Category: Environment

How many is too many? Do we still need to think about overpopulation?

Our politicians do not like to speak about overpopulation out of fear for the pious who believe that human beings ought to multiply. Left-wing ideologues argue that there is no such thing and that every apparent problem can be solved through a more equal distribution of resources. Enlightened progressivists are confident that there will be a technological fix. Economists tell us that we need continuous growth and hence more consumers. And the statisticians are confident that the growth of the human population will eventually slow down. We are, in reality, already bursting at the seams; numerous ecological problems are due to the fact that there are already so many of us. We need to think harder about the problem, something we find hard to do. We need to consider what the size of the human population should ideally be? And if we are already overloaded, we must also ask how we can reduce the size of the population in a humane way. We need to ask what obligations we have to coming generations.

Here is a new Swedish website from the University of Gothenburg that seeks to address itself to these issues.
Click here

“This is the way the world ends.” — Drowning in people

Last June a United Nations report predicted that the world’s population – now at 7.6 billion – was likely to increase to almost 10 billion by 2050 and to 11.2 billion by 2100. Now a Vienna based group of demographers have calculated that by 2070 the world’s population will reach ONLY 9.5 billion. This has been hailed as good news. Jesus Crespo Cuaresma from the Vienna University of Economics and Business has even concluded that “we can be richer without having to produce more” and that global environmental quality will improve.

The world’s human population is, in fact, already far above its optimum. We can see this everyday in our overcrowded cities. There are certainly some goods that can be multiplied to keep up with a growing population. But there are others that cannot. The artifacts and monuments of our cultural parts, for instance, cannot be reproduced at will. Mass tourism is in the process of transforming and destroying much of that heritage. And it is not obvious that the political and social forms of the past can be adapted to an ever-growing population. Mass democracy is not really democracy anymore.

The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich who 50 years ago wrote the controversial book, The Population Bomb, with his wife Anne, has suggested that the world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today. The question is whether and how we could ever get back to that number. We can think of some horrible ways in which this might happen. Ehrlich says: “To start, make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men. I hope that would lead to a low enough total fertility rate that the needed shrinkage of population would follow. [But] it will take a very long time to humanely reduce total population to a size that is sustainable.”

“This is the way the world ends”: Drowning in Plastics

There is much debate about climate change, but changes to our environment are nor limited to the weather. Environmental degradation is everywhere and, as the world’s population keeps increasing and more human beings want to participate in the benefits of modern civilization, it is not going away very soon.

One aspect of it is our growing production and consumption of plastics. Plastics cram landfills, they float in the oceans, are consumed by fish and thereby ultimately end in our bodies. Click here

The US and the West have long relied on China to take its used plastics for recycling. China has now banned those imports because of their poisonous impact. Now we are ready to poison some other, economically less powerful countries. Click here