The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/us/the-unrealized-horrors-of-population-explosion.html

by samclemens • 11 years ago

62 83 11 years ago

tokenadult• 11 years ago

As the article reports, the late agronomist Norman Borlaug helped fix the world food problem, and the late economist Julian Simon helped get the world thinking about how little of a problem population growth really is.

"One thing that happened on the road to doom was that the world figured out how to feed itself despite its rising numbers. No small measure of thanks belonged to Norman E. Borlaug, an American plant scientist whose breeding of high-yielding, disease-resistant crops led to the agricultural savior known as the Green Revolution. While shortages persisted in some regions, they were often more a function of government incompetence, corruption or civil strife than of an absolute lack of food.

"Some preternaturally optimistic analysts concluded that humans would always find their way out of tough spots. Among them was Julian L. Simon, an economist who established himself as the anti-Ehrlich, arguing that 'humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. [This has proven to be true all over the world.] In 1997, a year before he died, Mr. Simon told Wired magazine that 'whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.'"

I am old enough to remember when the ideas in the book The Population Bomb seemed like fresh, new ideas. Decades later, the world Ehrlich and I still live in seems more like a confirmation of criticisms of the book[1] than like a confirmation of the book. Since the book was first published, I have spent many years living in Taiwan, starkly poor when I was born and still poor when the book was published, and one of the more densely populated countries of the world during most of my lifetime, but today a prosperous, delightful place to live. The population of the United States has increased greatly in my lifetime, but the United States is still a great place to live too. Fears of great harm from a population explosion were just wrong, that's all. This article is part of a great article series published by the New York Times looking back on predictions from earlier eras and how they turned out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Criticisms

kiba• 11 years ago

It is very possible that we can destroy ourselves or be in dire strait because we grow too fast or our population is too big.

It's just not at this level or predicted trajectory.

schiffern6• 11 years ago

Anything other than techno-utopianism on HN? Cue the Norman Borlaug worship! Nevermind the fact that the "high-yielding, disease-resistant crops" only perform better when doused with biocides and chemicals (which leads to soil loss, contaminates aquifers and other waters, and ultimately leads to desertification).

We're only surviving today by stealing from our future. That's what "unsustainable" means. The problem is that the future catches up with you. The fact that industrial agriculture seems to work today obscures that fact.

bryanlarsen3• 11 years ago

Soil loss and desertification is generally caused by excessive tillage, not by chemical use. Chemical use in modern farming has drastically reduced tillage requirements.

ars7• 11 years ago

There's a TON of room for more farmland. You don't have to use some complicated chemical method.

For example make energy cheap enough, and we can desalinate enough water to re-green the Sahara desert.

That's not something we can do today, but the future is bright, and not limited.

yequalsx2• 11 years ago

It's a bit curious that the response to population concerns is that we can feed ourselves. There is much more to life than mere subsistence. The world can not all live like Americans. There aren't presently enough resources for this to happen. Maybe when we mine the moon and asteroids but not right now.

Great harm from the population explosion has been done. The environmental damage is enormous. Yes, we can still feed ourselves but this is not the only aspect of population growth fears.

ars7• 11 years ago

The world can not all live like Americans.

People say this all the time, but it's simply not true. There is no limit to our resources because they can be recycled endlessly. The atoms don't wear out.

The only input necessary is energy, and we are working hard to make that cheaper and cleaner.

vorg• 11 years ago

The world can not all live like Americans

If the recent trend of Chinese and Indians immigrating to the U.S. continues and the decline of birth rate for U.S. Caucasians continues, by 2050 the U.S. population may roughly reflect the world population by ethnicity, i.e. equal numbers of Caucasian, African, Hispanic, Indian, and East Asians. If there's a collapse around 2050 as predicted and the world population needs to suddenly reduce from 9 billion to 500 million, such an immigration-based country with control of the world's oceans and weapons would find it easy to convince its population that citizenship is the best determiner of who survives and who doesn't. There'd probably also be some religious overtones when the U.S. government sells the idea to its people.

ksenzee• 11 years ago

An excellent example of how not to react when your theory has been proven wrong:

"The end is still nigh, [Ehrlich] asserted, and he stood unflinchingly by his 1960s insistence that population control was required, preferably through voluntary methods. But if need be, he said, he would endorse 'various forms of coercion' like eliminating 'tax benefits for having additional children.' Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted, he said, is akin to letting everyone 'throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.'"

schiffern6• 11 years ago

But if need be, he said, he would endorse 'various forms of coercion' like eliminating 'tax benefits for having additional children.'

