27 posts tagged “population”
I will go with the activist, but we really cannot tell who will turn out right.
Can homo sapiens – self-styled – have the wisdom to learn to manage fertility
for the common good? It is a unique experiment. We have examples of
other species being too successful in isolated situations such as islands,
impoverishing the environment and eventually diminishing in numbers
through starvation. We have similar examples in the human experience, but
we have no such experience for the species as a whole, spanning oceans
and historically warring cultures. I cannot imagine social regulation – except
in an Orwellian state – becoming so perfect that the human race actually
reaches an optimum level and stays there, but a future of population
fluctuations around a moving optimum level would be much better than we
now have.
The point of this paper is that that level is indeed moving – downward.
Human activity is already degrading the environment and its resources.
There are now too many of us to live decently on the impoverished resource
base toward which we are moving. It is not enough to hope that “something
will turn up.” That view betrays a vitalistic view of history. Nothing is likely to
turn up by itself.
In this wider perspective it is clearly far too soon to judge whether modern industrialized societies, with their very high rates of energy and resource consumption and high pollution levels, and the rapidly rising human population in the rest of the world are ecologically sustainable. Past human actions have left contemporary societies with an almost insuperably difficult set of problems to solve
Clive Pointing in A Green History of The World, 1991
The research on the reasons for population growth shows that human populations under conditions of regional limits of sustainability have the ability to limit breeding rates. Thus there are potential conditions for limiting the biological breeding rates through governmental rules.
There is however in the long view a deficiency in the limiting process, presumably due to cognitive deficiencies and societal factors influenced thereby. Indications therefore are:
- delay in accommodating the rules of the society to the real development of the society
- maintaining the intraspecific competition, e.g. between different “nations”
- comprehensive, at least latent refusal in the society of family planning by contraception
- enduring development for solving population growth/limits of sustainability by extending the limits of sustainability, instead of attacking global population growth.
Helmut M Knoflacher in Bevölkerungswachstum (Population Growth) – zwischen Erbe und Erkenntnis (German), in Rupert Riedl et al (Ed.): Die Ursachen des Wachstums (The Reasons for Growth) 1996.
We can conclude, then, by saying that over-population is quite clearly one of the gravest problems which confront us, and the choice before us is either to let the problem be solved by nature in the most horrifying possible way or else to find some intelligent and human method of solving it, simultaneously increasing production and balancing the birth rate and the death rate, and in some way or other forming an agreed international policy on the subject. To my mind, the most important prerequisites to such a solution are first of all an awareness of the problem, and then a realization that it is a profoundly religious problem, a problem of human destiny. Our hope, as always, it to be realistically idealistic.
Aldous Huxley in The Human Situation, 1977 (Chapter IV)
The fossil fuel bubble was a durable one, and unlike soap bubbles, it will collapse slowly. That gives the world some time to make the one real accommodation that will provide a smooth transition to the leaner times ahead: a deliberate policy of negative population growth.
I do not mean to understate the difficulties, nation by nation, of learning to manage population size to maximize human welfare, or the potential for conflict as different nations move at different rates toward sustainable populations levels, or the tensions created as crowded nations eye other nations’ land, water or resources. I would not bet that the human race can manage this most difficult of transitions – this retreat from overshoot – without turmoil. But we have an opportunity to try.
Lindsey Grant in The Collapsing Bubble, 2005
Will man, in his perceived role of steward responsible for nature, succeed in achieving a level of human population compatible with his responsibility – in other words, a level which allows the natural environment to survive? Or will man fail and leave it to nature to restore an appropriate balance, as she has done so often in the past when population booms have been followed by population crashes?....
Sir James Goldsmith in The Trap, 1993
So human progenies, if unrestrain’d,
By climate friended, and by food sustain’d
O’er seas and soils, prolific hordes! would spread
Erelong, and deluge their terraqueous bed;
But war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth,
Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.
Thus while new forms reviving tribes acquire
Each passing moment, as the old expire;
Like insects swarming in the noontide bower,
Rise into being, and exist an hour;
The births and deaths contend with equal strife,
And every pore of Nature teems with Life;
Which buds or breaths from Indus to the Poles,
And Earth’s vast surface kindles, as it rolls!
Erasmus Darwin in The Temple Of Nature Or The Origin Of Society, 1803, (Canto IV)
Among those concerned about population and development, there were always two mainstreams: Population optimists and population pessimists. The optimists did not just consider all problems solvable. They consider the population growth of the present time the best proof for a positive connection between population and economic growth. Pessimists consider the growing population primarily a treat: From general poverty over famine to a general destabilization of the society.
We are not agreeing with any of these “schools of thought”. Because this book shows: Population development and human development are closely related. But there is no linear connection between the population of a region and the the standard of living of this region. Therefore will the last dilemma mentioned in this book remain unsolved: That our development efforts is aiming at a standard of living, that can not be sustained (can not be made general in an ecological perspective).
Rainer Münz et al in Wie schnell wächst die Zahl der Menschen?, (How fast is the population growing?) 2007
Until we succeed at nurturing these additional cognitive skills, "trends and their implied problems," will remain hidden behind problems displayed by immediate conditions. Civil laws and religious codes will fail to create behaviors that keep human population in a graceful balance with the available resources and technology. Outside of an enlightened autocracy, a rapidly decreasing population will not be an institutional agenda. For it to become part of a democracy’s agenda, it would first have to be part of a majority of the constituency’s agenda. Achieving a graceful life for all, independent of institutional action would require this level of thinking to be the possession of most members of the global community. And this would require nurturing each individual’s thinking processes well beyond what we have accomplished in the past.
It is not a simple task, but achieving a graceful social existence depends on it.
Jack Alpert in Nurture can change our course (article) 2004
In a less imperfect world, people might realize that Earth’s problems could be resolved by voluntary population reduction, and would act accordingly before time runs out. That would be amazing and glorious, because humankind would have shown itself able to confront and reject its Darwinian inheritance of aggressive selfishness, its irrational addiction to blind faith, and its withdrawal from reality into political and economic correctness, by exercising its supreme gift: intelligence.
William Stanton: The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750 – 2000 (2003)
