WORLD POPULATION HAS MORE THAN TRIPLED SINCE 1930 TO OVER 6.5 BILLION PEOPLE.
Overpopulation AND OVERCONSUMPTION
"Democracy cannot surive overpopulatoin. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears."
-Issac Asimov-
Of the various threats to the Earth and humanity, overpopulation may be the most serious because of our inability to recognize it. Understandably, few people want to talk about it. Few recognize it as perhaps the most serious threat ever posed to humans of any generation. In 1950, there were 2.5 billion people. In 2000, there were close to 6.3 billion people. By 2050, the U.N. world population figures predict that there will be upwards of 9.5 billion people. When population increases, the amount of energy, food, water, fiber to make clothing, lumber to make houses—all these things and more increase in order to support a growing population. The increase of 7 billion people in a mere 100 years is an incredible explosion of human population, and brings up the critical if neglected question of ‘how many people can the Earth really support?’
Long-range graph which shows the incredible exponential growth of
human populations in the last 200 years.
As dangerous as overpopulation is, we (of the "developed" nations) must also recognize that overconsumption is equally as disastrous. Americans consume roughly 25 percent of the world's resources and produce 1/3 of the world's garbage. On a per capita basis, one American consumer equalls around 25 Chinese. It is simply not possible for everyone to live as Americans do today, and soon Americans will no longer be able to support this most unsustainable and destructive way either. We must look to simplify our lives and to embrace an ethical commitment not to have more than two children.
Ecologists use the term ‘Carrying capacity’ to describe the maximum population of a given species that its environmental is able to support for an unspecified amount of time. If a species temporarily goes above the carrying capacity of their environment, a resulting population decline (or ‘die-off’) will occur. If the population has only gone slightly above carrying capacity, then the resulting die-off will likely be small. However, if the population has gone drastically over the carrying capacity, the resulting die-off will likely be significant and could even drop the population well below the carrying capacity.
"It's simply not possible for everyone
to live as Americans do today, and soon Americans will no longer be able to suport this most unsustainable and destructive way of life either. We must look to simplify our lives and to embrace an ethical commitment not to have more than two children."
The question is whether the concepts of carrying capacity, overshoot, and die-off apply to humans the same as they do to other animal and plant populations. This has been a highly disputed question. There are many economists and proponents of technology who claim that the notion of carrying capacity cannot apply to humans because the limitations placed upon us by any particular environment can always be overcome by the creativity and ingenuity of the human mind.
To some extent, this argument is valid—that is, the notion of carrying capacity is problematic when looking at humans because of our ability to further and further exploit and utilize resources previously unavailable. This can mean expanding one’s environment, inventing new technologies, or creating more complex social patterns in order to capture and use the desired resources. This has allowed us to dramatically expand the carrying capacity of the Earth, especially in the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution. Nonetheless, ultimately we are still dependent upon and limited by certain fundamental resources. In short, the fact that we have become better at exploiting resources does not negate the fact that we are still dependent upon these very resources.
In the 19th century, a German scientist, named Justus von Liebig, formulated a natural law which stated that a population of any given species will necessarily be limited by whichever resource is most scarce. This has come to be known as ‘Liebig’s Law’.
To a great degree, the expansion of the Earth’s carrying capacity has been made possible due to our inheritance of fossil fuels, particularly oil. As Richard Heinberg puts it, “There are now somewhere between two and five billion humans alive who probably would not exist but for fossil fuels.” Our great discovery of petroleum has fueled the Green Revolution, long distance transportation, modern medicine, economic ‘globalization’, and practically every other type of modern convenience that we have come to rely on. Oil has given us what Heinberg calls a “phantom carrying capacity”—a carrying capacity that is only temporary because of its dependence on a finite supply of fossil fuels, which will soon peak. Heinberg ominously notes,
“[I]f the availability of these fuels were to decline significantly without our having found effective replacements to maintain all their life-sustaining benefits, then the global human carrying capacity would plummet—perhaps even below its pre-industrial levels."
Likewise, James Howard Kunstler in his book, The Long Emergency, writes that,
“…[C]heap oil has skewed the equation over the past hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of nonrenewable condensed solar energy accumulated over eons of prehistory…The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years… So, I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves arc toward depletion, we will indeed suddenly be left with an enormous surplus population…that the ecology of the Earth will not support. No political program of birth control will avail. The people are already here. The journey back to non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hypergrowth was simply a side effect of the oil age. It was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it.”
In other words, both Heinberg and Kunstler are saying that the concepts of carrying capacity, overshoot, and die-off do indeed apply to humans, and thus they predict a partial die-off of the human population at the end of the oil age.
How do we counter such an enormous and seemingly unsolvable ecological crisis? To many this is a problem with no clear solution. However, if we were to create an ethics of responsibility and care for our Earth and humanity, it may be possible to reverse the disastrous and self-defeating growth of the human population.
While this information can be overwhelming and even daunting, don't be discouraged! There is much you and your community can do to prepare for this possibly very serious crisis. To learn more about opportunities to act now, visit our SOLUTIONS and OPOA ACTION! pages.
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