While we foolishly focus our attention on jump-starting an unsustainable economy, let me remind you of where our collective focus should really be.  All causes are lost causes if they don't include addressing the issue of over population.

As Jim Kunstler writes: “The choice we face really comes down to this: do we put our dwindling resources and "hopes" into resuscitating those dying systems, or do we move forward to the next chapter of American life, cut our losses, and make new arrangements more consistent with the realities on offer from the universe?”

Most people do not want to take population problems seriously.  I suppose the answer must in part be the fear of eugenics.  People say any talk of population reduction puts us on the slippery slope to euthanasia, assisted suicide, and elimination of the "unfit."  Every ethical decision puts you on the slippery slope. You just have to live with it.  When a herd of animals is overpopulated we do not hesitate to liquidate the excess. However, anyone who speaks of carrying capacity in connection with human population problems is suspected of following the lead of the Nazis or Pol Pot.  Many people fear, and rightly so, that trying to limit our numbers can bring into existence…our Dark Side.  But it is also an ignorance of ecology that draws these suspicions and ignores the consequences.  I would hazard a guess that addressing the issue of overpopulation could be defined as an ethical question in which we have a choice between alternatives for which it is hard to find a common measure, but among which we must still choose. 

The total population of the world has remained essentially constant for most of the history of mankind. World population fluctuated between 10 million and 300 million for most of the last 10,000 years, never reaching 1 billion until about 1850. The biggest single factor in preventing sustained population growth has been infectious diseases. They were our human predator, and they helped to keep our population in check.

Prior to the discovery of the germ theory of disease in the mid-1800’s, 50% of the people born into the world died before reaching the age of five, with infectious disease being the number one cause of death. An even more significant problem was infectious plague.  Any time population became really dense, it was just a matter of time until an infectious plague exploded in the dense population and quickly returned the population to previous low levels. This was a Darwinian world.

In a society in which many children do not live to adulthood, the fastest way to increase life expectancy is by decreasing the number of childhood deaths caused by acute illness. Germ theory demonstrated that microorganisms known as germs are the cause of contagious diseases. It ushered in the science of microbiology and led to advances in immunology, sanitation and hygiene that have done more to increase the life span of humans than any other scientific advance of the past 1,000 years.

Before germ theory, illness was treated by appeals to supernatural powers or by trying to adjust body fluids through induced vomiting, bleeding, or purging. The modern approach emphasizes sanitation, the safe handling of food and water, pasteurization, quarantine, aseptic surgical techniques, vaccinations, and antibiotics to destroy microorganisms.

However, these successes came at an ecological price.  As vaccines and improved treatment insured more people survived to adulthood and their child-bearing years, the birth rate increased dramatically.  After 10,000 years with no significant sustained population growth, the world population grew from about 1 billion in 1850 to 2 billion by 1930, 3 billion by 1960, 4 billion by 1974, 5 billion by the late 1980's, and 6.7 billion in 2008, changing the ecology of the entire planet in less than 200 years. And without the advent of fossil fuels, these populations could not have been sustained, and would have gone the way of Malthus.

Garret Hardin wrote in his Tragedy of the Commons: “It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy.”

Yet, as long as those evils don’t come too close, we don’t seem to care.  We give cigarette smokers a new heart while children starve.  Those privileges come at a price, usually someone else’s life or health. Just look at the inequity in the world. We take more than our share here in the US and set it up as a standard of living, perching a misplaced sense of the sanctity of life upon it. We would like to have our cake and eat it to. But can we?

Disease can be looked upon as man’s keystone predator. “Keystone predator” is an ecological term used to describe the basic principle by which a predator may be a balancing force on an ecosystem.  For this reason, special care must be taken with identified keystone predators to keep them from being hunted out of an ecosystem.  Other than in some vials in a lab at the CDC, many of man’s keystone predators are extinct; others are of little consequence. Yes, we are no longer plagued with the evils of disease, but that was nature’s way of controlling our numbers and insuring a strong gene pool. Predators usually capture the old, crippled, sick, or very young animals. Very rarely are healthy adults caught and killed. In this way, only the strongest and healthiest animals are left to reproduce. Over long periods of time, predation actually improves the health of the prey population.

In November 1991, Jacques-Yves Cousteau reportedly said, in response to an interviewer's question, "Some snakes, mosquitoes, and other animal species pose threats or dangers for humankind. Can they be eliminated like viruses that cause certain diseases?" Cousteau said: "Getting rid of viruses is an admirable idea, but it raises enormous problems. In the first 1,400 years of the Christian era, population numbers were virtually stationary. Through epidemics, nature compensated for excess births by excess deaths. I talked about this problem with the director of the Egyptian Academy of Sciences. He told me that scientists were appalled to think that by the year 2080 the population of Egypt might reach 250 million. What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease? It's a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species. It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable."

Had we been truly intelligent, we could have limited our numbers on the commons.  Think of the world we could have had:  a small healthy population, relatively free of disease and suffering with a high quality of life—almost forever.  In our insistence to breed with freedom on the commons, we squandered that opportunity. And since the population went up due to the population sustainability of fossil fuels, it will go down as they decline—although there is uncertainty as to what a sustainable global population would be without them.

