Phobos: The reason that 90% of the world’s population will be in lesser-developed countries is simply because our population growth peaked earlier than theirs. The industrialized nations have birthrates below replacement. The third world has birth rates slightly above replacement. As long as that condition exists, the demographics will swing their way. That doesn’t mean population overall is increasing, just that the proportional representation of the population is changing.
If you find a link claiming that birthrates are increasing in the 3rd world, it’s simply wrong. This is not a matter for speculation - we know what the birthrates are because we measure them. And they have dropped significantly all over the world.
We can argue about the future, because you can come up with different numbers by accepting different initial assumptions in your models. But we can’t argue about what’s already happened - that’s a matter of record.
Most people arguing that the population is out of control are using outdated numbers, usually from activist groups like the Club of Rome or Zero Population Growth. These organizations have a vested interest in scaring you. Therefore, they use the older numbers (or completely fabricated ones) if it serves their purpose.
Very well Mr. Z., my apologies for the harsh words. Returning to wevets’s original statement that provoked this conflict:
All those people have to be supplied with fresh & clean water, food, housing, health care, waste disposal, energy, employment, and the various and sundry resources that go into consumer goods.
I will leave it to wevets to explain whether s/he meant “employment” to include multiple forms of attaining a decent standard of living by one’s own exertions, or specifically “jobs” in the sense you took it. (Perhaps s/he will also be kind enough to give a clue as to his/her gender so I don’t have to keep writing “s/he”. :)) I’ll simply point out that neither wevets nor I ever said that “employment” or “health care” was in fact a necessity for mere human survival; but that is not inconsistent with saying that humans need to have them, and many people prior to the 20th century have said so.
This gets back to the issue that I took up with UncleBeer: what counts as a population “problem”? You and UB seem to be saying that such a “problem” is when the world’s resources actually can’t sustain human life, and therefore the only “necessities” are those required for bare survival. wevets, sqweels, and I, for example, are interpreting “population problem” much more broadly: we think that any situation where overpopulation diminishes access to a broader range of “necessities” including employment and health care counts as a population problem.
Fair enough Kim. I think you uncovered a part of the debate that has been cloaked in the overall population argument. Personally, I think that humans have been pretty fine and happy without Jobs and healthcare, and cars, and television and running water for a whole lot longer than they have had them. It strikes me as a bit imperialistic to assume that everyone wants what we Americans do.
I would set the acceptable standards lower than you probably (well, for everyone else, but not for me )
Mr. Z.: *Personally, I think that humans have been pretty fine and happy without Jobs and healthcare, and cars, and television and running water for a whole lot longer than they have had them. It strikes me as a bit imperialistic to assume that everyone wants what we Americans do. *
True, but bear in mind that terms like “health care, waste disposal, energy, employment, resources for consumer goods” don’t have to be interpreted by late-20th-century American standards. “Waste disposal” can mean “sanitary latrines, composting, and a low-tech graywater recycling system” as well as “indoor flush toilets, curbside garbage and recyclables pickup, and massive sewage treatment plants”. The first option is not necessarily less sanitary than the second (if you have sufficiently low population density not to overstress the local environment), and I wouldn’t claim that people who have it are necessarily suffering. (I have lived that way myself for short periods, and would not really mind putting up with it, or maybe a slightly higher-tech variant of it, permanently—not that I would ever try to impose it on you, Mr. Z. :))
Similarly, “energy” and “employment” and “consumer goods” can be the sort that sustain a traditional lifestyle as well as the sort that support our kaleidoscopic consumerism; the plain Amish are an example of a group of people who have a pretty good standard of living (from the point of view of survival, security, and satisfaction) using traditional forms of these necessities. I would not dream of saying that we have to make them install electric pumps instead of pumping their water up by hand, and so forth.
So I interpret wevets’s list as a set of necessities that everyone should have in some form that can provide satisfactory amounts of health, prosperity, and happiness—not as a blueprint for imposing our American technomania lifestyle on the rest of the world. (I suppose the item I’d be most “imperialist” about is health care: I’d want everybody to have access to things like vaccinations and antibiotics and condoms, without necessarily banishing traditional medicine as well.)
