Forward: It’s the Population, Kids

Image Gallery Image by James Duft

If you were born around 1960, you came into a world populated by some 3 billion people. Today nearly 6.5 billion of us reside on the planet. When you die you’ll likely leave about 10 billion behind. Human population causes desertification, deforestation, extinctions, and climate change.

It’s easy to blame industrialization and point an accusing finger at gas-guzzling automobiles and unscrupulous multinational corporations for our environmental mess. Yet the planet somehow weathered 200 years of coal smoke, robber barons, and fossil-fuel locomotives with relatively mild, comparatively isolated consequences.

So why, despite the presence of international watchdogs, hybrid cars, and clean-coal technology, is a global meltdown closer than ever?

To quote the sage (a cartoon possum named Pogo, speaking to his friend Porky Pine on Earth Day in 1971): “Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”

Maybe it will take 75 years to reach a population of 10 billion. Maybe the planet can accommodate 12 billion frugal human beings. Someone recently pointed out that the world’s entire population could be housed in high-density skyscrapers on a piece of land the size of Virginia. In Macao, China, the population has already reached about 17,000 people per square kilometer. If the entire current human population lived in the same conditions, we would occupy about 150,000 square miles, a piece of land slightly smaller than California, slightly larger than Montana.

OK. But who would want to live there?

We’re the only species on the planet that can conceptualize its own impact on its habitat. Every other thriving species just keeps on spreading until it starts starving, at which time disease and evolution bring things back into balance for a little while.

I believe we’d prefer to manage the situation ourselves. I also believe we are responsible. Call it “dominion over the earth,” or call it a sacred trust. Both logic and morality call on us to protect our habitat.

A good first step would be universal access to birth control and a firm resolution to raise the entire human race out of poverty. So far every affluent nation on earth has seen its birth rate drop to between one and two children per family. Why? There are lots of theories, none of them proven. We don’t need to know why. We already know that economic justice is desirable, particularly if it results in a healthier planet.