Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumOverpopulation – The Root Cause of Our Problems – Why Is It a Taboo Topic?
Why is overpopulation taboo? It is incredibly frustrating to see so many people and organizations thrashing around over climate change and related issues when none of those problems would exist if we weren’t overpopulating the planet. The problems of epidemic and famine that will emerge over the next two or three decades will compound our relatively new problems with weather and increasing sea levels, and it is likely that at least a few billion people will die untimely deaths before the end of this century, all attributable to the human population explosion. Isn’t a focus on reducing birthrates worldwide what we really need? Are we putting ourselves at risk by addressing the more superficial issues and ignoring the root cause?
The population explosion is here now, and it is causing problems. In fact, we are experiencing many population-driven problems now. Immigration problems are stimulated by many things, but primary among them are the crime that crops up in increasingly crowded areas, scarcity exacerbated by decreasing ratios of resources to consumers (demand beginning to exceed supply), and the increasing difficulty of managing huge, fast growing and fast changing national economies effectively. Capitalist countries have the added problem of maverick corporate entities with huge financial power influencing politics and the laws, stripping the country of its natural resources, and manipulating and bribing officials, unconcerned that their actions and policies create poverty and economic imbalance.
When conditions deteriorate in small countries as corporate domination, government corruption, and cartel/gang activity (enabled by misguided American drug laws) increase crime and poverty, people become increasingly desperate to leave. Initially they leave to look for better opportunities and life styles, but as conditions worsen they leave in an attempt to not be killed or injured by criminals and to escape poverty. (Most people like to eat!) When conditions are bad it may not be possible to move a whole family as one, so one or both heads of the household often go abroad to try to make enough money to initially help those back home and eventually bring the family to a better place. The United States is currently experiencing a situation in which young children are risking death and hardship in the most extreme circumstances to join their previously-emigrated parents. Overpopulation makes poverty worse and increases the drive to emigrate.
Root cause analysis is not rocket science. Anyone can analyze causality by simply looking at something and asking why it is the way it is. Then, when some answer has been found, that answer must be questioned as to why each of its parts is the way it is. This process is sometimes called “the 5 whys” because if you keep asking why until you have gone through about five levels of causality you usually understand what is going on and why things are the way they are pretty well. If you use this technique to analyze human problems – plenty can be found on the front page of any news site – you will find that a majority of them, possibly a vast majority, lead back to overpopulation.
The above article is good as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that's not really all that far, since it was written to be published by a mainstream humanistic outlet. Here's a slightly deeper dive into the nature of the problem of human sustainability as I see it.
Most people don't unpack the impact produced by population and activity levels (I=PAT), relative to the amount of human impact the Earth systems can sustain over the long haul.
For example, I think the absolute maximum sustainable human impact is equivalent to 50 million hunter-foragers, with each of them using about 125 watts of non-food energy. (The derivation of that number is in my essay on sustainability.) If we use our energy consumption as the proxy for our activity levels (since all activity requires energy) this gives us a maximum sustainable human power consumption of about 6 Gigawatts.
Current human power consumption is about 18 Terawatts, or 3000 times greater than that putative sustainable level.
We have a variety of options in order to meet my proposed 6 GW global sustainability limit:
1. We might reduce our numbers while leaving average per-capita energy consumption the same as it is today (the iso-energetic option);
2. We might reduce our overall energy consumption while leaving population levels the same (the iso-numeric option); or
3. We might arrive at some combination of population level and per-capita energy consumption that multiplies out to the required 6 GW.
Here are the endpoints of the sustainability equation under these assumptions:
1. The iso-energetic limit requires a global population of ~2.5 million people using the same average 2.4 kilowatts of primary energy that we do today.
2. The iso-numeric limit requires a global population of ~7 billion people using an average of less than one watt of power each.
Of course neither of these options is achievable.
A more probable outcome is that our population and energy use might both fall over time until they stabilize at some mid-point that can be supported by the remaining biosphere. An example might be a global population of 50 million or less, living at the average hunter-forager level of energy consumption of 125 watts per capita.
Much of the outcome depends on just how much we have already damaged and destabilized the biosphere by our predation and pollution, and how much more damage we will inflict before the situation stabilizes. Given the effects we are already seeing and the inordinate resistance to the concept of de-growth among all societies, I do not expect we can avoid outright extinction sometime over the next couple of hundred years.
