Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Population

How to Slow Population Growth?

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Dr John Reid, a Melbourne neuroscientist, said on ABC radio yesterday, in a piece entitled ‘Apocalypse Now’, that population growth is a major environmental issue.

I agree.

He went on to suggest that,

“In the discussion of human impact on the biosphere, two separate but interactive issues are being conflated. These two issues are climate change, due to the emission of greenhouse gases, and the excessive demand for resources, due to overpopulation.”

So far, he’s making a little bit of sense.

But when it came to providing solutions to overpopulation, Dr Reid clearly had no regard for the rights of women in affluent societies.

He suggested that population growth might be controlled by putting,

“Something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile.

“Perhaps a virus that would knock out the genes that produce certain hormones necessary for conception.

“The world’s most affluent populations should be targeted first. According to the 2006 Living Planet Report, the six populations that have the biggest per capita ecological footprint live in the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, Finland, Canada, Kuwait, and Australia.”

But hang on John Reid! Many women, in many affluent socieites, are choosing to have none, one or just two children.

Dr Reid stated,

“The urge to procreate and the innate belief that people have the inalienable right, if not the duty, to have children is too strong to be suppressed, just to save the planet.”

But many women like me, choose to only have one child for a variety of reasons, including quality of life, recognising that there are enough people on this planet already.

Perhaps John Reid is conflating “the urge to procreate” with the urge to have s-x.

Modern methods of contraception mean it is possible to have s-x without procreating!

You can read the complete and startling transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2006/1807002.htm#transcript

Economic Growth Relevant, Even if Global Population Declines: A Note from Pinxi

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Many people are concerned by the current dominant global socio-economic paradigm in which economic growth is expected to continue forever.

I’ve commented at a previous thread that the associated issues, including resource depletion, may become “somewhat redundant” once global population starts to decline which many predict will happen before the end of this century.

A regular reader and commentator at this blog, Pinxi, disagrees. She writes:

“In my worldview, economic growth and resource depletion will remain relevant issues for the foreseeable future. These issues are not about to become redundant, regardless of whether we will achieve a declining (or stable) global population or decreased resource intensity.

I formed this opinion considering:

1) the large gaps in living standards (within & between countries) between the minority ‘haves’ & the majority ‘have nots’

2) the pressures and desires for continually rising living standards

3) that we haven’t decoupled living standards from resource throughput; we haven’t decoupled quality of life from materials

4) that looking at the rich countries with declining (& stable!) populations there is no evidence that economic growth or resource depletion has become redundant

5) MNCs see the huge populations in third and second world economies as massive untapped market opportunities – more sales needs more products & distribution needs more resources

6) more consumption means more resource use, and methods to reduce the linear nature of resource throughput require more energy for reuse, recycling, repurposing etc so there’s more entropy, less exergy

If global population is declining, you could have longterm negative economic growth but that doesn’t make economic growth redundant. Without a paradigm shift, economic growth is still relevant to our socioeconomic mechanics.

Industrialised societies are organised with economic growth at core and now expect continual improvements in living standards (and we get scared of potential threats to our way of life, such as global warming, peak oil, China, and cheap immigrant labour).

The paradigm will still persist unless we have a paradigm shift. What would bring on a paradigm shift (far-reaching disasters aside)? How would such a paradigm shift manifest?

We haven’t managed to decouple economic growth or maintenance of living standards from resource and energy throughputs yet. Until we do so, economic growth and associated resource throughput will remain an ongoing concern.

All those ‘other demanding people’ in ‘the other countries’ though want better living standards & cars, houses, coca cola & Maccas just like us. Meanwhile we still want to get one up on the Joneses, and marketers flog more must have items at us. All this requires resource throughputs.

A decline in birth rates in the third world is linked with education, health, food and women’s rights (self-determination, property, jobs etc) and while in some areas of the Millenium Development Goals we’re making percentile progress, we have huge improvements to make if we want real declines in the number of people living in poverty and dire inequality.

Basic human rights, and reduced risk and uncertainty in livelihoods and survivial, reduce population pressures. But that doesn’t by itself bring people up to speed with our first world standard of living. It simply means meeting bare minimum conditions for life for most people.

So even when/if population growth steadies, there’ll still be massive differences in quality of life and material standards, and bigger markets for marketing more unnecessary stuff that we all simply must have.

That attempt to catch up, and the never ending consumptive drive, will demand more resources.

Thankfully I still have my resource shares!”

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This is a slightly edited version of a comment originally posted here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/001779.html at 3.22pm on 11th December.

What’s Australia’s Carrying Capacity?

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Mitchell Porter sent me a note some time ago that began:

“There is a thought I had a long time ago when talking with some zero-population-growth advocates, maybe your readership can shed some light on this. They were saying Australia was already near its human carrying capacity, and I remembered reading that Australia has a population of about 100 million sheep. Now granted, sheep are metabolically different from humans in a number of ways, but still, the bare fact that this continent can support that many large mammals in addition to its 20 million humans suggests to me that the human population here could be considerably larger…”

Now I hadn’t got around to putting this information with some information I have some where on numbers of sheep in Australia and how they are a species in decline … so Mitchell took the initiative of posting it at the Wiki:
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/wiki/Australian_carrying_capacity .

Thanks Mitchell. You’re hopefully a trend-setter!