If we are having a serious population problem, I wouldn’t be too concerned about vaccinations. Not to be callous, but they would only serve to keep the population larger.
Yikes, Mr. Z.! That’s why wevets and sqweels and I have been suggesting that more attention should be paid to anticipating and avoiding the comparatively minor overpopulation problems; that way, we won’t eventually have to choose between intolerable overcrowding and letting millions die in preventable epidemics.
I would include occupations such as subsistence farmer as “employment,” not just working for a wage. It’s probably about the earliest civilized occupation; I don’t think that simply surviving in the wild could be considered “employment,” though. I don’t think I’ve stretched the word beyond all comprehension. I’m hardly an agricultural expert, but I suspect that subsistence farming requires a pretty low population density on good arable land anyway (anyone with some good info on this?). I doubt a very large fraction of the world’s population could be employed in this way.
Save the letters!!! I’m male.
It is incorrect in the sense that people will not automatically die without those things. However, since these people will be clamoring for them (except for the tiny, insignificant minority that wants to live like the “Cro Magnon HMO’s” you’ve mentioned… care to speculate on what fraction of the population wants to live like that, incidentally?), I don’t see the point in splitting hairs about it.
If you want to volunteer to explain to the populations of China and India that they can survive without fresh & clean water, food, housing, health care, waste disposal, energy, employment, and the various and sundry resources that go into consumer goods, I won’t stop you. But I won’t be joining you.
In fact, people have demonstrated that even if they can survive without my list, they’ve proven that they’re very willing to risk their lives to obtain the items on my list. Some examples are the immigrants who risk death on boats in the Florida Strait, in the deserts of the southwestern U.S., and in the treks of refugees away from areas where war, famine, or some other disaster has interrupted the ability of local society to provide these things.
Also, I think our discussion of droughts ended prematurely. Of course people didn’t die from the water shortage in Atlanta, in the wealthiest and most modern country in the world. But people still suffer and die in droughts elsewhere. Examples can be found here, here, and here.
Again, I believe that the issue is not the survival of the human race, but the survival and quality of life of individual members of the human race. From that perspective, we have a population problem.
I think that would betray the objectives I just stated above.
This, meseems, ought to be the key point of this thread.
We can, I think, accept that the measures taken in a period of good weather may not be adequate in a period of bad (to invert the discussion, a building well out of the way of the normal rising of the creek in the spring may be engulfed by a 500-year flood). Assuming for the sake of discussion that we have successfully identified the problems and their likely periodicity (does that 500-year flood really come every 500 years or so, or every ten years), what should be done about the problems?
We can also, I think, stipulate that the “carrying capacity” of the Earth at any given time is probably approximately the population at that time. As Uncle Beer and others would point out, that “carrying capacity” does not remain fixed over time, however. I would go further, and suggest that significant changes can occur without significant changes in technology by applying capital (Roman aqueducts were not pushing the engineering envelope). What, if any, are the moral differences being saying, “You’re going to come up with the $10 billion to do ‘X’”, “I’m going to come up with the $10 billion to do ‘X’”, and “Despite your contention that ‘Y’ would be cheaper, I’m still going to do ‘X’” (the source of the money as in either of the foregoing)?
I can help you out, wevets with the subsistance farming question, but not right now (don’t you hate it when people do that?). I’m stuck here at work today and can’t look up the exact figures, but I can give you some info about my experiences and what I remember off the top of my head. If you want the facts after that, I can post them tomorrow.
OK, so, subsistance farming. Many Third World peoples do manage subsistnace farming on very small, very poor plots of land. I think the key to understanding this is that subsistance to a Third World resident is far below what you or I would imagine to be bare-bones subsistance.
In Nepal, appx. 80% of the population survives by subsistance farming and most do so on less than—darn, my memory! I want to say one hectacre, but I’m not positive. I promise to check for you if you’re interested. In any case, it is not a lot of land and, I think, a good protion of the world does survive this way.
