Recapitulation and a Look Ahead

The cosmopolitan approach is required for some worldwide problems, such as ozone depletion, acid rain, and the exhaustion of oceanic fisheries. By contrast, potholes and population call for a parochial orientation. But if local "laissez-faire" in population matters is interpreted to mean no borders, a suicidal commons results. To survive, rich nations must refuse immigration to people who are poor because their governments are unable or unwilling to stop population growth. With its borders secured, how is a nation to control its own population growth? In one sense population control is inevitable; in another problematical. If the citizens of a nation pay absolutely no attention to their numbers, population will eventually be controlled by "nature"—by disease, starvation, and the social disorders that follow from too many people fighting for limited resources. But when wellwishers call for "population control" they mean something gentler than nature's ultimate response. Can we now predict what form successful human measures will take? I don't think we can, because the question demands that we successfully predict human history. Who, in the year 1700, could have predicted the Constitution of the United States? Who, in 1900, could have predicted Chernobyl? What happens in history is the result of the interaction of (first) the dependable "Laws of Nature" with (second) the apparent capriciousness of human nature. As concerns the first component, Francis Bacon should be our guide: "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Coming to the second factor we turn to the inventor of the holograph, the Nobelist Dennis Gabor: "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented." Ignorance of this insight leads the public to take too seriously the projections of demographers (who rightly insist that they cannot predict the future). Demographers merely project curves—present trends—into the unknown future, all the while knowing—as Rene Dubos said-—that trend is not destiny. This book has been one long dissertation on the laws of nature that must be obeyed, namely: the properties of exponential growth; limits generally; the properties of usury; the significance of human unreliability; and the consequences of reproductive competition (including natural selection). But within these limitations lie many possibilities of population control. Some controls are kinder than others.

Population Control: Natural versus Human

Were we able to talk with other animals, it is extremely unlikely that we should hear them debating the problem of population control. They don't need to debate: nature solves the problem for them. And what is the problem? Simply this: to keep a successful species from being too successful. To keep it from eating itself out of house and home. And the solution? Simply predation and disease, which play the role that human beings might label "providence." As far as the written record reveals, no one recognized the self-elimination of a species as a potential problem for animals until the danger had become suspected among human beings. One of the earliest descriptions of this population problem for other animals was given by the Reverend Joseph Townsend, an English geologist. His key contribution was published in 1786, twelve years before Malthus's celebrated essay (Box 25-1). Townsend was dependent upon others for the outline of his story, and there is some question as to whether the details are historically correct. But the thrust of the story must be true: a single species (goats, in this case) exploiting a resource (plants) cannot, by itself, maintain a stable equilibrium at a comfortable level of living. The animals will either die after eating up all the food, or their numbers will fluctuate painfully. (Details differ, depending on the species and the environment.) Stability and prosperity require that the gift of exponential growth be opposed by some sort of countervailing force (predatory dogs, in Townsend's example). However deplorable predators may be for individuals who happen to be captured and eaten, for the prey population as a whole predators are (over time) a blessing. With millions of different species of animals there are many different particular explanations of how they manage to persist for thousands or millions of years. The species we are most interested in is, of course, Homo sapiens. A meditation on Townsend's account led to a challenging set of questions. "If all this great earth be no more than the Island of Juan Fernandes, and if we are the goats, how can we live "the good life" without a functional equivalent of the dogs? Must we create and sustain our own dogs? Can we do so, consciously? And if we can, what manner of beast will they be?"

