According to Prof. Hans Rosling the solution is raising the living standards of the poorest.
Hans Rosling on global population growth
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html
I like my TED talks. That one was particularly pleasing. A ray of hope among the doom and gloom.
I think you should be able to distinguish between “Stop having babies!” as a linguistic shorthand for summarizing the fact that overpopulation is a problem and “Stop having babies!” as an entire solution, but perhaps not…
We in the west, like people everywhere, have a vested interest in ourselves and an elective, altruistic interest in the rest of the world. The problem is not resource use or overpopulation; it’s resource use and overpopulation.
I’m just trying to get the knee-jerk liberals here (and have been trying for a couple of years or more here on the Dope) to admit that the world is overpopulated and that it is an enormous problem.
The west has invented ways for the world to support many more people than it would support if only dependent and incompetent populations at the mercy of the environment existed. The developed world consumes, on a per capita basis, an enormous share of total resources, having developed the means to get at them and consume them. They now propose to help extend all of that development to populations otherwise unable to develop themselves, and some developing countries are successfully playing catchup on their own, anyway.
Therefore, several billion people are on a pathway to begin consuming at as near western levels as possible, and therefore…
Overpopulation is a huge problem. It is the biggest problem we face for the future of the world’s ecosystems and for the future of the human species. Assuming AGW is a correct hypothesis, its root problem is too many people creating all that CO2, but even without that we are eating the earth like mice run amok during a harvest time plague.
Right now, the liberal response to overpopulation (because where new population growth is occurring renders it politically incorrect to say otherwise) is, “Let’s get the developing countries rich, and they will stop reproducing on their own.” This is a stupid (not to mention, untested) approach. In the first place, it leaves 9 or 10 billion people all of whom will have as a target consumption maximum what the developed world is enjoying now. In the second place, it is pure speculation that the timing of getting rich will be such that 9 or 10 billion is a correct upper limit.
The first step around “What else should we do?” is to recognize that overpopulation, all by itself is a huge problem. Way too many people in the west consuming, and way too many people in developing countries about to consume. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how overpopulation became such a politically incorrect thing to admit.
So, is overpopulation a problem?
Is it? C’mon; just say it. Say it. Say it without finding two or three other things that are also a problem. It will be a good first step on the road gloriously free of political correctness. And possibly my first cured patient here. 
But if over-population is such a problem won’t it cure itself? If the water supply becomes exhausted people will die off until demand meets supply. It’s the Invisible Hand :). Whether the consequence of this is really bad for the West (which is unlikely to be the primary point of failure in the foreseable future and realistically all we really care about) depends on where and when it happens, and much weaponry the affected people have. If it happens to say, India, because China has dammed it’s rivers and isn’t allowing enough water though and India nukes some of those dams it could be pretty bad for everyone. Alternatively if it happens far enough in the future that the West is too weak to control access to the imported resources it needs it could be bad for us too.
I’m not sure the problem is really solveable without killing lots of people. As Der Trihs has pointed out, we already exploit many natural resources at unsustainable levels. Fish stocks are one example, stocks are crashing everywhere but fish is the major source of protein for millions of people around the world. And you can bet that people will continue eating fish Japan, the US and Europe while poeple starve to death in south-east asia.
What we really need is a good plague. That’d sort it all out.
Chief Pedant, let me start with where I agree with you.
- There is an overpopulation problem (I don’t call it the problem though: “the” problem is a function of population and how people live).
- The way we live in the West is arguably not sustainable just for we, 1 billion people. All signs are, the world can’t take billions more buying hummers.
- The developing world’s population probably is higher due to technology from the West e.g. the green revolution.
Now, inevitably, the points where I disagree.
Firstly, you have an idea of the West being the main driver of development of the developing world. This simply isn’t the case. Sure, we give aid, but not of the massive sums that would be required to “buy” a country into prosperity. If anything, we’ve held back development with subsidies and tarrifs.
Secondly, sure, as countries get wealthier their birth rate drops. This isn’t some wacky theory: not only is the correlation strong, but countries can be seen to move along the graph as they develop (in fact, even in the developed world, an increase in GDP continues to correlate with a decrease in fertility rate).
Finally, I think our main effort should be on trying to live a relatively comfortable life sustainably. Even if the world were composed solely of those countries that are already developed: our way of life still would not be sustainable long term.
The world’s higher population is forcing us to make many of the changes that we would have had to eventually anyway. But I’m under no illusion that it will be easy.
