“Overconsumption” vs Overpopulation
If there were fewer of us, we’d consume less.
[Letter #018]
Good morning, son.
A couple days ago was April Fool’s Day. I admit that I was “got.” It was first thing in the morning, and I rolled over to grab my phone and look at the headlines that popped in from the night before, a common behavior for folks these days. I read that Tesla had declared bankruptcy. I said, “Wait, what now?” Your mother asked me what was up, and I asked her to hold a second while, trying my best to wake up and focus my eyes, I began a search for other news headlines to confirm this pretty remarkable development. Finding nothing, I returned to the article and headed to the comments section to try to determine why this piece was written at all. The first commenter noted that he had looked at his calendar that morning, and I was finally beginning to shake off the fog of sleep.
The author had indeed “gotten up pretty early in the morning” to make a fool of me. That’s alright though. Happens to the best of us, I suppose. I imagine there will come a day when that headline ends up being true, although I’m certain that a darling company like Tesla will be snapped up by another big corporate name without making much of a fuss. Even so, it’s not happening yet. I guess the lesson here is that when you hear something extraordinary, try to not spread it around until you’ve confirmed it.
Another day on the calendar that hasn’t yet fallen in April (thank goodness) is Earth Overshoot Day. In 2023, it was August 2nd. That’s the day on which, it is calculated, that the human population of the planet has used up all of the available resources that Earth could provide on a renewable basis for the entire year. As the human enterprise grows each year (presumably ad infinitum), the date is moved forward on the calendar to account for the fixed limits of the planet. It seems an odd quirk to me to focus on how much that Earth can renew each year anyway, as we fire apes spend so much time consuming that which can never be renewed anyway. Not on a human timescale, that is. Even if we extended Overshoot Day beyond the end of the calendar by way of excellent resource management, we’d run out the limited stuff regardless. Well, unless you’re thinking about waiting around for another 50 million years for more hydrocarbons to cook.
I think there’s a much simpler “solution” to this whole overshoot issue. Of course, you know well that there are no actual solutions to a predicament like planetary overshoot. It’s not a problem to be solved. It’s just something that must be endured, if possible, and accepted as it is. The “solution” is going to end up being what Nature will inevitably sentence our species to in the long run: fewer humans. That opens up a big ol’ can o’ worms though, and those bastards are just wriggling around all over the place.
To get the caveat out of the way, as I was saying, it’s not actually a “solution” to “have fewer humans,” since there’s no active way to achieve that with any shred of morality left (and even if we cut the population in half, we’d just kick the can on the same problem). You start talking about “overpopulation” and you’ll invariably be accused of being an eco-fascist or something similar. It’s easy to understand why too, as there are plenty of assholes out there today who think that there should simply be fewer of “those people” around and then everything would be better. Thing is that Nature doesn’t give a shit what color any of us are or what supposed “race” we claim to be. The bottom line is that humanity is an extremely successful species in terms of adaptation and reproduction, and we’re about to go through what all highly successful species go through: population correction.
As a quick aside, I’m aware of the predictions that show how the poorest parts of the world, which are populated by largely non-white peoples, are most likely to deal with the first and worst effects of climate change. It’s gutting to think about, but I can’t change anything about that. Just love people as best you can, son.
Have I told you the story about the St Matthew Island reindeer before? I’m sure that I have, but here it is again, because you know Papa Bear loves telling stories. Back in 1944, the Coast Guard set up a long range navigation station on St Matthew to help with World War 2. The station needed only a couple of dozen service-people to staff it, but these folks still needed to eat. They had rations shipped to the station, but in the case that things went badly in the war and supplies couldn’t reach the island, the Coast Guard arranged to have 29 reindeer released into the woods there. The idea was that the station staff could hunt the deer for food if that became necessary. When the war ended, the deer were left on the island unharmed, none of whom were ever needed for food.
