Don’t be a Twit About Overpopulation
What You Need to Know About Population as We Surpass 8 Billion
More and more drivers were speeding through the school zone of a local elementary school, putting children in great danger. One very alarmed parent decided to do something about it. One morning he stationed himself on the corner with a bucket of rocks and hurled stones through the windshields of speeding motorists. At a meeting of concerned parents the next day, the principal of the school advised mothers and fathers NOT to be alarmed about the speeding. Shocked at this response from the principal, entrusted with the safety of their children, parents pressed for a reason. “Don’t be alarmed,” the principal repeated, “because we just can’t have stones being hurled at passing motorists.”
Thankfully, that’s not a true story. But this next one is: On World Population Day of this year — July 11, here is the message issued by the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency (UNFPA):
“…in the next few months, the total number of people in the world tops 8 billion. This milestone will attract much attention and debate, and likely scaremongering over ‘too many’ people. That would be a mistake. Focusing only on population numbers and growth rates often leads to coercive and counterproductive measures and the erosion of human rights”
Alarm over runaway population growth has, at times, led to grossly inappropriate responses — human rights abuses like forced sterilization, eugenics, and racism. Unfortunately, the response to these cringeworthy solutions to overpopulation was to go silent on the issue.
As we pass through the 8 billion world population milestone on November 15, 2022, it’s long past time to end the silence.
We need to be alarmed. Fortunately, there are some very positive, ethical, solutions to overpopulation that are respectful of human rights.
At the top of the list is for people around the world to be free to make thoughtful, informed decisions about family size. They should have good information, be free of coercion or social pressure to have children, have lots of children, or to not have children. You can probably see the problem here. How can couples make informed decisions if everyone’s afraid to tell the important truths about this issue?
Here’s what I said in the current episode of my GrowthBusters podcast about coming to terms with limits to growth, 8 Billion is Too Many: Don’t be a Twit About Overpopulation:
“If responsible people don’t talk about these issues, irresponsible people will — and they’ll spread disinformation and perpetuate the negative attitudes we want to avoid.”
Sure enough, disinformation and misinformation about world population is ubiquitous. Elon Musk opines that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” That is just nonsense.
A slew of headlines and news reports about declining birth rates have characterized declining birth rates as a crisis. Professional journalists with no axe to grind are reporting this story inaccurately, completely oblivious to the fact that 8 billion people are crushing the planet and low birth rates are very good news. They aren’t reporting on this factually because they’ve been educated in a world that brushes human population under the rug. Even the UN agency entrusted with shepherding good policy on this issue has chosen to be silent about the truth.
If you don’t want human rights abuses, racism, xenophobia, and other ugly responses to alarm about overpopulation, we need to be having frank, responsible public dialogue about the problem and its most beautiful solutions.
So, what do we all need to know about human population today?
Whether you’re making well-considered decisions about bringing kids into this world or about your housing, transportation and recreation (how much energy you use), you need to know what’s going on with the scale of the human enterprise.
First, the world is overpopulated. There are too many of us. It’s not debatable (though the uninformed will inevitably try to debate you on this). It’s just not widely known — thanks to the global silence on this issue. The data is very clear.
The scale of the human enterprise determines our impact on the planet. Our impact is critical because it determines whether our home planet is going to meet our needs and the needs of future generations. It also affects whether the Earth retains its awesome beauty. We can make modest adjustments with our behavior and technology, but there’s no avoiding the practical reality that the bigger our scale, the harder we’re going to be on the Earth and its intricate web of life-supporting systems.
Let’s define “scale of the human enterprise.” Think of it as the area of a rectangle, with one dimension being the size of our economy and the other being the size of our population.
All the report cards tell us we’re currently flunking when it comes to keeping our scale within the means of the planet to meet our needs over the long term. I won’t list them all here, but our failing grades include:
- extinguishing other species at record rates
- accumulating too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to have a stable, habitable climate
- pumping major rivers and aquifers dry
- toxifying our air, land and water
- depleting fertile soil (and other precious resources that aren’t renewable)
The news is so dire, we need to exercise every wise and feasible option.
Can’t we just turn to green tech to bring these grades up? No. It can NOT be relied upon to miraculously render 8 billion lives compatible with the ecosystems of this one planet. So far, technology hasn’t shrunk our footprint. And its track record is littered with terrible unintended consequences. Those who are afraid to confront the truth about human overpopulation offer technology as a solution, but that is based on hope and blind faith, not any factual evidence. The best we can hope for from technology is to trim our sails a bit, not change our course.