Throuout this thread I have been reflecting on some of the lessons I’ve learned in recent years and remembering how my perspective used to be very much like those in this thread who are saying that things like indoor plumbing are necessities. I couldn’t imagine how horrible life would be without so many of the things we, in the developed world, consider basic needs. but I tell you, if you ever have the chance to live in a Thrid World country for a considerable amount of time, you will likely find that sooooo much of what you once considered necessity don’t seem so important anymore. It is really amazing how much you can live without and not be miserable.
We don’t have a population problem. We have a wealth problem. We have political problems. We have technology problems. We have distribution problems.
People aren’t starving in 3rd world countries because of overpopulation - they are starving because they are poor. Hong Kong has an incredibly high population density, and a very high standard of living.
If you cut the population of Nepal in half, do you think the half that are left would somehow double their incomes? Not a chance. They might have a bit more room, but they’d still be subsistance farming.
In the long, long run the Earth will run out of resources. It’s a closed ecosystem, and we use some non-renewable resources. So barring the discovery of transmutation, we’ll have to deal with this at some point.
But note that cutting down the population, implementing conservation, etc. doesn’t solve this problem, it just postpones it. And anyway, we’re talking about a long, long way down the road. We currently have access to more resources now than we did 30 years ago, because advances in exploration have outstripped consumption. The real price of most commodities has dropped in this century.
But ultimately we’ll need more. Fortunately, we have an entire Solar System, and an entire Galaxy beyond that. The only thing stopping us from mining minerals from Asteroids is that it’s much cheaper to mine them here. When the day comes that things like Iron become expensive, we’ll just go out and grab ourselves a whole new planet.
But what’s needed to do this is wealth. If we impoverish ourselves, we’ll be stuck on this rock and doomed to eventual extinction. But if we’re filthy rich, we can do anything.
That’s why I’m opposed to many measures that would significantly hurt the economy for small environmental gains (the Kyoto accords come to mind). We NEED a strong economy to go where the real resources are.
I don’t know why you would want to do that. Are there any data that demonstrate that the carrying capacity is approximately the size of the population at any given time? Carrying capacity is the potential population size that an environment can support, not the current size of that population.
I agree completely. I don’t think anyone here is contending that carrying capacity is a constant. The carrying capacity can go up or down. For example, genetically engineered crops with higher yields increase the carrying capacity as does the introduction of agriculture to new arable land. The commercial extinction of fisheries or desertification reduce the carrying capacity.
Thanks! I would love to see some firm numbers on subsistence farming.
I disagree with the first statement, but I agree with all the others. I believe these (including the ‘population’ problem) are all different facets of the same problem: How to improve the quality of life for human beings.
No, I don’t believe they would double their incomes. But cutting the population in half is not what I want to do. I want the rate of population growth to be exceeded by the rate of our ability to provide the various items on my list. The lower the rate of population growth, the easier this will be to do.
I would think that postponing this problem is something we would want to do since we cannot at present solve the problem. The use of space may be a solution, but it’s a long way off (after all, we haven’t been back to the moon in what, 30 years?). We want to make sure we have time to implement that solution.
I disagree. We can help the economy and the environment at the same time. Imagine how damaging to the economy global warming could be, or the commercial extinction of fisheries, or desertification.
Actually, I don’t think that there is any generally-agreed-upon definition of “carrying capacity”.
But, using the definition that you have given (which I basically agree with, although I think that some would not), we see as a self-evident fact that the Earth supports the current population now, and that sufficient Calories and protein, at least, are provided by the existing agricultural system (for simplicity’s sake, I’m rolling raising livestock, fishing, etc., into “agricultural”). Thus, the lower limit of the Earth’s carrying capacity is roughly the current population. Now, we could argue that certain practices as, e.g., overfishing, threaten to lower carrying capacity in the future; then, however, we must extend the definition to mean “potential population size over at leas several generations” (without getting too ridiculous about the span of time; I’m willing to bet that the carrying capacity of the Earth over 10[sup]13[/sup] years will turn out to be approximately zero).
On the left, how much additional population could we shoehorn into the existing economy and ecology? Probably not more than a few tens of millions. Now, again, we don’t expect the current system to remain static; we can build, e.g. aqueducts, which would allow us to move currently inaccessible water to people who need it, but that obviously takes a finite amount of time (and capital), and requires us to add the time dimension back in to our definition of “carrying capacity”.