The Benign Demographic Transition

The child survival hypothesis is immensely popular with politicians, religious leaders, and executives of organizations engaged in foreign philanthropy, because it justifies the anti-Malthusian and tender-minded belief that reducing infant mortality will automatically bring about a reduction in fertility. The belief easily converts into policy, because saving babies is something we know how to do. Nonetheless, the term child survival hypothesis is not widely known outside professional circles. By contrast, the theory of the "demographic transition" has been extensively popularized over several decades. Its meaning can, however, stand a bit of clarification. The theory was born French: in 1934 Adolphe Landry wrote of the revolution demographique.' A decade later this was translated into the familiar English form. By 1969 a widely used population textbook expressed the common, if not the predominant, opinion of demographers when it identified the theory as "one of the best documented generalizations in the social sciences." Documented it certainly is: the literature is appallingly large. But documented does not mean proved. Ironically (in the words of demographer Michael Teitelbaum), "its explanatory power has come into increasing scientific doubt at the very time that it is achieving its greatest acceptance by nonscientists. In scientific circles, only modest claims are now made for transition theory." That was said in 1975. Ten years later Teitelbaum and Winter put the matter more forcefully: "It is doubtful whether this theory was ever truly a theory at all (that is, a set of hypotheses with predictive force)." Before we look into its predictive abilities we need to find out exactly what the theory asserts. This is not easy because the theory is almost never carefully and rigorously described. We need once more to call upon the art of graphing. Transition theory assumes a finite world. For most of the world, most of the time, both birth rate and death rate have been in the neighborhood of 40 per thousand population per year.5 When the two rates are equal, ZPG (zero population growth) prevails. Despite perennial fluctuations in population size at different locations, the average growth rate of the entire human population for the past million years has been very close to ZPG, namely 0.02 percent per year. At this growth rate the population doubles every 3,500 years—hardly a population explosion!

Trying to Escape Malthus

Before Malthus appeared on the scene, William Godwin recognized that the expanding population might ultimately produce an unfavorable ratio of population to resources which could create a problem. Five years later Malthus viewed this problem as an inevitable result of human nature reacting to a world of limits. Godwin, however (in the passage previously quoted at the end of Box 3-1) had proposed to solve the population by changing human nature. He suggested that some day our species might "cease to propagate." Since this was written in England two hundred years ago, in the absence of contradictory evidence we can only assume that Godwin was postulating an end to human sexual activity. He no doubt thought the sacrifice would be worthwhile because, in his Utopia, there would be "no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment." Most of Godwin's suppositions are too ridiculous to linger over, but one of them deserves an extended analysis because it touches on a general principle that will be called upon repeatedly as we continue to look for ways to avoid overpopulation. There is not the ghost of a chance that the human species will ever "cease to propagate." The reason is found in the great discovery made by Charles Darwin sixty years later: selection. Suppose, following Godwin, that the natural fertility of our species evolves almost all the way to zero. Then what? Initially, fertile individuals might be but a tiny minority of the whole; but, over time, selection would ensure the dominance of the fertile fraction. If there were even the slightest genetic basis for fecundity in human beings (as indeed there is in other animals) then fertile human beings would in time replace the infertile. To postulate a selection for universal sterility (as Godwin's scheme would require) is to perpetrate an oxymoron. Nature does not work with oxymorons. We who are alive now are the descendents of an unbroken line of fertile ancestors. This line extends back millions of years to the first humanoids—indeed, billions of years to the beginning of sexual life of any kind. Powerful though she is, Nature cannot create a self-sustaining, totally infertile, sexual species.

Generating the Future

An enduring problem of social life is what to do about the future. Can we predict it? Can we control it? How much sacrifice are we willing to make in the present for the promise of a better future? The questions are harrowing, and agreement comes hard. The year 1921 was a time of famine in some parts of the newly formed Soviet Union. An American journalist, visiting a refugee camp on the Volga, reported that almost half of the people had died of starvation. Noticing some sacks of grain stacked on an adjacent field, he asked the patriarch of the refugee community why the people did not simply overpower the lone soldier guarding the grain and help themselves. The patriarch impatiently explained that the seed was being saved for next season's planting. "We do not steal from the future," he said. It would be too much to claim that only the human animal is capable of imagining what is yet to come, but it is difficult to believe that any other animal can have so keen an appreciation of the demands of the future. Alfred Korbzybski (1879- 1950) called man "the time-binding animal." Binding the future to the present makes sense only if understandable mechanisms connect the two. This understanding was notably missing in the writings of the anarchist-journalist William Godwin. Unlike Malthus, he could make no sense of the fluctuations of human numbers. "Population," he said, "if we consider it historically, appears to be a fitful principle, operating intermittedly and by starts. This is the great mystery of the subject.. .. One of the first ideas that will occur to a reflecting mind is, that the cause of these irregularities cannot be of itself of regular and uniform operation. It cannot be [as Malthus says] 'the numbers of mankind at all times pressing hard against the limits of the means of subsistence.'" Rather than trying to see how appearances might be reconciled with natural laws, Godwin simply said there were no natural laws. His proposal to replace law with "fhfulness" led one of his critics to comment: "Perhaps Godwin was simply carrying his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science."

