Earth is too crowded for Utopia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4584572.stm

VIEWPOINT
Chris Rapley

The global population is higher than the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he says.

[CSPP Note: For environmental utopianists, the elimination of billions of people seems an appropriate solution. As with so many issues, they often do not know what they are talking about - getting it exactly backwards. The BBC has in recent years excelled in this phenomenon. Below the Rapley opinion, is another view by demographic expert Ben Wattenberg: “Despite today's environmental hysteria, population growth really shouldn't be a central worry of the twenty-first century. How we should avoid the dynamics of population loss is the new question of the day. And the nations that answer that question best will be the ones that stand astride history.”]

Ten thousand delegates attended the recent Montreal Summit on the control of carbon emissions "beyond Kyoto".

That's a lot of people! The conference organisation must have been daunting; and just imagine arranging the hotel accommodation and restaurant facilities and dealing with the additional human-generated waste.

Imagine the carbon and nitrogen emissions from the associated air travel!

The 40 or more decisions made were announced as an historic success.

Supposing this proves to be so, will it be sufficient to secure an acceptable quality of life for the generations to come?

What about the myriad other planetary-scale human impacts - for example on land cover, the water cycle, the health of ecosystems, and biodiversity?

What about our release of other chemicals into the environment?

What about our massive transport and mixing of biological material worldwide, and our unsustainable consumption of resources?

Big foot

All of these effects interconnect and add up to the collective "footprint" of humankind on our planet's life support systems

The consequences extend to the ends of the Earth (recall the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic) and each is as difficult to predict and as challenging to deal with as the link between carbon emissions and climate.

It would surely be impractical and almost certainly ineffective to assemble 10,000 delegates to address each one of these issues, and especially to do so in the necessary "joined up" way?

And in particular, what about the net 76 million annual rise in the world's population, which currently stands at about 6.5 billion - more than twice what it was in 1960 - and which is heading towards eight billion or so by mid-century)?

That's an annual increase 7,500 times the number of delegates in Montreal.

Imagine organising the accommodation, feeding arrangements, schooling, employment, medical care, cultural activities and general infrastructure - transport, power, water, communications, waste disposal - for a number of people slightly larger than the population of the UK, and doing it each year, year on year for the foreseeable future.

Combined with ongoing economic growth, what will be the effect on our collective human "footprint"? Will the planet cope?

Steps to Utopia

Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental "footprint", the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero.

Only the lack of the individual can bring it down to nothing.

So if we believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.

Let us assume (reasonably) that an optimum human population level exists, which would provide the physical and intellectual capacity to ensure a rich and fulfilling life for all, but would represent a call upon the services of the planet which would be benign and hence sustainable over the long term.

A scientific analysis can tell us what that optimum number is (perhaps 2-3 billion?).

With that number and a timescale as targets, a path to reach "Utopia" from where we are now is, in principle, a straightforward matter of identifying options, choosing the approach and then planning and navigating the route from source to destination.

Cinderella subject

In practice, of course, it is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability.

As found in China, practicability and acceptability can be particularly elusive.

So controversial is the subject that it has become the "Cinderella" of the great sustainability debate - rarely visible in public, or even in private.

In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence.

Rare indeed are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers, moralists, policymakers, politicians and indeed the "global public" to debate the trajectory of the world's human population in the context of its stress on the Earth system, and to decide what might be done.

Unless and until this changes, summits such as that in Montreal which address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the ineluctable casualty.

Professor Chris Rapley is Director of the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, UK

The Green Room is a new series of environmental opinion articles running weekly on the BBC News website

*****************

Ben Wattenberg on the Coming Population Implosion

Item one: http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18358/article_detail.asp

Never Mind the Population Explosion
By Ben J. Wattenberg

For at least 650 years, since the time of the Black Plague, the total number of people on Earth has headed in one direction: up. In the modern era, this has occasioned much panic. Environmentalists have insisted that more people means more ecological damage, more resource depletion, more energy drain. People, they implied, and sometimes stated outright, are the ultimate form of pollution.

Consider the 1999 book Beyond Malthus, by the environmentalist Worldwatch Institute. Worldwatch is no marginal organization of Green flakes--it is a media favorite funded by some of the most important foundations in America, including Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Hewlett, Packard, Turner, Mott, and the United Nations Population Fund. Beyond Malthus argues that the world is suffering from a deadly "demographic fatigue"--that the world's population is growing so dangerously that soon there won't be enough grain, water, forests, fish, energy, jobs, housing, or meat.

There's a gaping hole in these claims, though. Soon--probably within a few decades--global population will level off and then likely fall for a protracted period of time. The number of people on Earth will be headed down. Many nations will be "depopulating." Why? Because fertility rates have fallen faster, farther, and for longer periods of time than nearly anyone anticipated just a few years ago.

In many developed nations depopulation has already begun. Europe is now losing about 700,000 people each year, a figure that will grow to about 3 million per year (or more) by mid century. Russia alone is losing close to a million people each year. Within the next few years Japan will begin losing population. The steep trend toward fewer children per woman has been nearly universal in the modern nations.