William Stanton writes, "In this time of energy abundance, and the complacency it engenders, the vast majority of the general public assumes that what the future holds is “more of the same”. They argue, if pushed, that the expertise inherited by post-fossil-fuel scientists and engineers will allow a smooth transition into a new kind of energy-rich world in which renewable generators will produce as much energy as fossil fuels do now. Such a view is untenable because it ignores the fact that almost all materials essential to modern civilization will be orders of magnitude more costly, and scarce, when they have to be produced using renewable energy instead of fossil fuels."

Garret Hardin once wrote, "Ruin is the destination towards which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

We have grown accustomed to the freedom to breed on the commons. For anyone to suggest otherwise is anathema to most people. But this unbridled growth can’t continue. We must intervene and become our own predator; a Darwinian application in all of its aspects. To many people, the mere suggestion of population control, much less reduction, is out of the question, especially if it entails addressing both the birth rate and the death rate. But like Hardin points out; we must choose — or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that mankind calls Earth.  Not the Earth itself, as that would be quite presumptuous, but its’ ability to support us.

You want freedom from disease and suffering?  You want the freedom to save as many human lives as possible? You want the freedom to preserve your moral ideals and embracement of the sanctity of life?  Fine, then you are going to have to give up the freedom to breed without restraint.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

In my last blog, I stated that ‘the human population is in severe overshoot and our phantom carrying capacity is leaving us.’  So, let’s look at a few definitions so you can have a baseline understanding of this topic.

"Drawdown” is the process by which the dominant species in an ecosystem uses up the surrounding resources faster than they can be replaced and so ends up borrowing, in one form or another, from other places and other times.

"Overshoot" is the inevitable and irreversible consequence of continued drawdown, when the use of resources in an ecosystem exceeds its carrying capacity and there is no way to recover or replace what was lost. Overshoot is a condition in which the delayed signals from the environment are not yet strong enough to force an end to growth.

"Crash and die-off", is the sequel to “overshoot”—a precipitate decline in species numbers. Once a population has exceeded the capacity of its environment, the population will decrease until it is reduced to the level at which the resources can recover and are once again adequate to sustain it.

Fossil fuels have sustained the global human population explosion and the parallel growth of industrial throughput and consumption. But it has come at a high cost to human health and the environment at large. Is the human population in “overshoot?”

Some say man is above Nature and not subject to her constraints. Richard Heinberg, puts it aptly. To quote from his book, The Party's Over, "We like to think that our intelligence and moral code sets us apart from other creatures. When other creatures gain an energy subsidy, they instinctively react by proliferating: their population goes through the well-studied stages of bloom, overshoot, and die-off. If we humans are more than mere animals, we should be expected to behave differently. Yet so far we have reacted to the energy subsidy of fossil fuels exactly the way rats, fruit flies, or bacteria respond to an abundant new food source. A hard look at the evidence tends to make one skeptical of (such) human claims to uniqueness..."

Mankind is not bacteria in a Petri dish who competes somewhat equitably with others for food, so obviously the die-off scenario will be quite different.  If we imagined ourselves as bacteria for a moment, we would see that less than 5% of the bacteria (the USA) have piled 25% of the sugar in the Petri dish on one side, setting it up as a standard of living, while 75% of the Petri dish barely survives.  Unlike animals or plants, we don’t exactly compete for food; we buy it or work for it.  And since sugar is being constantly added to the Petri dish, we are not going to see a typical crash in the population as the sugar (energy) declines, unless the inflow completely stops, or some other ‘limiting’ factor steps in. But the population will decline as the amount of available sugar declines.

The inevitable die-off necessitated by overshoot will apply differently depending upon where you are in the Petri dish.  In the third-world, the inability to purchase or grow food will cause starvation, malnutrition, and markedly increase the death rate. Many starving countries rely on exports of cash crops to survive. They won’t be able to afford IMF debt, nor the energy required for irrigation, petrochemicals, or fertilizers.

In the 1st world, our standard of living will decline markedly. In some ways, modern civilization has allowed us to redirect or satisfy the desire to reproduce by allowing us to acquire things—material possessions—in place of having children. Our material infant mortality will increase dramatically.  I see and end to NASCAR and long commutes, long-haul trucking, and an implosion of our urban sprawl and financial systems. Unemployment will rise beyond belief. People will have to actually work for a living, rather than live off investments.

This might seem, in principle, an alternative to the more literal form of die-off which is an abrupt increase in human mortality. Of course, there will be a lack of available, affordable medical care, resulting in a lower life expectancy. Poorer diets will also lower life expectancy. As the standard of living declines, more of the lower income and elderly will starve, freeze to death, or die from heat exhaustion, as do every year. Depending upon the rate of decline of available energy, the attrition could be slow or quite fast.

At first, we will live off conservation and efficiency, and then we will work down through our standard of living until such time as a balance will once again be achieved with nature.  Will we be able to find sustainability along the way and bring our population under control? Will we quickly evolve a new economy and a new basis for civilization—or continue to secure stable supplies from the rest of the world by force, as the military footprint in the Middle East suggests. 

We can hope to soften the shock, but unless there is a general awakening and decisions at the planetary scale to bring radical change in the domain of energy, civilization will confront the most acute and no doubt most violent upheaval in recent history. This unavoidable prophecy is being universally ignored, denied, or underestimated. Rare are those who realize exactly how close and how great is its’ advent.

Time will only tell.

For further reading, I highly recommend William Catton’s book, Overshoot: the Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change.