This is such a confusing quote that it's almost certainly taken out of context. Isn't eliminating a taxpayer-funded subsidy removing a form of coersion?

dmix• 11 years ago

Nice catch. The joys of political spin...

Watching the video on NYT, Ehrlich wanted to add taxes for people who have children which is more accurately coersion.

wahsd2• 11 years ago

Not the most eloquent way to sway people's opinions by equating their children to garbage; as much as he's not wrong.

The first and foremost "pollutant" source of environmental damage and degradation are humans. Simply speaking, the only way that humanity has any real chance at fighting global climate impacts is by limiting and reducing reproduction. But it's a really difficult topic to talk about, let alone even just bring up. It's the 1 million pound gorilla that cannot be seen for all the gorilla blocking the view.

crpatino• 11 years ago

Population growth is half of the problem. I do not deny anything you have said, however...

What do you make of the DINK couple that has foregone their reproductive rights for the sake of "environmental concerns" but still get themselves a couple of pets and treat them as upper-middleclass children. One would say, disabled children that are never going to become productive members of this society and most likely will be dead by age 16.

Maybe there would be enough room in this world for the people we already have - at least for long enough that the correction in overpopulation comes from the fertility rate rather than otherwise - if those of us at the top of the pecking order would not insist on wasting so much real wealth in our natural but unexamined impulses.

Spooky23• 11 years ago

It's difficult to talk about because it's not politically correct (or politically advantageous) to talk about the root cause issues. So you get bean-counters selling dystopian nightmares.

Generally speaking, high birth rates correlate with poverty. Improve standards of living, particularly for woman and disconnect access to medical & family planning resources from religion and birthrates decline. If you don't think that 50% of your kids will die before reaching adulthood, you don't have 12 children.

The 1 million pound gorilla is our collective failure to look past our tribal/national boundaries.

jessaustin2• 11 years ago

Disregard doomsday scenarios.

Symmetry• 11 years ago

Things have been going very well but I can't help but think we now have this huge selective pressure breeding for humans who will still have large families in the new environment. This isn't a problem that we'll have to deal with in our or our grandchildren's lifetimes but barring regulation or eugenics it seems inevitable.

shit_parade22• 11 years ago

Geological records show one fossiled truth, populations rise then fall.

Are we immune? Maybe, but looking at the pass 100 years and concluding we are is simply self deception.

wahsd2• 11 years ago

I don't think geological records are all that helpful in this case. There has never been a life-form that pushes the pendulum the way humans have. We have done so many things to limit and prevent the natural cycles that would have by now surely led to a significant limitation of the human population.

War, famine, disease, disaster, etc. they have all or are all being limited if not practically being eradicated. The danger is that if you keep pushing and pushing the pendulum the marginal effort needed to push it not only becomes ever greater and the duration which is can be held decreases, but the risk of something causing the pendulum to slip and swing freely exponentially increases. We are approaching several means in which the biosphere that is earth may collapse. We don't even really understand all the finer intricacies of our world, there is absolutely no chance we could even identify some sort of black swan even that we sure as hell won't be able to prevent, let alone reverse.

It all seems to grotesquely stupid how ignorantly we are treating our only habitat. The very single place that we can exist at the moment and we are risking it all on a stupid bet.

shit_parade22• 11 years ago

Populations expand until they collapse their food supply. Equilibriums are reached eventually but they are never very stable, at least from a geological time frame.

Humans have overcome a number of hurdles, but to say we are immune to the same pressures is just hubris.

Already populations are declining in wealthy countries, what will happen in JApan in 50 years? No one knows because it's never happened to such a wealthy technologically advanced country.

Food cost spiked several times in the 2000s leading to food riots and was a likely catalyst of the Arab Spring.

World fishing stock is over exploited and total world wild catch has flat lined the last 5 years, aquaculture has made up the difference but that is an entirely new area and the environmental effects are uncertain.

Technology may save us, but blind optimism is no different than baseless pessimism.

Global climate change is happening, no one knows how fast or have massive those changes will be, we just know it's happening. From a geological perspective we are already living through a mass extinction event, our influence has been profound and will be seen for millions of years in the fossil record.

eli_gottlieb2• 11 years ago

Basically, it turns out that your population explodes when you're very poor, but then stabilizes and even shrinks as your society gets richer and richer. We have a population paradox: the highest-impact lifestyles are lived in countries with falling populations, while the major population growth takes place where the resources don't exist to disincentivize it.

dragonwriter4• 11 years ago

Basically, it turns out that your population explodes when you're very poor, but then stabilizes and even shrinks as your society gets richer and richer.