Uneasy Litter Mates: Population and Progress

In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus reported that there had been a time when a person could walk across North Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and be always in the shade of trees. No more: the land was well on the way to becoming the desert we know today. Herodotus generalized: "Man stalks across the landscape, and deserts follow in his footsteps." In the tenth century A.D., a Samanid prince identified four earthly paradises: the regions of Samarkand, southern Persia, southern Iraq, and Damascus. No one who has visited any of these sites now would dream of calling it a paradise. They have been cursed with wars, but warfare is only a secondary cause of their degradation. Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize—destroy—move on. When the Pollyannas write history they focus only on the first of these three actions, the desirable effects of which were most evident during the rapid colonization of the New World. In 1845 a now obscure American journalist coined a deathless phrase when he spoke of "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." "Manifest destiny" is one of those catchphrases we love. We would not welcome the words of a journalist who identified colonization as but a prelude to destruction and abandonment. The restless "moving on" of the human species has depended on always having fresh land to move to. Optimists are not easily frightened by the results, of course: as late as 1980 one Pollyanna brightly explained how all turned out for the best in this best of all possible worlds: "Each year deserts the world over engulf an area the size of Massachusetts. A great deal of land lost is agricultural. . . . Fortunately, however, land is always being replaced or coming under cultivation to make up for land lost." An ecologist—ever guided by the question "And then what?"—would insist on a clarification of the above quotation: Does "always" mean "forever"? If so, it implies that there are no limits to earthly space. It is not surprising that ecologists are not the most popular of people in a growth-oriented economy.

Overpopulation: Escape to the Stars?

"Why worry about too many people on earth when we have the whole universe to expand into? Europe solved its population problems earlier by shipping the excess off to the New World: why can't we continue this process? Already our space programs have pointed the way." This possibility is constantly raised in public meetings and should be taken seriously. So long as there is a glimmer of hope in sidestepping the problem of overpopulation by escaping to the stars, many people will refuse to grapple with the problem of adjusting to earthly limits. In the 1950s a Monsignor Irving A. DeBlanc deplored "an often expressed idea that birth control is the only answer to problems created by a fast-growing world population." Instead of trying to curb population growth, said DeBlanc, we should welcome it and make plans to ship off the excess. Thus we could continue humanity's millennia-old tradition of moving to a new home after making a mess of our old one. We can grant that DeBlanc's intentions were good. They fitted in with his value system: he was the director of the National Catholic Welfare Conference's Family Life Bureau, an organization committed to encouraging large families. Their publicity was addressed principally to Roman Catholics. Some Catholics endorse space migration because the church hierarchy opposes artificial methods of birth control. But we must not forget that science itself has become something of a religion to millions of people. The marvels of technology have brought many people to an uncritical worship of a god called "Progress," which is sometimes equated with perpetual growth. If this means that the control of population growth is immoral there remains only migration to the stars to correct for overpopulation on earth. Thus can theistic and atheistic religions meet at the crossroads of conception. In 1958, four years after the founding of NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—its congressional guardian, the Science and Astronautics Committee, supported the idea of space migration as an ultimate solution to the problem of a "bursting population." The hired technical staff of NASA no doubt thought poorly of proposals like DeBlanc's; but when an agency is fighting for the space that counts—space at the public trough—its administrators are in no hurry to correct statements that increase the size of their budget.