But what's going on is not restricted to the well-to-do nations. While the poorer, Less Developed Countries (LDCs), still have higher fertility rates than the rich countries, their birth rates are falling faster than in the rich countries. As recently as 1970 the typical woman in a less developed nation bore six children. Today, the rate has tumbled to 2.7 children, and is continuing downward rapidly. Such declines are taking place in India, Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Mexico, and many other countries.

These birth trends are not idle speculation, or theoretical projections. Many of the future population trends are already pretty well baked into the global cake of the future. A stark New Demography is here.

This new demography portends a different world. Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. Population Division, puts it this way: There was the Industrial Revolution. There was the Information Age. Now there is the Demographic Revolution. The numbers of people on Earth will grow at an ever-diminishing rate, level off, then begin shrinking.

Whom does this help? Whom does it hurt? Why is it happening? Can we do anything about it? Should we?

What demographers call the "Total Fertility Rate" (TFR) is, put simply, the average number of children born per woman over the course of her childbearing years. The TFR is the keystone of all demographic calculations, and I argue that it is the single most important measurement of humankind. Moreover, it comes with some certainty. Demographers can tell you in 2004 with precision how many 20-year-old potential mothers there will be in 2025.

How? Because those potential mothers of the future are already born today. With minor adjustments for the deaths of children and younger adults at various ages, we can project that generation into various crossroads of the future.

By the mid 1980s, something quite remarkable was already happening in the demographic arena. Women in the "modern" countries bore substantially fewer children than are required to keep the population stable over an extended time.

The "replacement" level in modern countries is a Total Fertility Rate of 2.1 children per woman. That is demography's magic number. Why 2.1? Sooner or later a mother and father die. If the parents are not "replaced" by two children--plus one tenth of a child to account for those children who do not live to reach their own age of reproduction--the population declines.

By the mid 1980s, the average Total Fertility Rate in the "Developed Regions," as the U.N. labels modern countries, had sunk to 1.8. At that point the TFR in the Developed Regions had been falling steadily for 35 years.

In the early 1950s, women in the developed nations typically bore 2.7 children over the course of their fertile years. Part of that was catch-up for reduced childbearing during the Depression and World War II. In the U.S., the Total Fertility Rate soared as high as 3.8 children per woman during the 1950s Baby Boom.

By the early 1970s, the fertility rate for all modern nations had already receded 24 percent--down to 2.1 children per woman. Most long-term demographic projections assumed that long-term fertility will hold steady at that simple population-replacement level. After all, how could it be otherwise? If the TFR dipped substantially below replacement and stayed there, humankind would eventually disappear, proceeding to zero at a steep decline. If it remained above replacement, we would experience a never-ending population explosion, expanding geometrically until the resultant pile of newly born human flesh expanded at the speed of light, as one explosionist described the situation to a Congressional committee.

The standard graphs were elegant, sloping gracefully to the perfect level of 2.1, which would last apparently forever. But that's not what happened. Today, every modern nation--44 of them in total--has fallen below the 2.1 replacement level. The only country that still comes close to the magic rate is America, which, according to the National Center for Health Statistics recorded 2.0 in the year 2002, just a bit below the replacement level.

What about the non-modernized parts of the planet? We have become accustomed to think of the Third World as the place where the population explosion goes Bang! Images race through our minds: hordes of small children trailing weary mothers living in rotten slums in sprawling, ever-growing, and unmanageable cities, drink- ing unsanitary water. Or there is the rural model: Even more children, even greater poverty. Illiterate and broken men and women hopelessly trying to scratch a living out of tired land, victims of diseases long vanished from the modern world. Civil wars rage.

These were the images stressed at various points on the political spectrum. Notwithstanding very low fertility in the modern countries, and the forthcoming European and Japanese depopulation, the total world population will continue to grow substantially for several decades, gobbling up resources, polluting the planet, warming the climate, forcing unwanted immigration on the modern nations, and, always lurking in the background, changing the balance of power while altering patterns of race, culture, and ethnicity in the world.

It has been said the human species is running out of control, with rapacious humans pushing other species into extinction as they build ever more fast-food joints in the middle of rain forests. A quadrupling of global population in a single century was indeed something to write home about, and there was some real merit--along with a good dose of demagoguery--in what environmentalists had to say during the last half-century's remarkable run of population growth.    

But today's new population data are so dramatically different from what happened in the past that new interpretations are necessary. Even what is happening in poor countries has to be seen in a different way. The less developed world is very much a part of the forthcoming depopulation process rather than an exception to it.

As recently as 1965-1970 the fertility rate of the LDCs--all of Latin America, all of Africa, and most of Asia--was 6 children per woman. By 1985-1990 that had fallen to 3.8, and by 2000-2005 it had tumbled even further to 2.9. It is now about 2.7.

