The Impact of Population Growth

People are bad. Well, more like having lots of people is bad. Or actually, how said people live is pretty important, too. The point is, we need to address population growth if we want to have any chance of mitigating global climate crises such as climate change, pollution, species extinction, and the like. Ehrlich and Holdren set out to disband the idea that US population size and growth are nothing to worry about, a myth that I personally find hard to believe ever existed. Their discussion centers on five theorems about population size and per capita impact, global context, population density and distribution, meaning of environment, and solutions both theoretical and practical, respectively. They introduce a formula to try to gauge total negative impact of us on the environment: I = P x F(P), where P is the population and F is per capita impact. This equation makes clear that impact can increase faster than linearly with population. In fleshing out the theorems that introduce this essay, they basically explain why are screwed, and how what we thought we knew, we actually don’t.

With increasing resource use, diminishing returns increase per capita energy use and environmental impact as we try our best to get to the last little bits of (effectively or actual) non-renewable resources. Another worry is the threshold effect, where straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back type scenarios result in rapid widespread problems, such as a forest of dead trees. Direct cause and effect problems not enough to scare you? Then consider the issue of synergistic effects, where problems work together in sync to make the sum worse than the individual parts. And to even maintain the environmental status quo increases disproportionately in cost/difficulty as population increases. Trying to increase per capita effectiveness of pollution control alone highlights aforementioned issues such as diminishing returns and threshold effects, and economies of scale are basically irrelevant, as these guys already calculated them in their gloomy evaluations.

Thinking in terms of a global context makes clear the uneven resource consumption and environmental destruction by (over-) developed countries, as well as how such places are not even really allowing the possibility that underdeveloped countries can follow in their footsteps towards prosperity. Here the authors note that even if population growth were halted or even reduced, if per capita consumption remained the same (or increased), we would still be in pretty deep (like, existential) trouble.

Population is best thought of in terms of carrying capacity (of regions and scaling up to the planet as whole, really), not just space itself; many of the worst environmental problems are essentially independent of how people are distributed. And also, redistributing people would be tough, in part because people live where they do for reasons such as its being a favorable environment for people.

Environment does not just mean forests and streams and stuff, and crowding seems to lead to increased aggressiveness (as do higher temperatures, but that’s not here in this text). The authors say our health suffers with population growth [see crowding, malnutrition, carriers of disease (although actually living in urban areas can definitely reduce carbon footprints/resource use as well as lead to better information/cultural exchanges and lots of other good stuff like good old fashioned compassion, for example, which benefit the species as whole, in my opinion, but again, that’s not in this reading- that’s just me)].

Theoretical solutions are not actually solutions most of the time, hate to break it to you. Tech solutions are all too often too little, too late, too expensive, too weird, or otherwise insufficient. And also most just shift our impacts, as opposed to removing them. So that has to be considered. Don’t rely on technology to be our savior.

We cannot have complacency (the authors call it “unjustified and counterproductive”) towards the many problems we face as a species and for the planet as a whole. There is no single solution or even small set of big solutions to save ourselves, but working on the population issue is a good start, especially since it is so big a problem and is so slow to take effect. So we better get on it, pronto.

In this reading, Ehrlich and Holdren do not get around to saying how they want to work on the problem of population growth. And that in itself seems like a pretty big problem. If you’re not careful you’ll get weird not good scenarios like forced sterilizations (shout out to India), heavy handed child policies (China), mass killings, attempts to label people as more or less worthy of living, increased eco-terrorism, and the like. How can we humanely address the issue of too many people using too many resources without eliminating human agency? Development seems like a pretty good solution, since it generally results in smaller families. But that, as is always the case with environmental issues, is not a clean and tidy silver bullet solution. Other thoughts? (Also, I wonder if the decades between when this was written and now have at all changed the situation as it is presented here... if so, I’m not optimistic that things are better today.)