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bkkyosemite
(5,792 posts)Africans have been starving as long as I can remember not even able to have clean water. That is the elite over the rest, just as here but we suffer less than those there. Greed and power is the reason for the season of damage to the Earth. There is no organized effort to make sure we use the earth in a fugal and careful manner because the elite and powerful could care less about the earth. They will do anything they can to reap the wealth from this planet without regard for it's care. They care only about themselves and the enslaving of the rest to make them feel powerful. They have even talked about getting rid of the rest of us. It's not the societies, it's the greedy ptb that are causing earth to be damaged. The societies care about the Earth but are so deeply involved in the ability to survive they do not have the time, the resources or the education to save this Earth because of the interference and control of the greed takers.
In other words there is far more to over population then just have too many babies.
ConservativeDemocrat
(2,720 posts)And your hatred and delusions mean NOTHING to mother nature.
Here's the way it really works for every species: control your numbers or nature will control them for you. And the latter is a lot less pleasant than the former.
- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community
/ Overpopulation is largely driven by oppression of women, which the billionaires you hate are trying to end. But I sense you're none to rational, and so won't waste further words on you.
Baobab
(4,667 posts)Then we have situations like the one in many developed countries where population is actually falling.
Nt.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)If consumption, especially energy consumption, rises as a result then most of the the long-term ecological benefits of lower birth rates may be lost - even though there will be undeniable short-term human benefits.
there is no such thing as a free lunch.
bloom
(11,635 posts)Gates does seem to be using money help people in Africa.
But I expect that the wealthy do figure that they have the power to ride out any changes to climate, etc. And I expect that they are right - for the most part - at least until they succumb to cancer, etc.
At any rate - I've figured that the elite have the most to give up. I think rationing of fossil fuels is past due.
bkkyosemite
(5,792 posts)
mopinko
(70,113 posts)maybe it is taboo because that is the solution.
MisterFred
(525 posts)
LWolf
(46,179 posts)1. Childbirth is one way that the patriarchy controls women and retains dominance.
2. In the fight against that dominance, reproductive choice is key, and that choice would be compromised if we limited births. Very few people will demand the right to choose to end pregnancy without the right to choose to conceive and have children.
3. Organized religion's quest for power insists on growing the population of future sheep while keeping women subjugated. It's embedded in culture that people are less than whole without having children.
4. Capitalism and empire require large pools of cheap labor and cannon fodder.
Basic LA
(2,047 posts)Having no more than 2 kids per couple was a big movement of its time, comparable to the push for renewable energy today.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)The latter has assumed paramount importance ever since the environmental movement was corporatised in the '80s and '90s.
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,002 posts)Earth's population (a bit over 7 billion now) will peak at about 10 billion.
The solution to the population problem is sustainable development, rather than the other way around. When children begin to live long enough to care for elders in old age, there is no longer an incentive to raise ten children hoping one or two survive to care for the parent in old age. This extension of life is already occurring but there is societal lag in recognizing it at the family level.
A stable population will make sustainability easier than a growing population of course. But development will come before population stabilizes and it will stabilize population.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)We have a "shitting in our own nest" problem, of which population is one factor. The other factor being the amount each of us shits into the biosphere, both metaphorically and literally.
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,002 posts)GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Which meant that anyone who raised the issue was seen as talking about limiting the opportunities of the developing world - in other words it became tinged with the accusation of racism.
According to the World Bank data, by 1975 the TFR in high income nations had dropped below 2.1 children per woman (replacement), while the low income nations still averaged out at 6.4. Since most of the discussion about the problem was happening in high-income nations, it became easy for critics to re-frame it as a racist, classist discussion.
MisterFred
(525 posts)Excepting immigration.
haikugal
(6,476 posts)Control their reproduction leaving the rest to out breed them. That's what I've been told.
It's a bit like the global warming argument actually...
zalinda
(5,621 posts)The simple truth is that when we were hunter gatherers, we were programmed to produce more offspring so that they could help find food. It has been this way for a long time. When you look at farmers, they had more children, to help on the farm. The poor in urban environments would have more children so they could go out and work to bring more money into the household. If you take a look all through history, the more affluent the people, the less children that they produced. It works that way today, too. You see the poor having more children, because they can't afford birth control. You find that people who have more money will have less children. Is it that if we don't have enough food, we have more sex? Or do our bodies produce more eggs and/or sperm when we are hungry?
