The Man Who Defused the ‘Population Bomb’

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574411382676924044.html

by ivankirigin • 17 years ago

37 44 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

m_eiman• 17 years ago

He didn't defuse it, he just added a few more feet to the fuse. As long as Earth's population grows exponentially (or even linearly), we'll hit a wall sooner or later.

Malthus is still right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe

shrughes• 17 years ago

Earth's population isn't growing exponentially or even linearly, though.

pyre• 17 years ago

Source? Numbers? I know that a few first-world countries like Japan have negative population growth, but is that the case everywhere? Are the countries that having negative population growth enough to offset those with positive?

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

And shrinking in richer economies. You can't extrapolate out decades with those kinds of trends. Lots of developing economies will be as rich as the west is today before then.

Periodic4• 17 years ago

Isn't it a law in ecology that a population will grow to the limit of its scarcest resource? In some countries that is food, in many modern societies now it seems to be time.

We know that the population can't grow exponentially forever, but other than a recent dip in fertility rates, we have seen a fairly steady exponential growth.

http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/Papers/gkh1/chap1.htm

gte910h2• 17 years ago

Omce birth control becomes free or affordable, and societites move out of agrarian only production, that is untrue.

Reliable birth control pretty much leads to voluntary replacement only reproduction

mynameishere• 17 years ago

For a few generations. Eventually, the survival of the fittest kicks in, and those people who avoided birth control (from a stronger paternal feeling, etc) will restock the population.

donaldc• 17 years ago

Except for some insular subcultures (such as the Amish, to give only one example among many). These subcultures are continuing exponential growth unabated, and eventually this will affect national and world fertility rate statistics.

But such subcultures are still less than 1% of the population in the developed world, so even doubling their numbers every 20 to 25 years, it will take a while for them to have a statistically significant impact.

kingkongrevenge4• 17 years ago

This appears applicable to whites in the west and Asians in east Asia. I'm not so sure this is universally true. You see big differences in fertility rates in different ethnic groups in the US.

And it may not even generally be true. It might just be how things appear right now given current circumstances. If you cut off immigration to the US, which is driving growth, I doubt the white fertility rate would stay at or below replacement. Wages for low skill labor would rise and fertility would go up. Who knows what the birth rate in Japan would be if their economic policy were not so incompetent.

jacobolus2• 17 years ago

It's not just birth control: Even more important is education of girls, which is the number one factor reducing natality. Educated urban women (and educated urban families) just don't have the 8-15 children that rural peasant families do (before industrialization anywhere in the world, for thousands of years). Part of it is also that previously >50% of children died before age 5. Now infant mortality is extremely low in most industrialized countries.

zacechola4• 17 years ago

To continue the analogy, he added more explosives to the bomb. More food begets more people.

eplanit• 17 years ago

Indeed, you're right. He helped us kick the can further down the road.

teeja• 17 years ago

It could be argued that by enabling growing population with diminished consequences, he made the bomb bigger. There's no argument that pouring industrial chemicals into the soil has created a dependency on those chemicals - and their manufacturers.

warfangle2• 17 years ago

He also is, sort of directly, responsible for the patenting of plant genomes, input-intensive farming that leads to soil depletion and algae bloom, dangerous crop monocultures, and so on and so forth.

On the flip side, he directly helped countries like ethiopia implement modern farming techniques that increased crop yields magnificently.

tomjen2• 17 years ago

He saved an estimated ONE BILLION people. That really puts things in perspective.

Periodic4• 17 years ago

I'd like to know the methods for estimating this number. Malnutrition deaths, children that were able to be born because their parents felt secure enough to have another child, food-shortage violence deaths, there are many indirect factors when you're talking about affecting scarcity for a population.

kingkongrevenge4• 17 years ago

The estimate is nonsense. Africa's population has trebled (or whatever) yet the green revolution never happened in Africa. The continent is overwhelmingly fed on pre-green revolution crops grown in pre-green revolution ways with low fossil fuel inputs. The old ways scaled up. (Though arguably at great cost to natural habitat.)

Certainly there would be many more farmers (less efficient) without this gent's green revolution advancements and the food would be more expensive, but it's baseless to assert everyone would have starved otherwise.

netsp• 17 years ago

With something like this it is impossible to really estimate, even if you are looking only at direct effects (starvation. etc.)