IIRC, "strong social support network" is more accurate than "richer" as to the factor that reduces natural growth rate.

ams61102• 11 years ago

A strong social support network is impossible without a rich society.

panglott2• 11 years ago

I think "very poor" is a little inaccurate. Hunter-gatherers are "very poor", but don't have a population explosion problem. The societies that have population explosion are traditionally agricultural economies with restrictive gender norms that have not fully industrialized.

Basically, it's all about the returns to education. When women have reproductive choice, and when the returns to higher levels of education increase, then parents have fewer children but invest more resources into raising them.

eli_gottlieb2• 11 years ago

You're right, actually: women's education is a more proven intervention for reducing population growth than the increase of per-capita wealth.

danbruc2• 11 years ago

In 1972 the »Club of Rome« published »The Limits to Growth« [1] where they used a computer model to model possible scenarios for the longterm development of human society. More than forty years later the actual development is pretty close to a scenario predicting a collapse mid century. This chart [2] based on a study from 2008 [3] compares the prediction of the »standard run« scenario with thirty years of actual data.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

[2] https://pbmo.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/world3.jpg

[3] http://ecohist.history.ox.ac.uk/readings/Technological_limit...

slapshot• 11 years ago

Well hang on a second. You show a graph and claim that "the actual development is pretty close to a scenario predicting a collapse mid century". But the model to date (1900-2000) shows steadily increasing population, food production, pollution, etc. Unsurprisingly, the 25 years of reality on the graph (1975-2000) following the date of the model shows steadily increasing population, food production, etc.

The model then predicts a sudden shift in 2025 without any inherent explanation. There's a vaguely-defined downward-sloping "resources" line on the graph that seems to drive the sudden shift, but there's no actual data given for the 1975-2000 period to know if actual "resources" are tracking the model. I'd guess not --- as much as the Bakken shale oil formation may have some serious environmental impacts, it (and many other discoveries) have dramatically increased energy resources. Food production doesn't show any signs of immediate collapse. Renewable energy is still expensive, but it's getting better faster than many expected. Etc.

So, 25 years of steadily increasing population does not validate this model in any meaningful way. The model depends on a sudden shift in ~2025 that no empirical evidence supports. It might still happen -- I can't rule it out -- but the data given hardly confirms this model.

gamerdonkey• 11 years ago

Not to say that this is concrete evidence or to lend any credence to The Limits of Growth predictions, but there are at least some concerns about overfishing the oceans and a possible collapse there.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/29/j...

nostromo• 11 years ago

There's no denying that civilization today is unsustainable.

I doubt any of these models will be accurate. But do they need to be? Either our technology will make our current lifestyles sustainable, or reality will catch up with us and cause much distress.

api2• 11 years ago

"without any inherent explanation."

This is what complex systems do. Simple linear causal reasoning just breaks down... there are too many feedback loops, chaotic functions, etc. Things will look completely normal and then wham, the system will suddenly and without apparent warning undergo a radical shift.

Look at how economic bubbles pop. You'll have a roaring, humming economy collapse within hours or days and nobody knows why. The postmortem generally takes years. Sometimes the reasons seem 'obvious' but that is only in hindsight. Nobody ever succeeds in calling the top of a bubble -- despite the huge financial reward of doing so -- except by sheer luck.

LTG was an attempt to apply complex systems modeling at the global scale to answer questions about the long term viability of our current civilization. So far it seems to be tracking reality in some ways, but as you correctly state we do not know whether this is spurious correlation or actual evidence for the validity of the model. We also know -- see the work of folks like Ilya Prigogine -- that it is actually impossible to predict the future of systems like this with certainty. There are strict limits on prediction in complex systems.

So we don't know. LTG is scary, but for all we know it won't come to pass.

But we'll know soon. We get to find out in the next 25 years if all the work we've done to build a better future over the past 500 years is a total mirage and all our children are all doomed to starvation, warfare, and misery. Fun times.

schiffern6• 11 years ago

The model then predicts a sudden shift in 2025 without any inherent explanation. There's a vaguely-defined downward-sloping "resources" line on the graph that seems to drive the sudden shift

What a fantastic question! You're thinking in the right direction.