It has been proven that when contraception is provided, that income goes up. People will tend to get out of poverty. If a stable income was provided and a stable supply of birth control was provided, would the population be reduced?
It's something to think about. I did my part, I only had one child.
Z
MisterP
(23,730 posts)didn't really have that many more kids until industrialism, urbanization, and colonialism--capitalism's deskilling, above all: it wasn't catastrophic checks on the 8-10 kids peasants have since the late Victorian but deferred marriage; it was that premodern birthrates were LOWER than the 20th c., as well as the death rate being high; higher premodern rates are encouraged by marginality more than prosperity
Central American historians have even complicated the whole "it's not many dispossessed dirt farmers, it's a few big plantations," since the labor for sweeping the whole land clear is 1. given many hands by population growth and 2. an extension of slash-and-burn, now remade into being permanent
post-1950 population growth in fact was a deliberate policy, withholding contraception and education in order to provide more laborers and soldiers--and it was the left that was more natalist and anti-choice, since the Pill was just a Rockefeller plot: that's why El Salvador's brutal miscarriage law is so slow to be overturned
it's like a dam that chokes off fertility downstream, a nationalization or privatization handed over to cronies, a plantation that levels a rainforest, a stadium with more seats than there are people in the village, a plush mall surrounded by beggars, a Gbadolite Airport for the Concorde--a mimesis of Europe by the new postcolonial elites
Fast Walker 52
(7,723 posts)also, the bigger issue is income inequality, since poor people tend to have way more children than are sustainable.
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)Among the many flaws is that the urge to reproduce (or more correctly, the urge to seek orgasms) is one of the strongest urges and ultimately overrides good judgement. Speaking for my gender, as a male human, there is not one man alive that has never made a fool of himself over "love/sex". Mother nature has had millions of years to fine tune the mechanisms by which animals are pushed into reproducing. We are simply not evolved enough to overcome that basic programming. And we probably never will be.
The answer to Fermi's paradox is simply that the coefficient L in Drake's equation may well be exactly equal to zero. The same biological forces that drive us to create civilization also drive us to destroy it.
MisterFred
(525 posts)You have to explain away Japan and other negative population growth countries before deciding a solution is impossible.
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)and the refusal to admit to an unpleasant reality.
Between 2014 and 2015 Japan's population fell by 947,000.
China's population growth was 6,274,389.
India's population growth was 15,751,049.
So China and India contributed 22,025,438 souls in 2015, while Japan deducts 947,00 from that total leaving a net growth of 12,078,438 for that region alone. And that doesn't even take into account Southeast Asia which, while smaller than China and India, is growing faster than both of them on a percentage basis.
So, yes, cherry picking one exception to the rule can cast doubt on the rule, but if you lump together the whole human race, the rule remains valid, and a different, more realistic, and far gloomier picture emerges.
MisterFred
(525 posts)And you are assuming that societies remain static and don't change.
Don't get me wrong, just because there is a solution doesn't mean that it's likely to be implemented. But I'm not so foolish as to be certain it will not be.
MisterFred
(525 posts)Social Security systems: if there are less young people relative to the elderly, the elderly have to work to a later age. In the U.S. we solve this problem partially through immigration. But for the world, see: Japan.
How do we address the problem: For most people once you suggest overpopulation is a problem, they immediately think of China's One Child policy or forced sterilization. Wrongly. We should instead be looking to Western Europe, Chile, the United States, Russia (on the female side only), some of the countries in south Africa, etc., to figure out how to build societies that are growth-neutral or have negative population growth.
In a lot of cases, I want to emphasize very strongly, it's feminism that allows for low population growth and a better future.
P.S. Of course there are other issues, like religion. But some countries, the U.S. and Chile, for example, have over come those.
ErikJ
(6,335 posts)to fund family planning globally. Obama reversed that soon after elected. RW Christians want the Rapture so maybe thats why.
cprise
(8,445 posts)education and automation, and keeping the work week well under 40 hours.
Those measures are very achievable (in fact, we're well past the mark on productivity). If they don't work then something else is eating up the gains -- i.e. an over sized Finance sector.
ErikJ
(6,335 posts)If we reach the tipping point where the vast frozen methane deposits start thawing life on the planet may be so difficult that 90% of life goes extinct like in the Permian event 250 million yrs ago.
They say the best way to solve it is to educate WOMEN better so they become more than patriarchal baby making units. Or the internet and AI robots could solve it too. They will decide that most humans have to go to save the biosphere. Or maybe most people will decide they like mating with beautiful sex robots instead of humans.