First when you have a chain of necessary companents: (Scientific Invention > development of agricultural techniques > NGO Deploying of techniques > Rich guy funding the deployment > ex politician who convinced the rich guy) , each one can claim full credit for the process.

Then you have to guess what would have happened if this guy didn't do it? Would Mexicans still be farming like 1824?

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

How much of the Green Revolution was due to improved technique and how much was due to hydrocarbon inputs?

biohacker424• 17 years ago

The man achieved great things, specifically the way in which he solved the problem is phenomenal. It reveals not a just a great mind, but a great character. Not to be glib, but you'd look for something like that in a founder. Except the he didn't create yet another web 2.0 site, he saved billions of lives.

Having said that, lets keep in mind that the green revolution is not as often described a low risk/high yield deal.

Low risk/high yield things often tend to be Utopian and are most often revealed to not be at least one of those things.

The green revolutions is HIGH risk/high yield. It is high risk because it relies on very few, very genetically similar varieties. And those are at high risk for decimation due to disease.

They themselves might not be more susceptible to any one disease, but their near universal use carries a high risk of unforeseen food shortages when some fungus wipes out a sufficiently large percentage of the global wheat crop.

We should carry on Norman Borlaug's work and develop more genetically diverse strains which maintain similarly high yields.

It would also be nice if we could find a way to fertilize without creating hardpan soils or fertilizer runoff into rivers/lakes/oceans.

zacechola4• 17 years ago

You misstate the arguments of some green farming techniques. For example, rejecting monoculture on a patch of land is low risk/high yield. 15 different crops (not 15 varieties of one crop) is much less susceptible to total failure due to a single catastrophic event than a monoculture.

Secondly, is high yield even a good thing? Many crops produce more yield but do not produce more (or produce very little more) nutritionally valuable product. Corn being the exemplary plant in this case. Germ size has barely increased, while starch has grown considerably. Which is great if you're feeding cattle, but biomass from starch doesn't necessarily mean protein-rich biomass, rather it becomes animal fat. Delicious animal fat, to be sure, but not necessarily a good yield/nutrition trade-off.

biohacker424• 17 years ago

is high yield even a good thing?

It is if you want to feed more people, More people may not be a good thing, but it often just is an inescapable reality and if you want to keep them from death by starvation you need higher yield.

And I'm not sure rejecting monoculture on a patch of land is high yield. Not if you want to harvest and distribute it all and do it before it spoils and the "patch" is large enough. Then you need machines, huge machines, and those demand monoculture.

Or you could go with human labor but then you'd need a whole other patch of land, harvested with machines, to feed the laborers harvesting the first patch.

Corn is a good example of high calorie/poor nutrition. But most other crops are not that bad.

jules• 17 years ago

I find food from my garden consistently much tastier than food from the supermarket. Especially tomatoes, haricots verts, peas & lettuce. Tomatoes from the supermarket taste as if they injected 80% water. Haricots verts from the supermarket taste as if they're a month old. You wouldn't even recognize peas if you're used to frozen peas.

I don't know if the difference is because of different species of plants or different light conditions or different soil. Whether it's better for your health I couldn't say.

fiplibs2• 17 years ago

Industrial farming is a product of economy. In our society oil is cheap and labor is expensive, and our farming techniques reflect that.

As far as alternatives go, an instructive example is post-USSR Cuba. Before 1991 they were a satellite-state which sold sugar at above market prices to the USSR and in exchange received oil and farm machinery. After the collapse they had to, essentially overnight, switch over to subsistence farming. They use low-input techniques by necessity due to the high price of fossil fuels.

In almost every Cuban town there is a microbiologist who will examine the soil from your plot and recommend biological or chemical amendments. Open spaces in Havana are populated with [collectively-run] urban gardens. They're the first country applying permaculture techniques on a large scale.

Permaculture can actually be more productive per acre than industrial agriculture, but it requires more (and more educated) labor to do so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

kingkongrevenge4• 17 years ago

They're also highly dependent on imports of US produced food, and so probably not a great example of something to emulate.

sireat• 17 years ago

I don't follow Cuba-US relations too much, thus my ignorance, but how are they importing US produced food? Through Canada or Mexico and gray market intermediaries?

I am not doubting they get some US food, just questioning how much.

The Man Who Defused the ‘Population Bomb’

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