Yep, the process that happened in every nation to date that became economically and technologically developed to modern Western levels is “untested”… :rolleyes::rolleyes:
It’s untested because there is no guarantee you can make every country rich enough to stop reproducing.
Either you’ve missed the point, or I perhaps made it badly.
I agree that if you have an educated and wealthy country, you will have fewer progeny, but that’s a big “if.”
But the process of making the currently poor and underdeveloped wealthy–even if we can pull it off–will hugely strain the earth. Being wealthy is shorthand for Stuff, and having Stuff–infrastructure; houses; cars; TVs; food…–is the reason the developed countries put such a disproportionate strain on available resources.
That’s why overpopulation is a problem Right Now and why we need to stop reproducing Right Now. It’s a stupid stupid strategy to wait until we have 50% more peeps which we hope will THEN spontaneously stop reproducing because they’ve become Rich. But that’s the liberal response, because it is politically incorrect for them to say to developing countries, “Stop making babies! Right NOW!”
This is interesting, because I tend to see a lot of denail of overpopulation as coming from conservatives as a function of their opposition to family planning.
Also, conservatives tend to side with their own group, while liberals are notorious for seeing the other side’s point of view. So conservatives regard seeing the environment’s point of view as hating humanity the same way they regard seeing foreigners’ point of view as hating America.
What I tend to hear from “liberals” is that if we raise the status of women then birth rates will drop because they will be more willing to use family planning.
But there are a lot of cultural barriers to overcome, both in terms of gender roles, and in religious opposition to contraceptive use. So yes, the c-word is definitely in play here.
One thing I’m not worried about is the earth’s ability to sort out the human problem it has. If we can’t manage to make ourselves sustainable as a species on planet earth, we WILL perish. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that some humans will probably survive the collapse.
Oh, speaking of a good plague, there are African countries that will have negative population growth due to AIDS.
Who do you guys think makes a bigger impact on the planet: 300 million Americans or a billion Africans?
The earth doesn’t have a “problem.” Problems are a human invention. The earth doesn’t care one way or another whether or not it has life on it, or whether it exists at all. Neither does anything else except us.
Also - no species has ever been sustainable, nor has any species ever reached equilibrium with its environment. Every living creature in the past 2 billion years has either seen its numbers either constantly increasing or constantly decreasing. Population booms followed by extinctions are the way nature works - they’re what give the museums so such a big variety of exotic fossils. The only thing different with humans is the size and speed of our impact.
Non sequitur. A hundred fifty years ago, there was great strain on the supply of whale oil; now, the supply of whale oil is of no particular importance. Your “Stuff” shorthand commits the fallacy of composition (i.e. the supply of Resources X, Y, and Z are each limited; ergo, the supply of resources generally is limited).
Not having noticed Americans causing large-scale desertification lately, I’ll give this one to the Africans.
I think this picture answers that question.
Yeah, my point exactly.
It’s not raw numbers.
And I don’t know as much about Africa particularly, but I know that a lot of Latin America’s footprint comes from factories, mills, and foundries that are there to supply goods to the United States*, which I think should count, at minimum, as a shared footprint. I would not be surprised if Europe uses Africa for similar purposes, though that is just a guess.
*And not out of some altruistic desire to create jobs or boost the standard of living in those places; they’re there because the wages they pay and the pollutants they produce are illegal in the US. It’s corporate law-dodging, plain and simple, and should be illegal.
The problem is over-consumption not over-population; plain and simple. here is a quote from Fred Pearce [
](http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2140)Here are a few other choice quotes
In the end of the article he rationally sums up my opinion very nicely…
(Emphasis mine)
Good point.
…but I think you go a bit far here. Generally, when a rich country takes advantage of a poor country’s cheap labour, it’s actually to the benefit of both countries. Just look at China.
The pollution issue is different though as economics shouldn’t trump the need to minimize climate change etc
The question of overpopulation applies to all places.
Cutting in half the population of Americans would result in a much larger impact reduction than cutting in half a billion Africans.
So the US needs to exercise population control.
A billion Africans are all looking to get Stuff as fast as possible; the only reason they don’t have more stuff is because they haven’t figured out how to get it, not because of some sort of superior moral position. So cutting that population in half will decrease, by half, their future impact. So Africa needs to exercise population control.
If you just want to look at who is using up the resources, it’s easy: It’s the developed world, which has the ingenuity and means to do it.
The current plan, so to speak, is to extend that ingenuity and means to the places that haven’t figured out how to Get Developed on their own, or who are slow to figure it out, including Africa.
So the issue remains: too many people. Way too many people already and way too many people in the pipeline.
We need to stop making babies.