Skipping forward to 1957, a research crew visited the island to check on the reindeer population. The original deer had found that there were no predators on the island at all, so with the abundant food, they had the prime conditions for reproduction. The crew counted 1350 reindeer, and they all looked to be in good health and even a little fat. The island had a typical covering of grass, of course, but it also hosted an abundance of lichen which the deer adored. Candy for reindeer, if you will. By all appearances, this was a good situation for the animals. A regular reindeer paradise.
Six years later, in 1963, the researchers took another trip to St Matthew to check on the herd. They noted the rather prolific reproductive habits of the deer. As there had still been no predators on the island at all, the reindeer population had shot up to around 6000. These poor fellas were no longer healthy in appearance. They were thin, some quite emaciated, and the lichen was completely gone. The herd was left to munch on the ever-dwindling grasses to survive. At this point, things were looking pretty dire.
The research crew returned again in 1966. The island was scattered with countless reindeer skeletons. Thousands of them were unable to weather the winter, being too malnourished. The only ones to survive were 41 females and 1 infertile male. That was the final generation of reindeer on the island. Where there had been plenty of food for a few dozen, and possibly even a few hundred, there was no way for the island to keep producing enough to sustain the consumption of thousands of reindeer. Even at the height of the population, it’s possible that there was still enough to provide for several hundred deer, which might have been the island’s actual carrying capacity. That total amount was split among thousands though, and the population dropped well below the remaining capacity. In this case, the correction was severe enough to drive them to extinction on St Matthew. Incidentally, maybe a pack of wolves released on the other side of the island would have eventually formed a regulating predator/prey balance, but that’s a digression for another day.
It’s a true story that has the side-effect of also having a moral. Our world is an island in space, and its ability to provide for life is limited. The carrying capacity of Earth is vast, yes, absolutely, but it’s still limited. St Matthew’s reindeer give us a morbid reminder of what happens when we seek infinite growth in a finite space. Such is the way of Nature though. We grow and expand, and if we grow too large, we die back. After that correction, if there are any of us left, we are forced to remain within the constraints of the new conditions around us. It’ll be up to us then what we decide to do with our place in the world. Nature is the ultimate predator, above even the apex homo ignis.
That’s something that I’ve found concerning recently: “Our place in the world.” Specifically, I’m thinking about how much space our “place” is taking up. There’s this line of thinking these days, and I admit that I’ve bought into it in the past as well, that claims that “it’s not overpopulation that’s the problem, there’s enough food for everyone. It’s just that it’s not distributed fairly, and also we waste a lot of food, and also we eat too much meat!” Disregarding the notion that humans consume much more than just food, there are a lot of good points hidden in there, and the heart is absolutely in the right place for those who preach this message. I just think there’s more to it than that.
I’m not going to address the meat part of the message here now (might do that another time), but the first two items on the list are interesting. In the first bit, the claim is that we grow enough food, but that it’s distributed unfairly and that’s why people are starving. It’s true, I agree, that the systems we use to get food and other necessary goods to people are a terrible way to do it. But, — and not to point out the giant, neon, flashing sign here — we use a capitalist system for the entire planet. If you want to distribute food to people who need it, then you either have to make that profitable to the capitalists or you have to dismantle capitalism. Since the latter is literally unimaginable to the majority of society today, we’ve been trying to accomplish the former for time immemorial. We’ve seen some good come of that, but it’s always just treating the symptoms and trying to play catch-up. If you want fair distribution, you simply cannot use capitalism.
In the second bit, the claim is that we waste a large percent of our produced food. Well, that’s a big topic to discuss, but one key cause of that waste is how it’s sold. Grocery stores figured out a long time ago that people are more likely to buy a food item if there is an appearance of abundance, so they made sure to also stock up the shelf with more than enough bunches of bananas, even if they knew they’d have to throw half of them away unsold. That, they calculated, was the cost of doing business in bananas, and they made more Money doing it that way than simply stocking as much as they knew they could sell out in full. The psychology of human behavior in the market. Blame Bernays, I guess.