The explanation involves systems theory, so I'll let an expert explain. https://youtu.be/HMmChiLZZHg?t=420 1h30m, but it's the best explanation of Limits to Growth out there.

heydenberk• 11 years ago

Food is above trend; deaths, births, greenhouse gasses are well below. I'd say this reads as relatively good news so far.

danbruc2• 11 years ago

The model is a qualitative one and one should not take the output as quantitative predictions. The bad thing is that there are essentially no scenarios without collapse. I think until around the turn of the millennium there were still reasonable scenarios that could have avoided the collapse but after that even scenarios with unrealistic policy changes and technological advances tend not to avoid a collapse.

I of course hope that the predictions will turn out to be wrong or at least to pessimistic but we surly know that complex systems can unexpectedly change their behavior at the flap of a butterfly.

wozniacki• 11 years ago

To me, whats always stark and telling about the nature of opinions on such issues as population explosion is that they are always so entrenched, fully-formed and hardened as if each side had already made up their opinions sans any late emerging data.

Setting that aside for a moment, I always listen intently when non-political actors and philanthropists like Bill Gates have things to say about where we are headed as a human collective. Without exception, I'm almost always disappointed with how little in the way of criticism he levels in the area of unchecked population growth.

That could be partly due to the fact that anything he or anyone with his stature says, is endlessly twisted out of shape by demagogues to suit their personal agendas and motives, often with negative outcomes. For more see the Pakistani resistance to common vaccinations. [1][2]

Why is there such fanatical levels of orthodoxy even in issues that could benefit from our prudence and forethought?

Why are there parties on either side of this issue with their heels dug in, defending their viewpoint with tone-deaf arrogance?

Why are even such secular issues colored with such partisanship?

[1] Bill Gates: Violence in Pakistan and Nigeria threatens plan to eradicate polio by 2018

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bill-gates-viol...

[2] Four health workers slain in attack on Pakistan vaccination team

http://www.latimes.com/world/afghanistan-pakistan/la-fg-paki...

edit:typos

mcmSEA• 11 years ago

For the rest of the natural world, human population is an absolute disaster. The Anthropocene is a direct result of the pressure human population places on all other species on this planet.

ams61102• 11 years ago

99% of all the species that ever existed on earth are now extinct. The vast majority of these extinctions occurred before humans were a significant presence in the ecosystem. Maybe the more accurate statement is that the natural world is an absolute disaster for all living populations.

zanny2• 11 years ago

That isn't particularly fair though, since most biologists would have roared from the rooftops top stop other extinction events if they could avoid them.

And we are the cause of the current mass extinction. Through the innovation of society we have conquered the planet in a way few other multicellular organisms have managed to in the past, where they gain some evolutionary advantage that enables them to in short order effectively conquer all of their habitable zone.

It isn't unique though, the only difference is we can look at it happening and have this spark of wit in the back of our heads that tells us while we individually contribute little to the event we collectively are destroying biodiversity.

That isn't to say biodiversity is particularly saintly. Its gone away before, will go away again, and all we are really doing is eliminating anything that is not beneficial to us and that cannot coexist with us, not even through attack, but just by claiming our habitat as our own. Yes, our ignorance in how we allow it to happen might be our downfall if we kill off essential species in food chains that cripple ourselves as a result, but thats the risk you take dominating an environment the way we consistently do.

Its the same way any evolving mammal 60 million years ago would have been stomped out by dinosaurs that dominated their habitat, preventing the evolution of most mammalian life we know today back then.

bryanlarsen3• 11 years ago

That's not completely true. There are some species that have adapted well to human domination. To give a trivial example: there are bacteria that only live in human bodies. They wouldn't do well if there weren't so many humans. :)

Pet species like dogs and cats are other trivial examples.

But there are larger non-pet species that have adapted to live in an environment dominated by humans. Rats are one such example.

Yes: I'm being pedantic. Your point still stands.

laichzeit03• 11 years ago

I've always maintained that breeding needs to be licensed. You need a license to drive, own a firearm, hell in some countries you need a license to own a goddamned TV. A breeding license with forced sterilization and tax penalties for non-compliance would eliminate this problem in a complete fair and equitable way.

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

It's not often you can put "forced sterilization" and "completely fair" in the same sentence and be correct. In my opinion, you didn't pull it off here.

guard-of-terra4• 11 years ago

There's a huge hole in your logic: countries where law is upheld already have reproduction rate lower than needed to stabilize.

And most of overpopulation is in countries where law is... episodic.

Imagine "tax penalties" in Kongo or Nigeria where people live off ground on less than 2$/day. Funny.

laichzeit03• 11 years ago

That's why I inserted the clause "forced sterilization". How do you stop someone from having a family of 5-7 children who's dirt poor, uneducated and believes it's part of their culture to be "prosperous" through progeny?

Bostonian2• 11 years ago

When someone from the government comes to your home to have you sterilized against your will, you have the right to resist by any means necessary.

Fiahil• 11 years ago

My thoughts when confronted with "we have a finite planet with finite resources" is more "why don't we expand beyond the earth?" rather than "We have to limit the number of children people can have". So, why don't we?

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Regardless of where people venture out in the solar system, the folks back on Earth will have to operate within their resources, right?

jessaustin2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I doubt someone with a sustainable habitat on Mars, and enough resources to send some back to Earth, is going to just send them without getting paid more than it would take to claw them out of the ground on Earth in the first place. It would make more sense to just keep the resources on Mars where one can use them, rather than wasting 95% of them transporting 4% to Earth.

panglott2• 11 years ago

I remember some discussion of this in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars", IIRC: he points out that it's simply too energy-inefficient to ship a few billion human beings out of Earth's gravity well, and no extraterrestrial habitat will have an ecosphere anything the size of Earth's.

Earth is simply the best place to support humans in the galaxy, and it needs to be sustainable in its own terms. We can and should live elsewhere, but that doesn't mean Earth will be any less important to us.

guard-of-terra4• 11 years ago

Who gets the mandatory ticket out? Who gets to stay and enjoy Earth?

Granted, I don't even want live anywhere on Earth. I would like a temperate place with good food, culture, infrastructure, sea is a plus.

The 60's idea was "we can make other planets exactly like Alabama", but guess what, not many people want to move to new Alabama.

_kst_• 11 years ago

Establishing sustainable colonies off Earth would put some of our metaphorical eggs in another basket, and make it more likely that our species could survive a major catastrophe. It's something we should be able to do in the next few decades or centuries, and I'm all for it.

But given current or reasonably foreseeable technology, we're just not going to be able to ship off enough people to relieve population pressures on Earth.

(Question: Has emigration to North America ever made a significant dent in population pressures in Europe, Asia, or Africa?)

NeutronBoy• 11 years ago

You saw the movie Elysium right?

guard-of-terra4• 11 years ago

Population alarmism in developed countries was funny: id did not peter out until deep into birthrate decline.

I remember one book of many: Hugely overpopulated world, old people killed to make room, not one child in sight during the whole action. As if people grew on walls like mold!

However, overpopulation already ruins undeveloped countries. Overpopulation lead to poverty and poverty to overpopulation. I can't imagine how this is going to resolve.

zanny2• 11 years ago

I can't imagine how this is going to resolve.

In the near term global warming is going to destroy a lot of arable land in third world countries and severely restrict water availability. How we respond we'll have to see, but we are not stopping the runaway greenhouse effect at this point that will make a lot of the equatorial belt uninhabitable.

guard-of-terra4• 11 years ago

Where will all the people go?

jakeogh• 11 years ago

The folks @ http://overpopulationisamyth.com work on addressing the points often used to support the Malthusian catastrophe.

klenwell• 11 years ago

I recently started reading Philip E. Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment[0] and Ehrlich gets namechecked pretty early in it. For me, this article proved timely.

Ehrlich gets credit in my book for making concrete falsifiable predictions and acknowledging some are wrong. He follows a classic pattern identified by Tetlock in claiming his major error was a matter of timing.

My questions:

1. To what extent did his efforts help forestall the catastrophe he predicted? Any at all? In the article, his efforts are cited as having a significant impact on Indian family planning policies. Any way to measure the impact on the population numbers?

2. Was anybody citing Borlaug and the Green Revolution at the time he made his prediction? Was the Green Revolution complete at that time or its impacts a foregone conclusion? If not, how much more probable might his predictions have been absent this revolution? (I guess question hints at another excuse-making Tetlock pattern: the historical counter-factual or "I just got unlucky!")

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp...

Bostonian2• 11 years ago

If world population tops out at about 10 billion, following the UN "medium" projection, that could be manageable, but the population of Africa, the poorest continent, is projected to double from 2010 to 2050. I wonder how that will work. I am looking at the "Projections of population growth" Wikipedia page.

The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion

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