“Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.”
Jacques Cousteau
“If we don’t halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature and without pity – and will leave a ravaged world.”
Henry Kendall, Nobel Laureate in Physics
“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man.”
Thomas Malthus
The issue of human population (fundamentally, the only real issue when you think about it) is absolutely clear; it shouldn’t be necessary to explain why our thousand-fold increases in the last few millennia are the forces behind essentially all of our ‘human’ concerns and dilemmas, including the increases of technological discoveries and implementations, both ‘chicken and egg’ to population growth. But while we know that populations have grown to…really beyond…dangerous levels, there is still a lack of clarity as to how to respond. Here are, broadly , the two different views of how populations will, and need to, change over this century.
One view is that there is a ‘natural’ demographic process that will reduce population. This process is thought to be seen in the lowered population growth rates over the last half century. While population is continuing to markedly increase, the percentage increases have been getting smaller, with the projection that the growth rate will go to zero between 2080 and 2100 at a population of between 9 and 12 billion depending on a number of factors; at which point the population will gradually get smaller. The implicit assumption is that by some ‘invisible hand process’, based in civilization, education, shifts in human understanding and values, human population will reduce and stabilize.
Which leads to the second argument, which data and reason increasingly favors, that the present population is at least twice (and more likely 4 to 8 times) sustainable levels; that there is near certainty that the result of present and future increases will be cascading waves of environmental, economic, social and political failures in the next few decades, long before any meaningful reductions will be seen from the ‘natural demographic’ process. Further, that so-called natural demographic changes are far from natural which can be seen in the human population growth process of the last several thousand years.
Population change is simplicity itself: increase birth rate while decreasing death rate and population numbers increase (we have been doing this for thousands of years); decrease birth rate and increase death rate and population numbers decrease. But, after that bit of simplicity there are few parts of human life more fraught with issues of sober practicality and issues of subjective, fanciful and fanatical belief… and the very essence of biological motive.
But there is a fundamental and terrible difference between birth rate and death rate: one involves bringing or not bringing something into existence and the other involves removing something from existence, though this distinction gets muddied in human societies by biology and the political uses of belief. First, a cold-eyed look at birth rates.
Birth rates: Human females typically produce one child at a time and, very often, give that child 2 or more years of attention before becoming pregnant again. If a large percentage of women were empowered and educated to their capacity to control fecundancy, and if, especially, they limited themselves, on average, to one child, the most basic element of birth rate reduction would be met. There are a number of conditions that would support this general goal:
Generally passive conditions:
- Improved broad-based education of, especially, females.
- Social expectations for the age of first pregnancy to correspond with true emotional maturity.
- Widely available and social approval of contraceptive methods for females and males.
- Unlimited access to abortion services.
- Clear routes for economic independence for females.
- Social structures empowering females to fundamental human equality.
Generally active (coercive) methods;
- Reducing the number of fertile females.
- Active social and legal prohibitions of reproduction.
- Economic penalties for having children.
- Forced sterilization of males and females.
If population numbers are to decline in meaningful timeframes, present birth rates need to be reduced well below replacement. This would be required, 1) given that timeframes are narrowing with each new discovery of our environmental impact, and 2) taking into account population (demographic) momentum (that absolute birth numbers continue to remain the same or increase as present populations of juvenile females reaching reproductive age increase for a generation or so). Worldwide birth rate average is presently 1.6 - 1.7% (1.6% increase in total population per year by numbers of births); a number which varies significantly by region and nation (1). These are the base figures that produce the BAU (Business As Usual) projections for population increases across the 21st century.
An in-depth analysis by the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), looking at, essentially, all reasonably possible non-catastrophic scenarios, makes clear that even with various stringent reductions in birth rate alone, meaningful population reduction over the coming century is unlikely to happen. Without uncommon action world population will continue to increase with the foreseeable consequences of, to put it bluntly, larger and larger numbers of people enduring greater deprivation and suffering as environmental systems fail and humans respond violently to the rapid loss of life sustaining conditions.
The PNAS analysis considered a variety of plausible scenarios: age ranges, unintended vs intended pregnancies, influence of demographic momentum, enforced birth limitations and others. What are called “realistic changes in rates” produce populations of over 9 billion in 2050 and 10.5 billion or more in 2100. “Draconian fertility reduction” in rates produced almost 9 billion in 2050 and about 7 billion in 2100. A scenario of enforced worldwide ‘one child’ policy and “no increased survivability” over present levels resulted in a population of about 7.6 billion in 2050 and about 3.5 billion in 2100. A variety of projections between these extremes were obtained by minor ‘twinking’ of the scenarios in different ways.
One interesting finding was that even large acute catastrophic population reductions by typical pandemic disease or other significant acute conflagration were largely inconsequential to the major demographic movements of population change; such rapid short-term increases in death rates showed only brief population reductions while the percentage increases ‘soldier on’.
