On (Adults) Growing Up in the World They Created

Human beings have an inherent problem of scale. When things get too big, whether buildings or systems, we start to distance ourselves from them. If they get so big that they overwhelm us in their complexity and seriousness we, childlike, close our eyes. Why, we must ask, are we paralyzed in the presence of this enormity of global overpopulation and what can we do to overcome it? To understand the dangers implicit in this behavior and find ways to counter it is one of mankind's greatest tasks if it is to survive the convergence of the massive forces descending upon us. All responsible experts, by which I mean those capable of taking evidence as the basis for judgment, now agree that the big word is "if." One of the problems with even this observation is that the word if is enough to generate childlike irresponsibility. That is, if we even suspect we can't do it, why try.

These thoughts occurred to me while reading an excellent essay by Professor Ken Small. The essay titled Global population reduction: confronting the inevitable can be found at file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Robert/Application%20Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ozc2s59x.default/ScrapBook/data/20090205223848/index.html

One approach is sometimes called the salami method, that is slicing up the problem into smaller more "manageable" parts. This approach, while certainly more accommodating of our human limitations, has several risks built into it that must be recognized and addressed. First it requires that the problem be well enough understood so that it is broken into its constituent pieces at relevant, addressable, sections. This in itself is complicated by all the factors that must be considered in this reduction process. Population growth includes the problem of contravening ingrained human values, e.g. the "need" to have children. It has an ethnic value, e.g. if we don't maintain our numbers our culture will perish. It has the problem of redistributing the world's resources and the very idea of ownership.

The next problem is how to orchestrate this salami technique so that the most necessary of these various "slices" are addressed at a time and in a sequence that will get the results we need. As you will note from Small's essay he is looking at the generation, approximately 20 years, as the basic "slice" to orchestrate the needed changes. He anticipates about 200 years of generational change to bring the earth's human population down to a sustainable level. This process allows us to begin asking, "What should my generation do to further this population reduction. This in tern presents us, if all the conditions of thought and understanding I mentioned above are met, to begin productively thinking, planning and acting so that the next generation will have a basis to build on.

So the issue for this generation is to articulate the problem as best we can and find the cut points for "slicing." Identify this generation's slice; that is what we need to accomplish in the next 20 years? Then, plan and promote the process and actions tjat must be undertaken. There will, of course, be a lot of learning from experience as we progress. We will have to use our intelligence to outsmart our human nature. In the future I will try to present some thoughts on how we might proceed in such an endeavourer.

For purposes of illustration let us postulate a global population of 10 billion by 2050. This is actually within the margin of possibility. Taking the upper limit for a sustainable population of 2 billion, which is upper midrange in the estimated earth carrying capacity, we would need to reduce population by 8 billion in 200 years or 10 generations. This would, in crude terms, require a reduction rate of about 800 million per generation. One could expect, however, that as mankind acculturated itself to the necessity of this reduction that it would take place at a faster rate the further along the process went.

But let us target on this generation's 800 million. Understanding the goal is to sufficiently reduce global population with as little violence as possible. What priorities should be set to achieve the necessary reduction?

Immediately it becomes obvious that the least violent method of reducing population is to reduce the birth rate. Thus we need a massive investment in birth control. This immediately runs into an intreched religious resistance found in our culture. We will have to make the consequences of not reducing human population so clear, as Al Gore did with global warming, that this can be overcome. It probably will require limiting family size. China's one child per couple policy, which with a variety of exemptions applies to 36% of the population, has prevented over 250 million births between the program's inception in 1979 and 2000. This is an average of about 166 million per generation. This begins to provide a scale to measure what needs to be done if we are to achieve a global 800 million reduction for the world as a whole in this first generation. It is important to understand why only 36% of the Chinese population was required to participate in the program. For instance one of the major exemptions was for rural families because they needed children for a labor force. Parents who were themselves only children were allowed to have more than one child for family lineage purposes. Thus the Chinese took into account both economic and cultural concerns. China has about 16.5% of the world's population of 6 billion. A global population reduction done on the same scale for the same 20 years would have been 960 million, well over our 800 million 20-year target. This suggests that the Chinese approach could be used as a model to be modified by cultural and other demands, just as China modified their plan for cultural and economic purposes. This further suggests that if one society of 1 billion can achieve these results without major conflict that it may be possible for the world at large to do so. I am well aware of the downside of the Chinese effort, eg. killing female babies by exposure to ensure a male child to carry on the family name. These are cultural factors that need to be improved. However, the consequences of not making these reductions will be far more disastrous for humanity than maintaining the current methods of family inheritance or lineage.

Bob Newhard