EUrope and Japan are already on decreasing population trends. In Japan they dont marry until their mid-30's now. Could it be from internet porn?
Population spikes of any organism usually ends in catastrophic depopulation. Climate change might be what does it. Sex robots or more likely, a killer epidemic that cant be cured.
StarzGuy
(254 posts)I agree with the thesis of this article. I've come to the conclusion that unless humans take the necessary actions to reduce our populations we will become extinct. So, you can forget about trips to Mars and beyond. There isn't going to be the necessary capital now or in the future to support such adventures.
It is now becoming clear that time has run out. Now we must take drastic actions to curb populations, but that isn't going to happen because the powers to be, namely the 1%, religion and others in power will never agree to such measures despite knowledge of the necessity to do so.
So, where does this leave the human race? Well, if you think things a bad now, just wait, it's about to get a lot worse. My interpretation of these facts lead only to one conclusion...that being the demise of the human race. Just as a reminder, extinction is the rule, not the exception. 99.999% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.
Have a nice day...
uhnope
(6,419 posts)2naSalit
(86,643 posts)but they are also partly responsible for this overpopulation... you know, the "go forth and multiply in mass quantities" thing to rule the earth" like the bible is interpreted to say. And then there's that part about how humans are to be seen as more precious than all other life forms...
I also think that with that type of encouragement we have gone far beyond anything that could have been intended when that crap was introduced.
Since we refuse to control ourselves - recall that many tout the idea that because we are able to perceive time and decide how to act that we are somehow superior as a species - nature will have to do that for us too.
I think there are probably 4 billion too many humans as it is, I chose not to reproduce and when it's my day to depart I will do so gladly... I am having a hard enough time watching everything I love be destroyed by humans so the sooner I get my gate ticket, the better.
BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)It's a subject I've been concerned about forever. Even since I was a kid myself. It's always been crystal clear to me that too many people ends up in social and environmental crisis. I think I got the point when I was a kid reading about overpopulation experiments with rats.
That realization was partly why I never had kids.
Saving to read...the statistics you include are making it slow going for me. Lol!
glowing
(12,233 posts)means empowering women with education and medical access. It also means the end to patriarchy as a rule within society and religions. They'd rather control us.
2naSalit
(86,643 posts)Thread winner!
glowing
(12,233 posts)Population... Controlling it by govt means or what not... But at the end of the day, it really does boil down to those two items.
Also, when the right types of women can succeed into govt roles (and I say this because we have Palins and Margret Thatchers in this world among the female gender that do all of us a disservice), the types of legislation and budgets are more likely to focus on the needs of family, community, education, and working together in a fair manner, rather than engaging in wars and placing more restrictions on women and the "others" in society.
It really is time for sane, logical women to start running the world for a bit of time. Women who don't feel "being tough" means engaging in the same ole same ole rhetoric that men set the tone. It means building coalitions, building momentum, and building up people to be the best potential that we were born to be. We need leaders with compassion and the sense to protect the innocent, encourage growth, create a new idea of what "wealth" looks and feels like. I think most women would say a happy, healthy home, community, and environment where every person has the chance, a real chance to fulfill their passions and dreams... Not held back by hungry tummies, dangerous communities, oppression, lack of home and hearth.
2naSalit
(86,643 posts)additional concerns but you are correct about the type of governing that takes place under male control and female control. I met Oscar Arias once, he was giving a lecture about how he observed that very concept in indigenous peoples in his country. His "take home" message was basically that until women are given decision making power in government, their personal lives and everything in between, there will be no chance for peace in this world.
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
Mary Mac
(323 posts)Politicians don't want to alienate religious groups that don't believe in birth control.
FreakinDJ
(17,644 posts)A lot of feminist believe it would lead to aborted female fetuses there fore the subject is misogynist
Starvation , Wars, Famine, Pandemics, Destruction of the Planet most certainly - at that point misogynist really doesn't matter
Warpy
(111,267 posts)focus solely on women as being the only cause of it without focusing on the political, social, religious, and economic systems women have to live in. In other words, if your only worth as a human being is the number of (preferably male) offspring you produce, you are not going to be interested in that warehouse of birth control down the street.
If they had focused instead on raising the expectations of women instead of trying to push pills and devices at them, the problem would be far less serious than it is now. The only proven way to decrease the birth rate is to empower women.
