And Then There Were Too Many
The latest census in Ukraine revealed an apocalyptic drop of 10%
in its population - from 52.5 million a decade ago to a mere
47.5 million last year. Demographers predict a precipitous
decline of one third in Russia's impoverished, inebriated,
disillusioned, and ageing citizenry. Births in many countries in
the rich, industrialized, West are below the replacement rate.
These bastions of conspicuous affluence are shriveling.
Scholars and decision-makers - once terrified by the Malthusian
dystopia of a "population bomb" - are more sanguine now.
Advances in agricultural technology eradicated hunger even in
teeming places like India and China. And then there is the old
idea of progress: birth rates tend to decline with higher
education levels and growing incomes. Family planning has had
resounding successes in places as diverse as Thailand, China,
and western Africa.
In the near past, fecundity used to compensate for infant
mortality. As the latter declined - so did the former. Children
are means of production in many destitute countries. Hence the
inordinately large families of the past - a form of insurance
against the economic outcomes of the inevitable demise of some
of one's off-spring.
Yet, despite these trends, the world's populace is augmented by
80 million people annually. All of them are born to the younger
inhabitants of the more penurious corners of the Earth. There
were only 1 billion people alive in 1804. The number doubled a
century later.
But our last billion - the sixth - required only 12 fertile
years. The entire population of Germany is added every half a
decade to both India and China. Clearly, Mankind's growth is out
of control, as affirmed in the 1994 Cairo International
Conference on Population and Development.
Dozens of millions of people regularly starve - many of them to
death. In only one corner of the Earth - southern Africa - food
aid is the sole subsistence of entire countries. More than 18
million people in Zambia, Malawi, and Angola survived on
charitable donations in 1992. More than 10 million expect the
same this year, among them the emaciated denizens of erstwhile
food exporter, Zimbabwe.
According to Medecins Sans Frontiere, AIDS kills 3 million
people a year, Tuberculosis another 2 million. Malaria decimates
2 people every minute. More than 14 million people fall prey to
parasitic and infectious diseases every year - 90% of them in
the developing countries.
Millions emigrate every year in search of a better life. These
massive shifts are facilitated by modern modes of
transportation. But, despite these tectonic relocations - and
despite famine, disease, and war, the classic Malthusian
regulatory mechanisms - the depletion of natural resources -
from arable land to water - is undeniable and gargantuan.
Our pressing environmental issues - global warming, water
stress, salinization, desertification, deforestation, pollution,
loss of biological diversity - and our ominous social ills -
crime at the forefront - are traceable to one, politically
incorrect, truth:
There are too many of us. We are way too numerous. The
population load is unsustainable. We, the survivors, would be
better off if others were to perish. Should population growth
continue unabated - we are all doomed.
Doomed to what?
Numerous Cassandras and countless Jeremiads have been falsified
by history. With proper governance, scientific research,
education, affordable medicines, effective family planning, and
economic growth - this planet can support even 10-12 billion
people. We are not at risk of physical extinction and never have
been.
What is hazarded is not our life - but our quality of life. As
any insurance actuary will attest, we are governed by
statistical datasets.
Consider this single fact:
About 1% of the population suffer from the perniciously
debilitating and all-pervasive mental health disorder,
schizophrenia. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were
16.5 million schizophrenics - nowadays there are 64 million.
Their impact on friends, family, and colleagues is exponential -
and incalculable. This is not a merely quantitative leap. It is
a qualitative phase transition.
Or this:
Large populations lead to the emergence of high density urban
centers. It is inefficient to cultivate ever smaller plots of
land. Surplus manpower moves to centers of industrial
production. A second wave of internal migrants caters to their
needs, thus spawning a service sector. Network effects generate
excess capital and a virtuous cycle of investment, employment,
and consumption ensues.
But over-crowding breeds violence (as has been demonstrated in
experiments with mice). The sheer numbers involved serve to
magnify and amplify social anomies, deviate behaviour, and
antisocial traits. In the city, there are more criminals, more
perverts, more victims, more immigrants, and more racists per
square mile.
Moreover, only a planned and orderly urbanization is desirable.
The blights that pass for cities in most third world countries
are the outgrowth of neither premeditation nor method. These
mega-cities are infested with non-disposed of waste and prone to
natural catastrophes and epidemics.
No one can vouchsafe for a "critical mass" of humans, a
threshold beyond which the species will implode and vanish.
Luckily, the ebb and flow of human numbers is subject to three
regulatory demographic mechanisms, the combined action of which
gives hope.
The Malthusian Mechanism
Limited resources lead to wars, famine, and diseases and, thus,
to a decrease in human numbers. Mankind has done well to check
famine, fend off disease, and staunch war. But to have done so
without a commensurate policy of population control was
irresponsible.
The Assimilative Mechanism
Mankind is not divorced from nature. Humanity is destined to be
impacted by its choices and by the reverberations of its
actions. Damage caused to the environment haunts - in a complex
feedback loop - the perpetrators.
Examples:
Immoderate use of antibiotics leads to the eruption of
drug-resistant strains of pathogens. A myriad types of cancer
are caused by human pollution. Man is the victim of its own
destructive excesses.
The Cognitive Mechanism
Humans intentionally limit the propagation of their race through
family planning, abortion, and contraceptives. Genetic
engineering will likely intermesh with these to produce
"enhanced" or "designed" progeny to specifications.
We must stop procreating. Or, else, pray for a reduction in our
numbers. This could be achieved benignly, for instance by
colonizing space, or the ocean depths - both remote and
technologically unfeasible possibilities. Yet, the alternative
is cataclysmic. Unintended wars, rampant disease, and lethal
famines will ultimately trim our numbers - no matter how noble
our intentions and how diligent our efforts to curb them.
Is this a bad thing?
Not necessarily. To my mind, even a Malthusian resolution is
preferable to the alternative of slow decay, uniform
impecuniosity, and perdition in instalments - an alternative
made inexorable by our collective irresponsibility and denial.