The common denominator of both of the above points is capitalism. The system requires unfair distribution and also waste. So long as the system remains, the problems remain. Simple as.
So, going back to the phrase above, “It’s not overpopulation that’s the problem, there’s enough food for everyone!” Is there, though? Well, maybe, at least if we’re just counting the raw calories produced each year. But, as stated, Capital requires overproduction and waste — a “cut,” if you will, a tax. So, is there enough for everyone, once you factor in the additional costs that capitalism requires for day-to-day operation? I’m not a math surgeon, so I have no idea, but I’m guessing the answer is “no.” So long as Capital runs the show, it won’t ever be profitable to feed everyone, and so not everyone will eat.
Ok, does that mean that we can change the phrase above to “It’s not overpopulation that’s the problem, it’s that we use a violently enforced hierarchical economy!”? Well, now it’s starting to sound a lot more like a good anarchist activist, but no. No more dancing around it. We’re overpopulated. Even if we had revolutions around the world today, we all decided to abolish all governments, all monetary systems, all classes and private property, and all other coercive hierarchies… Even if we did all of that, we’re still in overshoot, and the population is still going to collapse. Although all of that stuff I just said does sound like a fun time, it wouldn’t fix things.
Basically, we’re reindeer on an island. We like to think we’re much smarter than dummy-dummy-face reindeer, but we’re not. At best, we’re just smart enough to know how dumb we are. Many of us don’t even make it that far.
See, we’ve gone too far down the road already. Some folks are quick to remind us that it’s more than just food, about how the average American requires something like 200x more resources per annum than the average Bolivian, or something to that effect (I’m making up numbers). They claim that if we could just cut our resource and emissions to something like the average European, then blah blah blah. In the first place, I can’t see how the average American would give up a perceived “better” lifestyle for a perceived “worse” one without being forced to do so. They’ll run screaming off a cliff before they give up on single-passenger SUV driving. In the second place, it really is all about food. Food allowed us to go down this road of high populations, resource exploitation, and environmental destruction. Once the calories stop, it’s over. There’s nothing else to discuss without the food system taking center stage.
Capital is one of the primary reasons that we had the World Wars, and those wars are the reason that we developed the tech to convert fossil fuels into nitrogen-rich fertilizers. The World Wars led to the Baby Boomer generation, and those massively boosted crops are how we fed the planet of the Boomers and beyond. This is why Malthus and Ehrlich got it wrong, if you recall. They predicted correctly except that they couldn’t know how we would change agriculture with mechanization and then with chemical additives. Now, I’m no mechanization doctor or chemistry attorney, but I’m pretty certain that we don’t have any other miraculous tricks waiting in the wings to save us this time.
Capital is the reason we United State-ians were sold the American Dream of 2.5 kids and a house. If you look closely, you’ll note that’s above the replacement level of reproduction, which meant that each generation was larger than the last. That’s important for the ever-expanding growth that Capital requires to keep operational. The system was encouraging rapid population growth even before we kicked up agricultural output, but that exploding food supply really pressed the birth rates. Gotta sell all that food, after all. More people, more food, more people, more food. It was a reinforcing loop, driven by the extensive use of cheap, abundant, dense energy.
If there was an infinite source of dense energy, cheap and abundantly available, then maybe — maybe — we could do the whole revolution thing, re-distribute everything necessary to everyone, and educate folks on how to bring our consumption levels back in line with what is sustainable for the planet. Ifweall just worked together…
If wishes were dollars, everyone would be rich.
Not only are fossil fuels running out, meaning that we won’t be able to produce enough fertilizer to grow enough to feed everyone, let alone distribute those goods globally, but also all of the “development” and “consumption” we’ve done over the past couple centuries means that great portions of the planet are wrecked, rendering the overall carrying capacity of Earth lower than what it would have been otherwise. That’s what our capitalist system has done for us. That’s the situation it’s put us in.
