If the world continues on its course, overpopulation may lead to disasterous results. This article (on the Malthusian Catastrophe) touches on the matter.
Actually, I have been thinking about the matter for some time. I’ve read various articles on it, but for obvious reasons I can’t provide a cite for all of them.
My question is simply this: will there ever come a time when we seriously have to consider artificial birth constraints, like they have in China. One child per family, is of course the rule.
Now, I want to make two things very clear here. I know this is a very controversial subject, likely to incite strong emotions in people. And I am a staunch liberal, very concerned about individual rights too. (But of course, rights aren’t absolute, and are necessarily limited when they endanger other people’s rights.) And secondly, I am only referring to using it as a last resort. Actually, in places like the USA, Canada and Europe, a growing middle class and reliable birth control has kept this from happening. If its not too late to help other countries achieve this, then what this thread is about may be totally unnecessary.
We could vastly increase the world’s arable land by irrigating deserts. You’d have to distil or desalinate a LOT of seawater, of course, and I leave the unintended consequences of that to another thread.
There is no Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus was wrong 200 years ago and he is still wrong.
The human population will peak at about 9 billion people in the next 40 years. It will then decline precipitously. In 100 years time the world population will be the same as it was 100 years ago.
IOW there is simply no “problem” that needs to be cured.
Another 3 billion people will cause problems, however they will be nothing compared to the problems created by a massively aged population that will result form preventing those 3 billion people being born.
The optimal solution seems to be to simply let things take their natural course. Experimenting with totalitarian world governments in order to “solve” a problem that will cease to exist within my lifetime doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
Even allowing for that, a lack of agricultural land isn’t an will not be a problem. We *currently *produce more than enough food to support 9 billion people. At the point where the population actually reaches 9 billion we will be producing enough food to feed at least 15 billion.
Lack of arable land simply isn’t an issue.
No, we couldn’t. Generally speaking deserts don’t have fertile soils.
No, you wouldn’t.
If it ever got to the point of needing to irrigate deserts the most sensible source of water would be simply to increase the efficiency of current water usage practices. We could halve the current amount of agricultural water use using currently existing technology and still only increase the price of food by about 5%. the only reason we don’t is because water is essentially free. If water ever becomes limiting it will, by definition, cease to be free.
No. First of all, a few facts to understand China’s “One-Child Policy”. It has nothing at all to do with overpopulation. China was never in danger of overpopulation. In 1979, the fertility rate in China was 2.1 (meaning the average Chinese woman was having 2.1 babies in her lifetime), which is exactly the rate needed for the population to remain stable. The One-Child Policy was implemented at that time to give the communist government more control over people’s lives, because it was believed that if women spent less time bearing and raising kids, they could spend more time working in factories and farms.
Second, the One-Child Policy is not exactly what the name suggests. China is rigidly divided along class and geogrpahical lines, with different rights for those in different groups. Some groups are strictly limited to one child, others are allowed to have multiple children.
Third, the One-Child Policy has involved a brutal attack on human rights. There have been millions of forced abortions and forced sterilizations. Its effect on Chinese society has also been horrible. For one thing, Chinese parents greatly prefer having boys to girls, so if a woman becomes pregnant with a girl she’ll often get an abortion and then try again to get a boy. The resulting imbalance of genders in Chinese society causes all kinds of problems, including high crime and economic and political turmoil.
So to many folks including me, asking whether we should replicate communist China’s “artifical birth constraints” is like asking whether we should replicate Nazi Germany’s approach to population control. In fact, worldwide the truth is: “During the last 50 years, fertility rates have fallen all over the world. From Africa to Asia, South America to Eastern Europe, from Third World jungles to the wealthy desert petro-kingdoms, every country in every region is experiencing declines in fertility.” The real problem that many countries will be facing is underpopulation, not overpopulation.
The problem is not the family of 12 in Nepal. The problem is the consumption habits of the family of 4 in Southern California. They have two cars, produce tons of garbage, run appliances like fridges and freezers and air conditioners, heat their pool, etc, etc.
The West consumes a disproportional amount of the world’s resources. That’s the problem.
This hasn’t been true for, well, all of history. Since the advent of agriculture, war has had very little effect on population. The worst war ever fought in the history of the world saw the world with more people at the end of it than at the beginning.
The usual check to human population has been disease and famine, and the world’s population has grown sharply precisely when those problems became more solvable.
There’s really no situation in which I can see this being acceptable or tolerable, and without an in-depth knowledge of Chinese history I have to wonder if it would ever even be necessary unless the global economy were as badly managed as the Chinese economy was in its first couple of under Communist rule. Imagine what that would look like. The solution is in better use of resources and improved education and standards of living and increased economic opportunities, particularly for women. Those always lead to lower birth rates.
I think that estimate has been revised somewhat so the population peak is a little larger and comes a bit later, but the general idea is right and it also makes draconian measures unnecessary.
Where are you getting these numbers? Currently one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. It is estimated that we have to double food production by 2050 to prevent mass starvation.
38% of the Earth’s ice free land is currently being farmed. One third of that is crops, the rest is pasture and rangeland. Most of the remaining land is desert, mountain, tundra or urban.
That’s the thing though. The third world isn’t starving because we don’t or can’t possibly grow food for them. They’re starving because fuck them if they can’t pay for our food at our rates.
This is romanticized nonsense. In fact, low-tech populations tend to produce more environmental damage because they have less leeway to defer taking what they need right now (because their consumption is mostly needs, not mere wants).
Starvation still persists for some people, though for a much smaller percentage of the world’s population than any time in the past. This is because of bad government, bad economic systems, lack of technology and lack of education in the poorest parts of the world. If countries like Mozambique and Ethiopia had the most up-to-date strains of genetically modified crops, fertilizers, irrigation systems, and technological know-how, they’d produce enough food for themselves and plenty to spare.
What people like you conveniently ignore is that the West ALSO produces a disproportionate amount of the world economy. The figures vary a little from source to source, but for the last 20+ years, the US has consumed about 20-25% of the world’s resources and has produced the same percentage of the total world economy.
A pet peeve of mine: The replacement rate is not 2.1 children per woman, unless you’re using some crazy method of accounting. It’s exactly 2, using any consistent measure. And if you’re using some inconsistent measure, then you still can’t say it’s exactly 2.1, because it’ll depend on local conditions.
No it isn’t. If every woman has exactly two children, then the number of women in a society will gradually decrease. First, slightly less than half of all babies are female. Second, a small percentage of females will die in childhood. I’m sure the true number is some decimal between 2.0 and 2.1, and I’d agree that it does vary based on local conditions.