Nobody Ever Dies of overpopulation
Posted by: "Abernethy, Virginia Deane" virginia.abernethy@Vanderbilt.Edu
Date: Wed Sep 10, 2008 4:40 pm ((PDT))
Dr. Garrett Hardin's classic paper, written in the aftermath of a cyclone that killed thousands in Bangladesh, was published as an Editorial in Science, February 12, 1971 [Vol. 171, # 3971].
Dr. Hardin opposed mass immigration and was a founder of Population-Environment Balance. He designed its logo. Papers from a festchrift in his honor were published in the academic journal Population and Environment in Spring, 1991.
Several years ago, becoming unable to care for themselves and members of the Hemlock Society, Dr. Hardin and his wife acted on their joint suicide pact. They are survived by their children and grandchildren.
Nobody Ever Dies of Overpopulation
By Garrett Hardin (in Science, Feb 12, 1971)
Those of us who are deeply concerned about population and the environment -
"econuts," we're called, - are accused of seeing herbicides in trees, pollution in running brooks, radiation in rocks, and overpopulation everywhere. There is merit in the accusation.
I was in Calcutta when the cyclone struck East Bengal in November 1970. Early dispatches spoke of 15,000 dead, but the estimates rapidly escalated to 2,000,000 and then dropped back to 500,000. A nice round number: it will do as well as any, for we will never
know. The nameless ones who died, "unimportant" people far beyond the fringes of the social power structure, left no trace of their existence. Pakistani parents repaired the population loss in just 40 days, and the world turned its attention to other matters.1
What killed those unfortunate people? The cyclone, newspapers said. But one can just as logically say that overpopulation killed them.
The Gangetic Delta is barely above sea level.
Every year several thousand people are killed in quite ordinary storms.
If Pakistan were not overcrowded, no sane man would bring his family to such a place.
Ecologically speaking, a delta belongs to the river and the sea; man obtrudes there at his peril.
In the web of life every event has many antecedents. Only by an arbitrary decision can we designate a single antecedent as "cause." Our choice is biased - biased to protect our egos against the onslaught of unwelcome truths. As T.S. Eliot put it in Burnt Norton: Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.
Were we to identify overpopulation as the cause of a half-million deaths, we would threaten ourselves with a question to which we do not know the answer:
How can we control population without recourse to repugnant measures? Fearfully we close our minds to an inventory of possibilities.
Instead, we say that a cyclone caused the deaths, thus relieving ourselves of responsibility for this and future catastrophes. "Fate" is so comforting.
Every year we list tuberculosis, leprosy, enteric diseases, or animal parasites as the "cause of death" of millions of people. It is well known that malnutrition is an important antecedent of death in all these categories; and that malnutrition is connected with overpopulation. But overpopulation is not called the cause of death.
We cannot bear the thought.
People are dying now of respiratory diseases in Tokyo, Birmingham, and Gary, because of the "need" for more industry. The "need" for more food justifies overfertilization of the land, leading to eutrophication of the waters, and lessened fish production - which leads to more "need" for food.
What will we say when the power shuts down some fine summer on our eastern seaboard and several thousand people die of heat prostration? Will we blame the weather? Or the power companies for not building enough generators? Or the econuts for insisting on pollution controls?
One thing is certain: we won't blame the deaths on overpopulation. No one ever dies of overpopulation. It is unthinkable.
1 The UN Population Card indicates that the population of Bangladesh has a net gain of 6 persons per minute. Please see the article about the Population Card on page 216.
Andrew McKillop, Sept 09
ReplyDeleteFrom Zero Oil Growth to Zero Population Growth
One "emerging consensus view" is that world oil demand will ceiling if not crater. Peak Oil has won converts, some of them even able to openly admit it is real, but most G20 government attempts at selling oil saving and oil substitution to consumers is set as Climate Change mitigation linked, part and parcel of the hunting down of the Evil Molecule called CO2.
A new accessory to the claimed climate change mitigation imperative for quitting oil, or in fact simply reducing consumption rates is that Global Green Energy will generate jobs and profits.
In reality, geological depletion of global oil reserves is the real reason we suddenly have to go green and hunt down GHG. By 2025-2030 world oil supply could be down 25% or more
from today's output, and export supply or "offer" will shrink even faster, probably by 33% to 40% from today's export supply.
Zero Oil Growth is therefore now politically acceptable, and socially approved.
Talk of ZPG for Zero Population Growth is still on a lot shakier ground for media and political
opinion manipulators, but like Zero Oil Growth has some very powerful logic behind it.
In the 20thC world population nearly quadrupled from around 1.55 billion in 1900 to about 6.05 billion in year 2000.
Nobody in their right mind, today, claims it could quadruple this century, to about 24 billion.
This would be they type of nightmare Garrett Hardin often described.
If the world's population quadrupled in the 21stC like it quadrupled in the 20thC, the end of the human race would not be possible, but almost 100% sure and certain.
Mass starvation would be the norm unless fantastic tech breakthroughs happened. World ecosystems would be placed under such intense pressure any future dependence by human beings on natural systems would be impossible. Water supplies for cities would be so low and so expensive that only draconian and permanent rationing could allow basic human daily water requirements to be met. World remaining oil, gas, coal and even uranium reserves would disappear in an eyeblink, unless per capita energy demand fell, and continued falling.
Climate change would probably attain such peak rates that the worst possible scenarios used by the IPCC would be exceeded.
Population boomers are however still at work. This includes the newly victorious Democratic Party of Japan, insisting that restoring or strengthening population growth is vital for the nation and good for everybody in Japan.
Above all, the most basic reason that population growth is claimed as being good is that it appears or seems to almost guarantee 'classic' economic growth. This is the basic problem for changing the mindset of political and business leaders on ZPG, until we arrive at intractable crisis conditions.