A thread at MetaFilter, “Wolves, neo-Nazis and Germany’s population crash”, had links to articles about towns facing demographic collapse (in this case, parts of Detroit being bulldozed into farmland, and some towns in East Germany being deserted). I can’t see this as a bad thing (and bear in mind that the world’s population continues to increase inexorably). There’s a comment comparing population control to eugenics:
Exactly. More evil has been done in fear of a Malthusian crisis than has ever occurred from a Malthusian crisis. The Irish Potato Famine was partly a result of British policy that allowed it to occur – while millions died, the Brits exported food from Ireland – all those starving people were a “natural” purging of over-population, they thought, Malthus said so! Many other examples of self-fulfilling Malthusian prophecies. A lot of modern-day environmentalism is (uncomfortably) rooted in Malthus and Eugenics. One can see it even in some of the posts in this thread – it’s hard to touch Demographics without sounding like a colonial-era racists, so much of what we take as common truth is actually a holdover from 18th and 19th century racist and colonial mindsets.
There hasn’t been 7 billion people in the world before, though, so such a crisis is only a matter of time. A more informed comment:
One of the worst consequences of the imminent population peak would be if we lost our nerve and started encouraging more reproduction.
We’re – that is to say, all of humanity in general – is poised to dodge a bullet, if we don’t (in some sense literally) fuck it up.
Population growth cannot continue forever. We’ve pulled a bunch of neat stunts to keep the unprecedented population boom triggered by the Industrial Revolution going, but they have come at extremely high ecological cost. Those bills are just starting to come due, in the form of anthropogenic climate change, topsoil depletion, salinification, aquifer and groundwater depletion, soil and ocean nitrification…it’s a long list.
It would be incredibly stupid to encourage people to breed in order to preserve economic systems that were stupidly premised on continual population growth, rather than fixing those economic systems to cope with decline. A growing population is nothing to brag about.
We’ve held off Mr. Malthus for centuries and in all likelihood we can probably do it for a few more, with sufficient cleverness: built a ton of nuclear reactors, bioengineer salt-tolerant crops, desalinate seawater when the groundwater runs out, learn to love carp. Climate change might require some desperate measures, since it seems doubtful we’ll resist the temptation of all that coal and shale oil…I wouldn’t want to own real estate in Bangladesh. But most of our current problems probably can be solved, at least individually.
But many of those “solutions” will inevitably create their own problems – just as the Haber-Bosch process, which saved first Europe and later Asia from famine in the 20th century has created a host of problems that we’re going to need to tackle in the 21st – and there will be other, completely new issues. More and more balls to juggle, and we only need to drop one to create a true disaster.
So the question is not whether we can keep the whole growth mess trucking along for another century or so, the question is why would we want to. Why, when we have it within our reach to go another route: let the population begin to slowly decrease, while using productivity gains to maintain and spread the standard of living that right now only a small minority of humanity can hope to have.
If there is one thing – one single thing – that Western civilization has figured out in the late 20th century, it seems to be a way to stop population expansion without going down the traditional, bloody paths of war or famine. Women’s rights, reliable contraception, secularism, environmental awareness, retirement systems – whatever the magic ingredients are, they seem to finally be working.
It absolutely floors me that there are people who, when faced with what looks to me like the triumph, the saving grace of high-impact technological civilization in the face of so many obvious downsides and failings, so much oppression and industrialized death, want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by encouraging people – paying them outright, in some cases – to have more babies. Insanity.
My suburb, and city, are experiencing just the opposite – a demographic explosion. Traffic is horrendous; we seem to live in a semi-permanent construction zone due to constant demolition of houses and gardens with big ugly crowded dwellings built to replace them; violent crime and vandalism are increasing drastically no thanks to a higher population of ill-disciplined youths. For me, all this is extremely unpleasant and stressful. I find myself fantasizing about much of humanity being decimated by some virus epidemic; or of waking up one day to find all other humans had disappeared. Of course I would not last long either, but at least my environment would be peaceful in the interim. I want this chaos to end, to be destroyed.
Letter, The Age, 22/3:
We all pay a high price for growth
Alan Davies called for a more evidence-based analysis of the issues associated with growth (“Problems with fringe-dwelling are peripheral”, The Age, 19/3). He failed to offer any evidence that growth, either by sprawl or infill, improves any aspect of our lives.
Although Davies regards it as trivial, urban development claims more arable land globally than desertification, salination and erosion put together. Ten per cent of all arable land was lost to development in the 15 years to 2000. Australia’s high-quality horticultural soils are scarce and mostly localised, not coincidentally, near (or now under) our major cities.
The only argument for population growth is economic, but it benefits few at the cost of the many. A Florida study found that every dollar of benefit generated by new development cost between $1.38 and $1.72 for required additional services.
Another Florida report found that the fastest growing counties had the highest growth in taxes — to pay for all the infrastructure. The costs of growth, in environment, lifestyle, climate change or even just cold, hard cash, are much greater than the costs of ageing.
– Jane O’Sullivan, Chelmer, Qld