So, yes, I would argue that the instantaneous “carrying capacity” of the Earth environment is essentially the current population. If we wish to alter the definition to e.g., “how many people/year could be supported over the next hundred years”, we might (indeed, I say would) get a different answer. “Different”, however, does not necessarily mean “smaller”. The answer will also depend on what expenditures of time and capital we choose to make, and how we make them.
It is a technical term so most of the accepted definitions are pretty close. Do you want to pick one of these?
From: Begon, M.; Harper, J.L. and Townsend, C.R. 1990. Ecology. Blackwell Scientific Publications. p. 847. Italics in original.
From: (Ed.) Parker, S.P. 1997. Dictionary of Bioscience. McGraw-Hill. p. 82.
I’ve been assuming we would use one of these definitions or a similar one. Note that I’ve been using carrying capacity in the sense that the environment can support the population without **further deterioration. An arguement could be made that the environment is already sufficiently deteriorated to consider humans as living beyond their carrying capacity.
Usually an organism living beyond its carrying capacity deteriorates the environment to such a point that the environment can no longer support such great numbers. With humans, our ability to modify our environment and divert or increase productivity our way has postponed this eventuality beyond what appear to be the most probable estimates of population density. That’s why many here are arguing that there is no population problem. We do not know the numbers that would be required to reach that condition, but it is informative that humans already dominate about 40% of the best estimates of net primary productivity on land (Vitousek, P.M. 1994. Beyond global warming: ecology and global change. Ecology v. 75(7):1861-1876.).
The real question that appears to remain is then how much further degradation of the environment can occur before it impairs the ability of the Earth to support the human population or before it seriously impairs the quality of life of the human population. The former is a long-term threat, while the latter is considerably more immediate.
Well, those definitions can be used to fertilize the fields in ecologically-degraded areas; the first more so than the second, but the second is not lacking in nutritive values for plants either.
Consider the first definition. We can pretty well determine that the maximum sustainable population for humans, or for any other eukaryotic species, 10[sup]9[/sup] years from now, will, absent massive technological intervention, be zero.
Now, it is unlikely that even the deepest ecologist will set this forth as a reasonable argument that the current carrying capacity of the Earth for humans is zero. But the vague qualitative term “indefinitely” has to be replaced by a more substantive one. Use “over fifty generations” or “over evolutionary time”, if you wish; I will not make any objections based on the length of generations or as to how long species take to evolve (although I may object as to whether the correct time frame has been chosen).
To offer an example of how the first definition is worthless, consider the “carrying capacities”, by that definition, of a Paleolithic HFG culture, and a Neolithic pastoral/agricultural one, on the same piece of land.
The second definition needs some amendment also. “Deterioration of the environment”, in the strict sense, occurs with every human activity. Now, of course, the environment can tolerate, let us say, the campfires and middens of a hundred thousand small HFG bands; once again, no person of sense could offer that as a serious argument. To the left, the observation of that tolerance is what gave people that the environment could tolerate any insult.
To take a more meaningful example, let us consider fish. There is definitely reason to believe that current catches are unsustainable. To the left, however, the yield from aquiculture appears to be increasing much faster than wild stocks are diminishing. We easily foresee a future in which wild fish are essentially extinct (as, e.g., the wild ancestral forms of some domestic livestock are), but aquiculture completely fills the nutrition gap. By the first definition, this is a sustainable population; by the second, it is not (the extinction of numerous fish species, I venture to say, cannot but be held to represent environmental deterioration).
I suggest that the definitions of “carrying capacity” are so vague and unrealistic as to be worthless (indeed, the first describes itself as “an idealized concept not to be taken literally in practice “).
For those interested in exploring aspects of the earth’s carrying capacity further, I recommend the book How Many People Can the Earth Sustain? by Joel E. Cohen.
In addition, a good article exploring the consequences of population growth and its relevance to carrying capacity can be found in a May, 1998 Atlantic Monthly article entilted A Special Moment in History by Bruce McKibbon.