Death rate: The uncomfortable conclusion is that increasing of death rates will have to be looked at in the immediate future; The continued lowering of death rates is the major driver of population increases. Birth rates have been very slightly higher than death rates for a very long time, but as birth rates began to decline in the last century, death rates were dropping even faster, from approximately a 2% death rate in 1950 to less than a 1% death rate today. But, proposing death rate changes have many fraught ramifications throughout the society:
- The distribution of dying is spread disproportionately across age, ethnicity, class and other social divisions.
- There are many causes of death, both passive and active.
- A very large part of economic activity is directly dependent on maintaining the living, avoiding dying….and the living are completely dependent on economic activity.
- The living, the already existing, are often very reluctant to die and can offer great resistance in a wide variety of ways.
Today the total death rate worldwide is 0.7% to 0.8% per year (almost one person in every one hundred dies each year), though widely variable by region and nation. Again, this is the base beginning number for BAU calculations of population changes over the century.
Given the above bullet points, it is clear why most of the arguments and potential efforts of population reduction concern lowering birth rate; the only “change” that the PNAS report can offer about death rate is “no increase in survivability” across one of the scenarios: meaning that advancing medical options and other interventions would not be used to decrease the death rate. It should also be noted that focusing on birth rate places both the active and passive controls of population very largely onto females, whereas, societal actions to increase death rate would equally be a responsibility of males.
Historically, death rates have been ‘outsourced’ to environmental and ‘natural’ actions: diseases, accidents, starvation, conflicts, predation and, finally, aging out. Death rates over most of our history have varied from about 5% to 10% with corresponding birth rates closely tracking. But these ‘environmental actions’ have become increasingly, directly or indirectly, influenced by human actions.
The major human response to death rate has been to reduce it,,,at least within our own societies; such reductions are considered among our crowning achievements, but now that effort seems to be falling under the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ category. Without the worldwide developing of more realistic expectations about death, there is, increasingly, the likelihood that billions of people will be condemned to the most terrible suffering living things on this planet have ever experienced.
Estimates vary, but are all in the same direction: the earth can sustainably support somewhere less than 1 and no more than 4 billion people, with the strongest arguments centering on 1 to 2 billion…and we do not have unlimited time to get to those numbers. In fact, it seems that a combination of environmental degradation and the dangers that we represent to ourselves as we vie for advantage in a world of declining survivability, suggest that substantive changes must be made in the next few decades. Assuming that such projections have a high probability of being correct, it means that death rate will have to be increased; reducing birth rate alone in any responsible way will not be enough!
Someone is thinking about these numbers, we can be sure: if the death rate is, over the next decade, increased from 0.8% to 1.5% or 2.0% and the birth rate is reduced from 1.6% to about 1% and is maintained at these values, then world population will be about 7.5 billion in 2030, 6.5 billion in 2050 and 5.2 billion in 2080; this is assuming relatively benign world events over that period; major conflagrations involving WMD or high morbidity pandemics would change the projections. With reducing populations and successful economic and social adaptations to the reductions, the world’s ecological systems and human systems would have a better chance of stabilizing at sustainable levels, though without certainty; even greater reductions in numbers and total human impact may be required.
I have built self-calculating spreadsheets for population change, of birth rates, of death rates organized by age, causes of death, income and other variables; have looked at death rates over the last several decades, at death rates of the world’s nations and regions….. No matter how the numbers are manipulated there is one conclusion: if the death rate is doubled from 0.8% to 1.6%, more than 60,000,000 people will die each year than would otherwise (a 0.8% death rate results in about 64,000,000 deaths per year with a population of 8 billion; doubling the death rate would double that number). Manipulating the numbers only distributes those additional deaths in different ways among different demographics. We could look at it this way: about 8 people in 1000 die per year now, 16 people in 1000 would die per year with the increase. The reason that the totals work out to be 60,000,000 more deaths is, of course, that there are so many of us now!
Cutting through the swamp of fantasy, fallacy and fearfulness of death, all the arguments of religion, morality, economics, politics and personal/individual rights…we are left with the simple biology/ecology imperative that death is part of a species’ adaptation to its ecosystem. It is fundamentally unworkable in any system of Reality to see death as a biological adaptation to be avoided at all costs. Just as a species has rates of renewal, it must have rates of removal appropriate to its relationship with its environment.
One reasonable summary of our present condition is that humans must die in greater numbers than it is in our capacity to prevent. There is a draconian sound to such a statement, but it actually presents us with no greater problem than many others that we already deal with: we distribute society’s wealth in ruinous ways, we assign selected demographics to die in wars and other dangers, we withhold medical and other ‘life saving’ interventions for a plethora of economic, social and practical reasons. It is not so much that practical methods to accomplish these changes are just unthinkably inhuman, simply can’t be done… Rather, our attitudes toward death and therefore life itself need changing; a not at all unthinkable proposal since these attitudes have often been, many times throughout history, very different than at present.
It is time for this discussion to be had, openly and honestly, in the public forum…along with a basket of other related vital existential issues.
Notes: (1) The birth rate/death rate data for the poorest countries is questionable; the data simply is not systematically collected. This is especially obvious in the death rate data from the low income nations, as defined by the World Bank. Reported death rates are not different from the rates in higher income countries even when social unrest, civil war and famine are clearly occurring.