Here’s another bit though, if that wasn’t enough to paint the picture. Let’s say that we do have our global revolution and somehow end up in a planetary communism of Marxian utopia fantasy, all overnight. Best of all possible situations, and barring any horrific behavior that seems common with such revolutions, we’re going to presume that every person on the planet is given equitable allotments of food, energy, and pollution credits — all to levels established by some benevolent international panel of experts. We will then have two choices: continue using fossil fuels or stop using fossil fuels (whether that’s a phase-out or not isn’t important).
If we continue using them, then we’re still in the situation that we have now, although everyone can probably eat better since we’re using a better distribution system. We’ll still have to use a tremendous amount of industrial processes to create enough fertilizer and diesel fuel to get the food grown and delivered to everyone across the globe. The fractions of oil distillation that are no longer used by now-defunct industries will need to be dumped somewhere, since you can’t just pull straight diesel out of the ground. We’ll continue to burn through the remaining fossil fuels until we run out or until the planet heats up unbearably. Eventually, we’ll starve once agricultural yields decline enough that it won’t support us all, either through land despoliation or fertilizer shortages. This is essentially a complicated version of what happened with the St Matthew scenario. The reindeer had a perfect situation until the environment could no longer support their natural growth rate. The bottom line is overpopulation.
On the other hand, if we stop using fossil fuels, then we’ll have to figure out a different way to make agricultural production support us. That scenario would have to look like swidden farming all over the planet in order to get enough fertility and field space to grow enough to feed us all. That would be all available land everywhere, slash and burn method. Also, that would require every capable person farming, since we would have to do it all by hand. This level of agricultural production couldn’t be sustained more than a few years, tops, with each successive year showing fewer and fewer yields, as crop rotation wouldn’t be feasible in a “full-production” style. All of this happens amidst the mass extinction of every living thing that required those now-destroyed habitats. Suffice it to say that it wouldn’t be enough to be sustainable without a lot of die-off, both of people and everything else. This is reindeer starving with extra steps, but also with the added effect that we’ll toil in the fields for the rest of our miserable lives. The bottom line, again, is overpopulation.
Either way we go, we’re headed for a massive correction. The future won’t look like any of the scenarios I’ve painted above, as there’s no way we could achieve the hypothetical perfect communism, but I figure it’ll have some elements in common. There are just too many people on this rock to keep supporting everyone at this level, or even if we cut everyone’s consumption to bare minimum. I expect that rich countries will try to let poor countries die first, but that’s going to cause some serious headaches when the rich countries remember where they get food from. The lords will starve in their castles when the peasants keep their crops to themselves.
Again, I finish a letter with the opinion that the world just needs more acceptance of what’s coming at us. I think all of this discussion about whether it’s overpopulation or overconsumption is moot at this point anyway. It is a predicament, whether folks are ready to accept that or not. While we can try to comfort each other as best we can and reduce the damage that each of us is doing, what is happening is going to keep happening. There are just too many of us, period.
Most likely, famine and lots of conflict will be among the top slots on the list of drivers of the coming correction. Four Horsemen and all that. It’s pretty clear that we’re at the high-water mark for humans, and I can’t see a way that we will ever have this many of us again.
Already in 2024, we are seeing that our population is topping out. Every continent except Africa, I think, has already seen birth rates drop below replacement rates. A mass starvation event, huge epidemic, or third World War that kills everyone overnight isn’t necessary to correct the population if the slow march of Death isn’t staved off by births. That pale horseman can handle the job all on his own within a few generations. I just don’t think it’s very likely that the other dark riders will allow Death to have all the fun though.
I just hope you’re safe, son. I very much want us to get to a point where there’s just nothing worth fighting over anymore, but knowing humanity’s track record within the civilization era, I’m not putting my money on it. Until next time, I love you very much.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