The Challenge of Limits

A funny thing happened on the way to the second nationwide Earth Day in 1990. Twenty years earlier the first Earth Day had been saluted with much talk about population problems. At that time world population stood at 3.6 billion. But when the second Earth Day rolled around, the topic of population was almost completely ignored. Was that because world population had stopped growing? Hardly: in the intervening two decades it had increased 47 percent to an estimated 5.3 billion— an increase of 1.7 billion (more than six times the present population of the United States). Common sense tells us that the per capita share of environmental riches must decrease as population numbers increase, and waste disposal necessarily becomes an ever greater problem. Of course common sense is sometimes wrong. But if that is so in this instance, the celebrants of the 1990 Earth Day should have been shouting, "We've found the secret of perpetual growth!" A few incurable optimists did defend this position, but most people lumped their claims with those of the flat earthers, ignoring both. The celebrants were generally silent about the 47 percent increase in population. Why? The answer comes in two parts, the first being historical. It is now known that the planners of Earth Day 1990 were under economic pressure to leave population out of the picture. When directors of philanthropic foundations and business concerns were solicited for financial support they let it be known that they would not look kindly on a population emphasis. Money talks, silence can be bought. (Why the bankrollers shied at population will become clear later.) The second aspect of the answer is more subtle. It has long been recognized that some of our most deeply held views are not neat, precise propositions but broadly "global" attitudes that act as the gatekeepers of the mind, letting in only those propositions that do not challenge the dominant picture of reality. Germans call such gatekeeper attitudes Weltanschauungen, an impressive mouthful that is quite adequately translated as "worldviews." For all but the last few hundred years of human history the dominant worldview was a limited view: resources were limited, human nature was fixed, and spending beyond one's income was a sin. This essentially conservative perception prevailed until about 1600.

Carrying Capacity

An often quoted passage of Arthur Conan Doyle's story "Silver Blaze" makes the point that the absence of data can be a datum. When the mystery of the purloined racehorse seems insoluble, Police Inspector Gregory asks Sherlock Holmes:… "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes…. The dog that does not bark attracts no attention to itself. It takes insight to recognize that a nonhappening can be an alarm. Herman Daly showed a Holmeslike insight when he called attention to the bark that was absent from a would-be authoritative study made by a group of economists reporting to the prestigious National Research Council in 1986 on population growth and economic development. In 108 pages of text there is not a single mention of carrying capacity, a concept that should be central to all discussions of population and environment. It is as though gravity were left out of a treatise on the dynamics of the solar system; or assets and liabilities were left out of a textbook on business accounting. If civilization survives another century, and if there are still economists, a history of what will then be called "modern economics" may well begin with a belittling account of the "premodern" economics of the twentieth century in which carrying capacity plays no role. Nothing shows so well the impermeability of the barriers between academic disciplines as the silence of economists about a concept that dominates discussions of game management, a discipline concerned with population and environment problems as they affect animals other than Homo sapiens. Economists, dealing only with human populations, probably unconsciously embrace the human exemptionist doctrine (Chapter 15), though their commitment is seldom no more than implicit in their statements (Box 20-1). Two serious criticisms can be leveled against most of the authors quoted in the box. First, it is obvious that they desperately yearn for a world without limits. This is particularly evident in the last quotation, by Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the United Nations commission that issued this statement. One can praise the heart of the commission without agreeing with the head.

Growth: Real and Spurious

One of the Rothschilds is credited with saying that "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world." How so? Because interest makes money grow, supposedly without limit. Ecologists regard the claim as arrant nonsense, for it implies a denial of Epicurean conservation. Like putative records of lifeless money in savings banks, real populations of living organisms grow by compound interest, but this biological reality does not move scientists to reverence. Biologists know that the growth of animals or plants does not violate conservation principles; biological growth merely involves the transfer of matter from the nonliving world to the living. Though new arrangements of matter— new chemical molecules—are created, the quantity of matter/energy remains the same. Before delving deeper into population theory (the topic of the next chapter) we need to see what scientific sense can be made of growth phenomena in the world of finance. In developing the argument there will be quite a bit of manipulation of numbers, but no great precision in numbers is called for. The conclusions reached will be robust, a curious academic word that means that the illustrative data can be varied over quite a wide range of values without affecting the practical conclusions. To accept compound interest at face value is to be confronted with an apparent creation of wealth. A bank account earning 5 percent compound interest per year doubles in value every 14 years. Let us indicate the initial deposit by D and time (in units of 14 years) by t. (For instance, when the number of years is 28, t = 2.) The value of the account at the end of time t is given by a simple equation: Since time (t) is written as an exponent of the number 2 we speak of this as an exponential equation and say that the value of the account grows exponentially. (There are other ways of representing the growth function, but they too involve exponents.) Figure 8-1 is a graph of the exponential growth of a bank account that draws compound interest.