is not living sustainably. Various estimates of its real sustainability at the standard of living that most global residents now aspire to, is calculably about two billion people, not the 9 to 12 billion expected.

As was indicated above, the per capita footprint is not the same for all peoples. Americans make no friends by chastising underdeveloped countries for high fertility rates. For example, China has responded that the U.S. population (some 300,000,000+) is responsible for a far larger composite ecological footprint than the people of China are, even with their larger population (1.2 billion). They indicate also that since implementing their (coercive) “one child per family” population policy they have avoided the births of a number of Chinese equivalent to the entire population of the U.S.   

Whatever one’s view of the ethics of the Chinese population policy, it is interesting that their history of high economic growth began shortly after this policy was put in place. In other words, by limiting their population growth, they were able to temporarily remove many of the limits to their economic growth. And they are saying to us, “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”

Unfortunately for the Chinese, their growth potential is running into the same limits as the other peoples of the world: the race to see which comes first : extinction of petroleum -- or of us -- from the fumes of its dying exhaust. Olympic gamesters are already protesting air pollution and the loss of blue sky over Beijing.

This leads us to the following point: The U.S. is overpopulated and growing by some 3 million persons per year. Studies show that the sustainability level for the U.S is perhaps 200 million — approximately its population at the end of World War II. In addition to impending shortages of many other resources, the U.S. as of 2007 has used approximately 85% of its available petroleum and natural gas deposits.

These two fossil fuels are the base for the agricultural engine that feeds the U.S. and the world — fertilizer, energy and transportation. The undeveloped countries that hold most of the remaining oil reserves are quickly becoming aware that the projected needs of their own burgeoning masses requires them to jealously withhold their domestic stocks from world markets, or at least raise prices for what they regard as a more equitable "depletion allowance."

Studies indicate that the items on Americans’ dinner plates have been transported an average of 1500 miles. This begs the question: As fossil fuels become scarcer and as demand dramatically increases with the modernization of underdeveloped countries, what will be the result of increasing U.S population to 450 to 500 million over the next few decades as now projected? How will we acquire the energy needed to fill the surging demand for disappearing oil?  How will we acquire the energy needed to bring us our dinner?

Many economists lay the current rise in food prices at the doorstep of efforts to convert much of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol. Even if the entire corn crop is converted to ethanol, it will meet only a small fraction of the demand for portable energy. Competition for corn and other agricultural output to meet energy demands can only send the prices for food rocketing upward.            

Legal and illegal immigration accounts for about 75% of incremental U.S. growth. Projections from the U.S. Census Bureau show that in the absence of any net immigration, the U.S. population growth would slow down and level off in about 30 years leaving us with a population of something like 350,000,000. If fertility were to be below the replacement level, as it is in much of Europe, the U.S. population size would then start to decline slowly and naturally in the direction of a sustainable population. With immigration continuing at present levels, or at the even higher levels that are often advocated by many members of Congress, there can be no projected limit to U.S. population growth. This is the major impediment to the achievement of sustainability by the United States.

But what, as citizens, are we demanding from the various levels of our government? What is it we want that if granted, will multiply torrents of trouble upon us, our children and grandchildren? As our politicians compete for voter attention they urge more poisonous  legislation than the citizens would probably otherwise demand. How many of the following population increasing urgings have you heard recently?

“We need to grow the economy at least 4% per year. We need amnesty programs to make a place for illegal aliens. We are all immigrants; we need to increase the numbers of legal aliens we admit to the country each year. We need to increase the per child tax deduction. We need tax and regulatory policies that will help families grow. We need sanctity-of-life policies to protect the unborn. We need to import more workers for jobs Americans don’t want. We need to import technically skilled workers. We need to produce more children to have someone pay into Social Security and Medicare to support aging populations. We need to expand the real estate market by enacting favorable zoning laws and making credit easier, etc.”

These and many more like-minded desires/demands stem from some aspect of empathy — either the kinder/gentler type for our fellow human beings, or perhaps more often, for the raw achievement of our own personal agendas. In either case, the results of gratification of these desires is a not-so-slow poison for the U.S. and the human race.

Conclusion:

Of course we like the ease of living in an ever-expanding economy brought on by an ever-expanding population, just as many overweight persons are happiest when they are consuming calories in excess of what they actually need to function healthily. But unfortunately for the unwarranted happiness of overweight persons and for U.S. or world citizens pining for eternal economic growth there is that hard discipline called mathematics. It has a tendency to bring us back to reality — gently, if we embrace its implications and ease into remedy, harshly if not.

After multi-millennia of trudging via Darwinian evolution toward enlightenment, the human race is in position to reap our accumulated treasures — talent, wisdom and intelligence — and continue toward further enlightenment. Earlier I referenced the term “descent of man.” Darwin used this term to describe the journey of the human race from its origin from less developed organisms to the one of accumulated features and functionality that we now are. The more chilling context in which I referenced it above was to describe a dark path, a fork in the road upon which the human race is headlong embarked. We have been on our epic journey without fully understanding what Darwin discovered — most of the eons without even knowing evolution existed. Our only need was to practice “what comes naturally” to succeed as Darwin described.

We don’t have to repeal Darwin to survive, but, irony of ironies, we must completely understand the bonds of Darwinian evolution if we would step back from the dark path and resume our journey on the high road. Darwinian law says that the individuals of a species most able to match their innate features to the requirements of their ecological niche will live to perpetuate themselves through reproduction and therefore avoid species extinction — the common fate of over 99% of all species that ever lived on earth.

The human race has followed Darwinian law so successfully that we now have as our ecological niche the whole planet earth. Our domain even extends weakly to the lifeless planets around earth. In fact, we have been so successful in making Darwin’s discovery work to our benefit that our activities have begun to modify the ecology of planet earth.

So what does Darwin have to say on ecological niches that change? Its denizens must change with it or perish. So how can humans change to continue to fit in with our changed ecology? Can we begin to thrive on carbon dioxide rather than oxygen? Can we begin to breathe air or drink water colloidal with every known contaminant? Can we lower our expectations of living relatively unregulated lives and accept rigid government enforcement of resource allocations?  (Remember the gas station lines of the late seventies?)

Somehow, changing the biology of the human race, even if we could, is not acceptable as a satisfactory solution to Darwin’s latest challenge. Rather, it would seem that changing our planet back to the way it was would be the winning approach. We could breathe the air and drink the water and have enough food to eat and enough room to prosper.

The simple expedient of gradually reducing human populations to sustainable levels has appeal — first, as a concrete possibility, and second, as a state with which humanity could be happy. It is the only solution in sight of the impending Darwinian challenge that would allow us to continue to live humanely — as humans with real self-directed options. The choice is ours — we can stiffen our backbones, stand erect, and moderate populations to sustainable levels — or we can sicken and die of hyper-consumption.

© 2008  R. Leland Waldrip