All well and good, but the fact that you do not like the definition of a term doesn’t mean the term is undefined. If I want to discuss economics, but I don’t like the definition of “value” used by economists, it isn’t productive for me to try to communicate using my own definition at odds with the established one. A more productive approach might be to coin a new term with the definition I’d like to use. Perhaps that’s the approach you’d like to use here?
I think this is irrelevant. It would be absurd to discuss carrying capacity with regards to such time scales, and no one I know (or have ever heard of) does. Words only have meaning in a reasonable context. For example, if I were to ask: “What is the hue of honesty?” the problem is not with the definition of the word hue, but with the context it is being used in.
I agree. The reason a specific time scale has been left out of the definition of carrying capacity is to leave the term flexible for many uses. Its application to populations of bacteria may require vastly different time scales than its application to populations of conifers. In fact, in some of my other posts you may notice my concern that human society be in theory sustainable over long periods of time. In practice, we can never discover what will be sustainable in the future until we actually get there.
So?
Here you have hit a good point. “Deterioration of the environment” needs to be defined. I would suggest something along the lines of a decrease in the capacity of the ecosystem to support levels of biomass and diversity similar to those supported prior to the degradation. Obviously that doesn’t encompass some of what is commonly meant by environmental damage, and I don’t suggest that we should not be concerned with other kinds of damage. I just think that’s a useful way of using the phrase “deterioration of the environment” with regards to carrying capacity.
I don’t follow your meaning here. Is “To the left” a colloquialism I’m not familiar with, perhaps?
And, IMHO, the second should have as well. I disagree on the notion that the definitions are worthless. The term is obviously useful in theory. In practice, notions of carrying capacity must be taken with a grain of salt. It is a human imposed mathematical concept, and not one to which nature conforms easily.
However, since this is a theorhetical discussion of human maximum population size, I think the term is relevant.
Which is part of my objection. If we never again write, "carrying capacity of Homo sapiens sapiens, but abbrieviate the phrase as simply “carrying capacity”, we should still have it in mind that we are refering to human beings. Arguments from other species may be persuasive, e.g., “The carrying capacity for white pines is so-and-so many quadrillions of metric tonnes of biomass, and, as they are photosynthetic, I can’t see that humans, who are at least first-order consumers, can have a larger one”, but we must remember that the carrying capacity of white pines is not what we are tring to figure out (save that white pines may be necessary to the survival of humanity).
Having said so much, I will propose that “carrying capacity (of humans)” should be understood as meaning “…over the next thousand years”. My reasoning: a thousand years is such a great time that the nature of human society can be transformed unrecognizably over that span, and that the Earth can be altered significantly by natural forces (although hardly to the same extent); thus, nothing that can be said about carrying capacity now will necessarily apply then.
Good enough. I would only make it explicit that we consider the net level of decrease in biomass and diversity. We have two dimensions that are not necessariy commensurable, but at least we can decide if that is so.
It may be taken as equivalent to “on the other hand”. No political meaning intended; I just get tired of typing “OTOH” fifty times a day.
Wevets, you simply asked that population growth be lower than the growth of our capabilities to provide for that growth.
Well, your desire has been fulfilled. People are much richer around the world than they were 10, 100, or 1000 years ago. Our productivity is rising faster than our population growth.
Birth rates in the third world are falling precipitously. The only trouble is that death rates are also falling. The massive increases in population over the last hundred years did not happen because people started having more kids, it happened because they stopped dying so fast.
But my point stands. If you are worried about population growth, the most directly effective thing you can do is work for gender equality. Talking about the limitations of the biosphere may or may not be true, but arguing with third world peasants is counterproductive. Third world women mostly don’t have the power to limit their fertility, no matter how much they might want to. AFTER third world women have the power to control their fertility, THEN go making all your arguments about carrying capacity, it won’t do any good until then. But once they can control their fertility, you won’t have to make your carrying capacity arguments because they will limit the birthrate for their own reasons.
Very well Mr. Z., my apologies for the harsh words. Returning to wevets’s original statement that provoked this conflict: