How prolific are we? If you buy the Biblical account, we have gone from 2 to 6.2 billion, and we have done it in 6000 years. Now, unless we literally hump like bunnies – and I mean make babies nonstop during our adult lives – we must reject Anglican Archbishop James Ussher’s 1654 computation that the earth was created in 4004 B.C., basing his calculations on all the “begats” in Genesis and working the timeline backwards. When we started is less important than where we are now and where we are heading. And we are heading toward some (pardon) pretty inconceivable numbers. Numbers like 10 billion in the year 2035. Numbers that not even McDonald’s can feed. (Have some fun and play with David Levine’s Global Population Clock. You can set it to any date between 1970 and 2037 and get the earth’s population for that time, or you can just sit and watch the population grow.) The rate of population growth globally has indeed slowed, from 2.2% in 1970 to 1.6% today (2002). But it is still growing.
Humans and the Natural WorldTime was when we could rely on natural forces to keep the human population in check: good old wars, diseases, a life of harsh toil killing us in our 30s, incredibly high infant mortality rates, and just plain getting eaten by Lions and Tigers and Bears. But we’ve tamed and penned most of the animals (when was the last time you kept a sharp eye out for a puma while walking to the 7-11?), vastly improved infant mortality rates, passed labor laws and created Jimmy Hoffa, cured lots of diseases, and cut way back on our wars. We have defeated nature’s checks and balances. Face it; we are breeders. And we are breeding ourselves into crisis.
The Real Size of Your Living RoomAre we really so crowded? Take all 6+ billion people and put them next to each other (let’s say everyone gets to stand in a spot measuring two feet by two feet [math wizards will recognize this as 4 square feet]), enough so everyone can stand shoulder to shoulder. You could fit almost 7 million people in a square mile, and the population of the entire world would fit in about 893 square miles – less than half the size of Miami’s Dade County (which has a population density of 2000 people per square mile, except during tourist season, when its density approaches the global population example I just constructed above). So the problem is not space, per se, but resources. You know you could put that puma into one of those spiffy pet carryalls. Okay, so you’d need a pretty large carryall. But we need to look at the resources it would take to support that puma. An adult puma requires the resources of anywhere from 5-10 square miles of land to thrive, eating mostly ungulates (like deer, sheep, and the ever-popular capybara). Obviously it doesn’t need all the resources in that area, but you get my point – we can each live on a small plot of land, but we each need the resources of large plots of land to survive.
Resources: The OceansI’ve heard that the problem is not a food shortage but that we simply don’t distribute the food well. Sure. And there’s enough money for everyone if we apply the same principle. The only difference is that when the dollars or rupees or drachmas fall short, we can make more. We cannot, however, make more fish if we run out. (We may be getting close to running out. While a bit overzealous at times, Greenpeace nonetheless provides a vastly informative site on overfishing, or just type Overfishing the Oceans into your browser and see how many hits you get. The U.N. also has an annual Food Conference, though at a recent one they served a huge feast to attendees. Ironic, huh?)
Resources: The LandTake a drive. You can still go to many parts of the country and see endless vistas of corn and wheat and soy rolling and rolling toward a limitless horizon. But you can also see the constant flurry of development on the peripheries of most cities, where pastures of yore now offer affordable multi-family housing and a swimming pool. Just give it another generation or two at our current pace. (Scroll down a bit on the National Council for Science and the Environment’s Conserving Land page.)
Resources: Fresh WaterSwimming pool. Boy, don’t get me started on water use. Okay, too late – I’ve started. You’d think water wouldn’t be a problem. After all, the earth is a closed system, right? The water can’t escape, so it has to be here somewhere. True. And it’s all around us, in lakes, rivers, rain, aquifers, and polar ice caps. Mostly we get it from aquifers: large, underground reservoirs. And they replenish naturally. The water soaks into the surface of the earth and works its way down through dirt and rocks and stuff and eventually drips back into the aquifer, cleansed by the filtration process it just went through. But it takes a long time for water to make that journey, meaning we need to learn how fast each aquifer replenishes and then make sure we do not pump the water out any faster than it is being replaced. But (you guessed it) we don’t do that. And now the news is being peppered with stories of entire towns running out of water. Even in the water-rich state of Wisconsin more and more frequently wells are drying up, sewers are being extended to increasingly remote areas, and towns are looking ever wider for alternate water sources. Years ago friends of mine did some missionary work in India. They told me that they started each day with a trip to the river where they filled their bucket and carried it back to the village. That was their water for the day.
Resources: The Other StuffAll of this above and we haven’t even touched on pollution yet – industrial toxins filtering into our environment left and right, landfill issues, water purity, new little critters popping up and threatening devastation (think HIV, Mad Cow and Chronic Wasting Diseases, E. coli, stuff like that), the Brown Cloud hovering over most of Asia (bet you haven’t even heard of that one yet), stormwater runoff, topsoil erosion, human and livestock excrement treatment, and where-the-heck-should-we-put-all-this-radioactive-material-for-the-next-500,000-years questions. Deforestation, anyone?
CrossroadsShould we adopt the “Replace Yourselves And Stop” approach, guaranteeing a stable population? Not a bad start, but do the math. We produce a new generation every 25 years or so, but we live to the age of 75 – and that upper end keeps getting longer because of all these bloody gerontology scientists and people who lead healthy lives. So even if this very day everyone in the world agreed to make no more than 2 babies per couple, the world’s population would still continue to grow for another 50 years. And that estimate is predicated on the belief that everyone obeys the policy. But how many people would truly heed such a request? Think about all the forces that run contrary to limiting procreation: natural human proclivities, religious mandates, cultures that measure wo/manhood by number (and gender) of offspring, frat parties, parents wishing to be grandparents, welfare systems that reward multiple children, remarriages, and on and on. Can you realistically tell someone, “You may only have one baby to replace yourself,” and then expect that person to live the rest of his or her reproductive life without a single mishap? How about something like China’s ONE CHILD policy? Not bad, except who gets punished for violations? The women – legally, culturally, and physically (criminal prosecution, cultural ostracization, forced abortions). Sterilization? India, the second nation to top the billion-people mark (and this in a country 1/3 the size of the U.S.), tried it in the mid-‘70s. Who got sterilized? Why, members of the largest and most powerless group – the poor. And, since 1960, India’s population has increased by 250% anyway. Sheesh.
DirectionsI’ve heard the doomsayers predict that we are ruining the planet and slowly choking ourselves off in our own superabundance of population and resulting excretia. Such claims are a little flamboyant and more than a little alarmist. Ruining is a subjective term. Certainly we are changing the planet and making it more challenging for the individual to survive, but the human species has, if anything, proven itself quite resilient. I believe we will survive. I just don’t know how pleasant that survival will be. That’s where you come in, the individual in Global Population and Individual Responsibility. You have some choices to make. You can sit back and say, “It’s not fair; I didn’t make this mess.” You can choose to influence or contribute to any or all of these areas in a positive, constructive fashion. You can cower in the corner. You can choose to do nothing. But, having read this, you can never again say, “I didn’t know.” And that’s the Responsibility part. |
hen God told Adam and Eve to “go forth and multiply,” they were arguably the only folk on the planet. And just like Martha Stewart and her Imclone stock, God forgot to place a stop order along with His command, perhaps not imagining just how prolific we humans can be at procreating.