That leaves us with the big multipliers in that impact equation: population and economy.
Yes, we must shrink the global economy.
Primarily we do that by scaling back the extravagant lifestyles those of us in the over-developed world are enjoying. But the data and math tell us we would have to live a VERY meager lifestyle to keep 8 billion from crushing the planet. No one wants to do that. We can scale back, but not enough.
Yes, we must shrink our population.
It might be very nice to get population down to a level where extravagant lifestyles can be enjoyed without consequence. That requires getting the population count down below one billion. It’s a tall order, and accomplishing that in a beautiful way would take longer than we have. So…
We need to be shrinking our global population AND economy.
Our obsession with economic growth has got to stop, but that’s a topic for another day. Since 8 billion is our subject here, let’s explore the state of world population dynamics. Human population is not peaking at 8 billion. It took twelve years to grow from 6 to 7 billion. The jump from 7 to 8 billion took just eleven years. We’re in growth mode, adding about 80 million more human inhabitants every year (our annual average over the past eleven years was 90 million). That’s adding another country the size of Germany every 365 days. The data we have tells us a world population under 3 billion would provide the best prospects for our children to live decent lives on a planet that’s not a hellscape. Getting from 8 billion to 3 is not as hard as it sounds. But it does mean we can’t relax about our numbers until they’re contracting at a healthy pace.
I chose that word, “healthy,” because…
there is no such thing in today’s world as “healthy growth” of a population or economy.
Let’s get that through our thick skulls. Now, many of our analytically challenged elected policymakers and growth profiteers are telling us we need to be making more babies, not fewer. If we’re busy adding nearly two million people to the planet every week, why are politicians and billionaires experiencing depopulation panic? These growth-pushers want more consumers, more workers, more taxpayers, and more soldiers. Through ignorance and avarice, they are prioritizing these over the welfare of our children and planet.
They’re wringing their hands over a trend. More and more young people are very carefully considering the state of the planet, the affordability of housing, the cost of raising a child, the energy and attention it takes to be a good parent — or all the above — and choosing not to have any children, to have fewer, or to have them later in life. This is smart. And, as Bill Maher has advised — knowing what we know about the state of the planet — we should be celebrating this trend, not freaking out about it.
I hit the streets to see what the general public knows about the state of planet, overshoot and the overpopulation issue. I asked people to tell me what’s gotten better as we grew from 7 to 8 billion over the last eleven years. Here’s what I found…
As I feared, nothing has really gotten better as we added the last billion humans to the planet. It’s not any easier for those elected “leaders” to balance the budget. We have more fees and higher taxes. Reservoir levels are down. Storms and wildfires are more horrific. Traffic is more congested, not less. Even the trails in our mountains and national parks are congested. Boarding a plane is more of a nightmare.
Civility, compassion and kindness are down; mass shootings are up.
We aren’t healthier. We’re not better-fed. We don’t have more justice or equality. And we certainly haven’t eliminated poverty. You just can’t make a rational case for chasing more population growth.
The super-rich who have profited from this growing market of “consumers” are now trying to figure out how their families can survive the coming apocalypse brought on by all that “consuming:” The Super-Rich ‘Preppers’ Planning to Save Themselves from the Apocalypse
But the truth is we can solve overpopulation quite beautifully. We can simply celebrate and embrace the lower birth rate trend already underway. We can congratulate, suggest, encourage, and thank people for making voluntary, informed, carefully considered, smaller family-size decisions. We can make family planning convenient and free or affordable everywhere around the world. And we can support education and empowerment of women and girls.
Today, I find an improvement on the UN’s Day of Eight Billion web page, so I want to thank the U.N. for this truth-telling:
“…slower population growth over many decades could help to mitigate the further accumulation of environmental damage in the second half of the current century.”
Of course, slower growth is setting the bar too low. Ending growth, and beginning to contract world population, is a more appropriate goal. So the congratulations are mild. For too long, environmental organizations, elected officials, the UN, and most of the world have avoided the brutal truths about overpopulation. They won’t even use that word. We must do better.
It’s not debatable. No one can make and support the case that 8 billion people can live decent lives on Earth without injuring its ecosystems. Let’s stop tap-dancing around that fact. As we cross that 8 billion population threshold, don’t pretend everything is okay. Don’t avoid the uncomfortable truth everyone needs to know…
The Earth cannot sustainably support 8 billion people living anything close to decent (even though modest), lives.
Dave Gardner co-hosts the GrowthBusters podcast about coming to terms with limits to growth. He directed the 2011 documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth.
