Crew Log 124 – Population: The Elephant in the Room

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November 16th, 2009 – From the On-Board Scientist
by Dr. Michael Reynolds

POPULATION IS THE BASE OF IT ALL
Describing population pressure as the ‘elephant in the room’ is a tired cliché. (William Safire, bless his erudite soul, warned writers to avoid clichés like the plague.) But the elephant metaphor is a good one. We all know and read about population pressure, and its pervasive impact on the finite resources of our planet, but it is clearly behind every environmental issue. When we read about pollution, climate change, fish stock collapse, ocean acidification, coral reef destruction, and most other ocean health issues, we must keep this fact in the back of our minds.  In fact, as I reflect on this matter, it is not easy to point to any crisis in our immediate future where population will not be the root cause.

Lest we forget. Fifty years ago there were 2.2 billion people on this earth and it was predicted to double about

every 35 years; today there are 6.8 billion of us, and the doubling rate has decreased to 30 years.  As the doubling rate continues to decrease, current projections are that by 2040 (in just 30 years) we will be at 9 billion. After that, we can only hope that things will level off, or even drop a bit.

A MUST-READ BOOK
Much of what I have to say today comes from a remarkable book by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, called “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.” This remarkable compendium of current facts (published by Penguin Books in 2008) offers a clear and factual description of the current state of the world from an economic, scientific, and social point of view.

A foreword by E.O. Wilson pretty well sums up this important book:”Now is the time to grasp exactly what is happening. The evidence is compelling: we need to redesign our social and economic policies before we wreck this planet. At stake is humankind’s one shot at a permanently bright future. … If we choose sustainable development, we can secure our gains while averting disasters that appear increasingly imminent. … We can still correct the course, but we do not have much time to do it.”

The famous “hockey stick” graph of the growth in world population. Note, not only are we growing more numerous. Since 1750 there has been a tenfold increase in population but also a tenfold increase in production (agriculture, goods, art) PER PERSON. That’s a one hundredfold increase in our use of the Earth for human consumption.

THE FUTURE CROWDED PLANET
So, why isn’t population control a key priority? Researchers note, as Malthus did 200 years earlier, that we have a choice between a falling birth rate and a rising death rate. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich, in his book “The Population Bomb” predicted mass starvation by the end of the 20th century due to unconstrained population growth. Faced with this prospect, it is ironic that globally, in both the U.S. and in the developing world, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, at least 300 million of them obese, with many at substantial risk of chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer.Two technological developments that saved us from Erlich’s prognosis: the green revolution for which Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and the invention of the birth control pill (or ‘the pill’).

The pill has moderate side effects, is 99% effective, and can be as cheap as aspirin. In most industrialized countries, the pill has brought the fertility rate down to about 2.1, needed for a stable population. In nations that suppress women’s rights, fertility is as high as 8.0.

Unfortunately, as E.O. Wilson put it,

“We exist as a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and God-like technology.”

There are two key social processes that govern the issue of birth control. First is education, and education of women worldwide. Second is empowerment of women. In every third world country where women are educated and empowered, the birth rate falls. “In highly gender-stratified societies, the threshold level is likely to be higher than in relatively egalitarian societies. Education has been found to increase women’s levels of autonomy in decision-making, in acquiring knowledge, in gaining access to economic resources, and in interacting with a wider social circle. It is through this autonomy that education exerts an impact on fertility.”(1)

COLLAPSE AND THE EASTER ISLAND STORY

Jared Diamond is the author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which explored ideas behind why some civilizations prevail over others. In his following book, “Collapse,” he examines how and why powerful civilizations seem to suddenly disappear, collapse, and in an incredibly short time. In an ABC interview he said

“Why did these ancient civilizations abandon their cities after building them with such great effort? Why these ancient collapses? This question isn’t just a romantic mystery. It’s also a challenging intellectual problem. Why is it that some societies collapsed while others did not collapse?”

“But even more, this question is relevant to the environmental problems that we face today – what if anything, can the past teach us about why some societies are more unstable than others, and about how some societies have managed to overcome their environmental problems. Can we extract from the past any useful guidance that will help us in the coming decades?”

Another time when interviewed by the National Review he said, “A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.”  Sound familiar?

The story of Easter Island in the eastern Pacific is an incredible encapsulation of the human story as it seems to be unfolding globally today. There is not room here to do justice to the relatively short time it took for the Polynesians who came to Easter Island to over-populate, denude their vegetation, exterminate their animals and fish, and finally, with the help of their religion, to crush society into “a primitive state with about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare and resorting to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to supplement the meager food supplies available on the island.” (2)

The history of Easter Island is a striking example of the dependence of human societies on the environment and of the consequences of irreversibly damaging that environment. It is the story of a people who, starting from an extremely limited resource base, constructed one of the most advanced societies in the world, given the technologies available at the time. The demands placed on the island environment by the people and their developments were immense. When it could no longer withstand the pressure, the society that had been painstakingly built up over the previous thousand years collapsed along with the island ecosystems.

Remember: all views, ideas, and comments here are ad hoc, off the cuff, minimally researched, and subject to revision at any moment.

- Michael Reynolds with photographs by David Thoreson
michael@rmrco.com

This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

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SOME REFERENCES
World Population to 2300
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf\
http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol4/8/4-8.pdf

Fertility Rates:
(1) http://www.eubios.info/EJ124/ej124i.htm

Easter Island
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/eisland.html
http://www.physorg.com/news121959198.html
http://www.homepage.eircom.net/%257Eodyssey/Quotes/Life/Science/Collapse.html