TOO MANY PEOPLE The Case for Reversing Growth By Lindsey Grant Excerpted by permission of the author.

CONTENTS:

• I. THE ISSUE AT HAND
  Human populations have quadrupled in a century and raise the question, do we not need to reverse the growth to save the systems that support us?
• II. POPULATION AND MIGRATION
  The world's rich get fewer and richer, and the poor get children-and migrate.
• III. ECONOMIC GROWTH
  What about one billion people, living like we live and they want to live?
• IV. GRAINS
  The pursuit of high yields is dumping chemicals into the system like never before, but we are losing the battle. Your share of the Earth gets smaller. What about two billion people living in better balance with the system?
• V. IRRIGATION AND WATER
  We are running out of accessible and affordable water. Desalinization is a very expensive way to water crops. We would be a lot better off if there were a lot fewer of us.
• VI. MEAT AND FISH
  Most protein is derived from grain. We are past the end of the dream of more protein from the prairies or the sea.
• VII. CLIMATE
  Prepare to be much warmer-and maybe under water. We are unlikely to avoid that future with a population much more than three billion.
• VIII. ENERGY
  Coal is our biggest and dirtiest fossil energy resource. It hastens climate warming and fouls the Earth. Better energy is available, but very expensive. What we are looking for is a few prosperous consumers.
• IX. POLLUTION
  We have done something about the air, but the new round of issues is a rouser. Sewage, anybody?
• X. BIODIVERSITY AND HUMAN SURVIVAL
  Meet the world of microbes. We had better learn to get along with them, because we can't live without them and we can't push them around.
• XI. THE IGNORANT EXPERIMENT
  Things can go wrong faster than you think.
• XII. THE END OF GROWTH
  Learn family planning from Charles Darwin. If we rec-ognize that growth is necessarily a temporary phenomenon on a finite Earth, we will see its limits and resist pressures for growth. We cannot rescue the poor from poverty until we realize that more goods for more people is an environmental disaster.
• XIII. THE EUROPEAN EXAMPLE
  Don't panic over Europe's declining population. At least, they are on the road to sustainability.
• XIV. THE "BLACK DEATH" AND THE RENAISSANCE
  The law of supply and demand applies to labor, too, but rising mortality is a brutal way to find prosperity. Our business leaders would have us believe that growth brings prosperity. For them, perhaps, but not for others. Labor would be much better off, and so would most of us, if right now there were half as many people in the poor countries seeking a living.
• XV. A NEW AMERICAN MINDSET
  We are a singularly cantankerous crowd. We must learn to cooperate for the common good, help the poor countries to deal with a population problem they recognize, and learn to manage our own fertility and our migration policies, or we will wind up a huge, poor country without having really helped those who are already poor.
• XVI. AND WHY NOT?
  Meet The Happiness Curve, and consider whether it might be rather fun to be less crowded.

CHAPTER I: THE ISSUE AT HAND

They say the Demilitarized Zone in Korea, which had long been a barren region, has reverted to a lovely young hardwood forest since it was freed from the human footprint by the 1953 armistice agreement. It is an unexpected and accidental commentary on the role of man in nature. In this age of human dominance, we inadvertently destroy the natural systems that support us, and it is only by chance that we are suddenly aware of what we have done.

Our future depends on learning to come into better balance with the rest of nature and to find a sustainable relationship we have yet to achieve. To pose the issue as a more somber question: is the present course of human activities consistent with the preservation of the Earth's existing life support systems? In this essay, I will survey the current evidence and make the case that we can turn the present deteriorating system around only by ending the worldwide infatuation with growth and embracing the idea of a return to a smaller population.

Just as perpetual growth in a finite space is a mathematical absurdity, its reversal becomes equally absurd if carried too far, except for those who would applaud the disappearance of the human race. The reversal of growth (negative population growth or NPG) to my mind is the ideal of a turnaround in world and United States population until we approach a less destructive and more tolerable level, perhaps at numbers the United States and the world passed two or more generations ago.

Europe's population growth is on the verge of turning around, and the almost universal reaction has been panic at the prospect -- as if the population it so recently attained is essential to its survival. The reaction illuminates the general infatuation with growth. Few questions were raised as population grew, but the end of growth is seen as a disaster. I will argue later that a smaller European population would be good for Europe and the world.

Humans since the Neolithic age have been proficient at disturbing and displacing natural systems, notably through forest destruction, land erosion and species extinction. With the advent of the industrial revolution, we have multiplied our disturbance as we extract minerals from the air and the Earth's crust, invent new chemicals and dump them all heedlessly into the biosphere. Now we are on the threshold of adding genetic manipulation-deliberately redesigning animals and plants-that may be as destabilizing as the earlier two revolutions. We are changing the Earth without having demonstrated that we know how to manage it.

There is something new on Earth: human systems have grown to the point at which the damage we do has become intolerable, not only to other species, but to our own future. As our problems have been caused or compounded by the growth of populations and economic activity, their solution requires that we turn growth around.

This book will explore several sectors where human activity is pressing hard against the environment. I will attempt to sort out how much the impacts can be mitigated by technology or changing behavior and to what degree a population decline or stabilization is essential to success. I will focus on present trends in world population, economic activity, food, water, energy and climate, chemicals and pollution, and loss of biodiversity. In some of these areas, one can roughly quantify population levels that would make a solution possible. They come out in the one to three billion range. In others, such as climate and energy, so much depends on mankind's ability and willingness to embrace technical solutions that a desirable population number cannot be offered -- it is a two-part calculation that involves balancing numbers and behavior. In none of the areas, be it noted, can it reasonably be argued that a larger population helps in finding solutions.

If I seem to belabor the population connection, bear with me. All these issues have a self-evident connection to population growth. I find it astonishing that the technical literature seldom touches upon that connection and never -- almost literally never -- mentions population policy as part of the solution. (I did a search of the literature for the 1997 United Nations (UN) General Assembly session on sustainability, and it was a disheartening proof of that point.

Ask for this book at your favorite bookstore, or order online at Amazon.com

Home