Imagine (not quite) all the people

A really, really long post but one which means a lot to me.

There are a whole litany of serious environmental and resource-depletion crises besetting this amazing Earth. We're fairly well aware of Climate Change and Peak Oil because of media exposure and their direct impacts on us, but there's also the destruction of habitats and the resulting mass extinctions, the over-exploitation of fisheries leading to ecosystem collapses... and on and on it goes. At some level we can frequently find links between these issues and purely human problems like war, poverty and disease.

Everybody in the developed world knows all of this. Most of us care to some degree but are generally too involved in our immediate, day-to-day concerns to try and do anything serious about alleviating these problems. Most of the time it all just seems overwhelming. But in the backs of our minds lurks one simple, indisputable, dangerous fact which offers a solution to all of these woes and at the same time is almost anathema:

The Earth would be far better off if there were not so many people living on it.

It doesn't sound so scary on the surface, but let's scratch at it a little. Arbitrarily, let's say we think that three billion of us would be a nice sustainable number. That's a bit less than half the number of people living today. How do we get from here to there?

If it would save the world, would it be justifiable to deliberately kill off half of humanity? I don't think so. But not everybody would agree with me. White supremacists, for example, would be very quick to suggest which half of the population should inherit the Earth. Still, simply halving the population is a foolish notion anyway because the real long-term problem is with population growth.

Pretend that our current world population of six-odd billion is sustainable in environmental and resource availability terms. Then ponder for a moment (a long moment, preferably) how we might keep the population at that level and no higher.

This is the really hard bit. Remember my recent post about how values drive behaviour? (Here) As far as I can recall, Maslov didn't explicitly talk about humans having a "need" to have children. Perhaps he should have, or perhaps it's just so obvious it didn't need to be mentioned. But I believe that as clever and "evolved" as we are, we are still deeply driven by instinctive, natural forces to go forth and multiply. Every single one of your ancestors, right back to Adam or the Amoeba (depending on your world view) did exactly that. It's who you are. It's intrinsic to the nature of every living thing.

Over time that instinct has been reinforced by the natural law of strength in numbers. Species which have more offspring tend to have a survival advantage whether it be through simply playing the numbers game (like sea turtles) or through group behaviours (like ants or bees).

Getting back to that simple, indisputable, dangerous idea... I think we find the notion of population limits so troubling because it's unnatural.

My wife and I have three children, each of them deliberately conceived and dearly loved. It's natural and wonderful and I delight in my family. But in choosing to have a third child I have become part of the overpopulation problem.

(In my defense let me note that Michelle was about five months pregnant already when I had the emotional breakdown which resulted in me taking up the cause of sustainability. We won't be having a fourth.)

I get to wondering about what possible hope there might be for the future. It seems obvious to me that if we continue on our present and entirely natural track we're going to repeat the Easter Island story on a global scale, or something similarly catastrophic. Somehow we must become self-limiting not only in our consumption of resources (which we are actually starting to do!) but also in our reproduction.

Pause there and take a breather before I try and condense all of the above into a single paragraph...

We're bringing calamity upon ourselves and the rest of the world as a result of us simply doing what comes naturally. It's not ethical (or in any way practical) to try and cull the existing population. Saving the world will require nothing less than all six billion of us agreeing to deliberately limit the number of descendants we have, in direct defiance of nature itself. Failure to do this could result in the extinction of humanity and possibly of most or all life on Earth.

It's an impossibly daunting idea.

But just imagine if it could be done. What would such a society be like to live in? If we're going to succeed in the long term I suspect we'll see well-established pockets of this kind of society by 2050.

By definition I'm not talking about a "one child policy" such as exists in China. That's a strategy for reducing population rather than maintaining a steady one. In a steady-state population each adult would have exactly two children, on average.

Perhaps a "two child policy" will form the basis of our future civilisation. For the sake of human rights I don't think it's something which should be in any way enforceable by law - if a couple wanted fourteen children I feel it would be morally wrong to forceably prevent them from having them (assuming that the children would be properly cared for). But at the same time if birth numbers were carefully monitored then a system of "voluntary allocation" could be devised to help keep the population steady.

Start with the notion that beyond the inherent right to reproduce, it's reasonable for every person to have two children. Of course you need two people to make a child so this is not a doubling process. Each child represents two combined "rights" from two parents.

I suspect that in a society with a strong philosophy of sustainable population there would be an increased number of people who would choose to remain childless. It may be that they wish to live a life of rich experience without parental responsibility. Or they may feel that the best way for them to contribute to society would be by devoting themselves to professional or philanthrophic endeavours. Such a person could notionally "give up" their right to have two children and in doing so make it reasonable that another couple somewhere might have one more. (Remember that individuals don't have children - couples do. Making one child requires two "rights" to come together.)

It's almost certain that there will always be premature deaths. If an adult dies before having produced any offspring then "their" children could reasonably be had by somebody else. Should a child die, I imagine the bereaved parents would be considered to have the right to bear another should they so desire - but if they chose not to then it seems reasonable that another couple might have an additional child to make up for the one lost.

On the other side of the equation there are those who become parents of more than two children by accident or who simply desire a larger family. In a voluntary steady-state population there would ideally be enough people making deliberate family planning decisions on the basis of the overall population balance that a zero growth rate could be maintained.

I reckon I could live in a world like that. One more thing before I wrap this up: could it possibly work in real life on a global scale?

Honestly, I have no idea. On the positive side I do know that people can choose to alter their behaviour if their values demand they do something other than what's "natural". Witness suicide bombers...

The negatives are pretty big though. Avoiding pregnancy requires either contraception or sexual restraint - already a big challenge in the developing world for several reasons. As far as I know the world's system of economics considers population growth to be necessary thing. And in strategic military terms a larger population is generally more powerful than a smaller one (the old strength in numbers thing) and there's more than enough national, racial and religious tension in the world to make that a current concern.

Yet again for me it comes down to a question of values. If humanity wanted to maintain a sustainable population, I believe it certainly could do so.

What do you think? If you agree with me, what can we do to bring about this kind of change in the world?

Thanks so much for reading.