As it is, the planet has a nasty habit of supplying famine and disease to thin any overpopulation. We're no different.
PATRICK
(12,228 posts)things the Few believe favor and work for as opposed to alleviating. Growing markets, killing consumers. Culling the peasants. Some people are talking about it very much so. That does not include encouraging the masses to discuss or act toward a better solution than the famous "Final" four of the apocalypse.
eppur_se_muova
(36,266 posts)... and most of our "secular" politicians don't want to risk that. Never mind that many RCC women -- especially in poor countries -- rely on birth control.
2naSalit
(86,643 posts)
Kip Humphrey
(4,753 posts)in contravention - it may even be dangerous.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)There *are* solutions:
1) Educate & empower women.
2) Reduce exploitation (both by sharing resources more fairly and paying a fair price for them in trade).
3) Keep the local population to a level that can be sustained.
Unfortunately,
#1 runs foul of most religions (patriarchal by design) and the political systems that support them.
#2 runs foul of basic human greed supported by the religions of "economy" & "progress".
#3 runs foul of short-sighted "do-gooders" who keep "rescuing" the "victims" after "disasters".
Empirically, as soon as a region starts to advance with #1, the majority appear to undercut it
by increasing #2 and even the "enlightened" minority replace it with #3 - thus propagating the
problem and guaranteeing that the petri dish *will* fill up in yet another failed experiment.
The2ndWheel
(7,947 posts)More people is a symptom of the issue. The root cause would be our increased ability to avoid death. I guess the even more fundamental cause would be our ability to give ourselves the ability to avoid death. Not just on an individual scale, but collectively. Our increasingly global human project, and the idea of universality, plays a big part.
Instead of external pressures keeping our numbers in check, we've attempted to give ourselves a floor under which we can't fall, and we want to push ourselves up over everything else. So instead of physics, or whatever you want to call the laws of nature, we're governed by human made laws, which are subjective, and we have a tough time figuring out who gets to tell who what they can or cannot do. Which is why we came up with the floor, so that, in theory, we at least can't do this or that to people against their will. We think human rights exist, even though they're just figments of our imagination.
We have 4 ways we can set things up:
A) a floor and a ceiling
B) no floor but a ceiling
C) a floor but no ceiling
D) no floor and no ceiling
Our utopia is C, as it doesn't let anyone not have enough to live, and it doesn't stop human potential from doing anything that it can.
Overpopulation needs other things in order to exist. Which may mean that even what I would say is the root cause, our problem solving brains, isn't the root of the root, because it doesn't just exist either. External factors had to put pressure on it to shape it into the tool that it is. So overpopulation, which may or may not even be an objective problem(whatever we call existence doesn't give a damn if we overrun our ability to sustain ourselves), just can't be the root cause of the problem.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)It's a problem of fouling our own nest.
We can identify overpopulation as one of the factors, but framing it as a "root cause" leads us to think of population as an independent variable. As you point out, it's not - it's dependent on a large number of other factors.
Climate, the overall condition of the biosphere, geography, resources, evolutionary pressures, human organization and technology all contribute to the situation. Those factors have combined into a wicked complex-system problem with positive and negative feedback loops running between all of the elements.
For a problem of this complexity there is no obvious solution. Trying to correct the problem by addressing just one of the factors will inevitably lead to unintended consequences and probably further system destabilization.
The2ndWheel
(7,947 posts)Under the concept of human rights as we know them today, America could not have become a nation. At least not the way that it did. Most if not all countries couldn't exist. We're trying to keep the benefits of a system that came about under different conditions, while making it fair for everyone to obtain those benefits. Little wonder why things don't quite line up.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Societies arose to satisfy the first three levels of Maslow's hierarchy: physiological, safety and belonging. Those are all enhanced by collective agreements.
Human rights belong to the top two levels: esteem and self-actualization. Those levels operate mainly at the individual level. They are a poor fit for social implementation, because individual differences result in conflicting interpretations of rights.
As you say, it's no wonder there's a mismatch.
So Far From Heaven
(354 posts)First of all, population growth is inherent in (almost) all religions. For two reasons, growth of the religion and growth in income for the religion.
Some countries require tons of unpaid workers for family economic sustainability.
Second of all, all economies rely on growth, unsustainable growth.
Gee, it's simple. Follow the money.
Cassiopeia
(2,603 posts)
Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)Nazi Germany at worst.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)