Along that road, many demographic rules have been broken. For instance, the one about Catholics. Because of the policy of the Catholic Church on birth control and abortion, it was assumed that Catholic fertility worldwide would always be higher than Protestant rates. For many years that was true. But these days fertility rates for Catholics and Protestants in the U.S. are about the same. And in many Catholic foreign countries births have tumbled faster than anyone could have imagined.

In the early 1960s the TFR for all of South America was 5.8 children per woman. Population alarmists looked at this essentially Catholic continent and shuddered. How could fertility ever be expected to fall quickly? South America would soon be overflowing with humanity.

It is not, and it will not be. Today the South American TFR is at 2.5 and falling. The sharp decline is led by the biggest Latin American country, Brazil, which had a TFR of 6.2 in the early 1960s. Today the official rate is 2.2, but Brazilian demographers say that the TFR has already crossed into below-replacement territory and that further declines are clearly in the offing. What is more remarkable about the Brazilian situation is that, unlike places like China, there has never been a government program to reduce fertility, although NGOs have played an important role.

The second-largest Latin American country is Mexico, also predominantly Catholic, and of particular interest to the United States. The Mexican fertility rate was 6.9 in the late 1950s. An average of seven children per woman! By 2000-2005 it was down to 2.5. Many Mexican demographers report that the Mexican TFR is actually at replacement level and falling. This stark decline may well change immigration flows into the United States.

Economic development is supposed to correlate with low fertility, isn't it? But the fertility rates of Argentina (2.4), Chile (2.4), and Uruguay (2.3), the three most economically advanced and Western-oriented South American nations, have actually fallen more slowly than the South American average. Why? No one knows.

Just as the "Catholic rule" was broken, so too is the "Muslim rule" breaking. Almost unmentioned in the general dialogue is that fertility rates in Arab and Muslim countries have been falling rapidly for decades. Indeed, it would be remarkable were they not; it's been happening everywhere else.

Consider North Africa as a bloc, nearly completely Arab. Forty years ago the Total Fertility Rate was 7.1. Today it is 3.2 and sinking like a stone. Egypt is the most populous North African country. Its TFR was 7.1 in 1960-1965. Today it is 3.3. The U.N. Population Division reports Tunisia's current TFR at 2.0--below replacement.

Go east. Syrian fertility has fallen from 7.6 to 3.3 and declining. From peak year to the present, some other Middle Eastern numbers: Jordan, 8 to 3.6; Iraq, 7.2 to 4.8; Saudi Arabia, 7.3 to 4.5; Palestine, 8 to 5.5 and falling.

Go farther east. At its peak in the early 1960s, Iran's TFR was 7 children per woman. It is now officially at 2.3 and dropping so fast that some leading Iranian demographers believe it could quite possibly be below the replacement level when you read this.

Other big Muslim countries that have had major declines are Turkey, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Only Pakistan retains a high current fertility rate, 5.1, but Pakistani fertility has still fallen by a whole child in a decade. It looks like the demographic transition is slowly wending its way up the Indus River valley, as it has globally.

Periodically the headline writers at the New York Times get things right. They did so on March 10, 2002, when they reported on the results of then-new U.N. data on population trends: "Population Estimates Fall as Poor Women Assert Control," with a subhead reading: "In India, Brazil, Egypt and Mexico, a Dip in Birthrates Defies Old Theories." A brief excerpt from this story, written by Barbara Crossette, is worth quoting:

The decline in birthrates in nations where poverty and illiteracy are still widespread defies almost all conventional wisdom. Planners once argued--and some still do--that falling birthrates can only follow improved living standards and more educational opportunities, not outrun them. It now seems that women are not waiting for that day.

Indeed they are not, nor are their menfolk, who are also rumored to play a role in the child-creating process.

Consider what has happened in Vietnam. When the Vietnam War raged in the late 1960s, the Total Fertility Rate in all of Vietnam was 7.3. After the North Vietnamese Army overran the South, the unified communist nation suffered terrible economic conditions for decades, not improving until the early 1990s when Vietnam, following China's lead, began adopting "communism with a capitalist face." But fertility sank rapidly even before the economy improved. From the high of 7.3 in 1965-1970, it dropped to 4.0 two decades later. The 2000-2005 rate is 2.3, which is just about replacement level in a nation like Vietnam where infant mortality is higher than in the West.

Overpopulation alarmists had made their case by showing geometric trends upward. Now New Demographers see geometric progressions downward. Demographers used to talk about the "doubling rate," the number of years it takes for a population to rise by 100 percent. These days one hears of the "halving rate," the number of years it takes for a population to fall to 50 percent.

A population explosion notwithstanding, the world generally did quite well in the second half of the twentieth century, by most economic and social standards. We don't yet know whether that will continue to be the case as population falls. We don't know because the world has never seen anything like it. Should these rates not turn around soon and sharply, the ramifications are incalculable--or as Italian demographer Antonio Golini mutters repetitively at demographic meetings, "unsustainable, unsustainable."

What is happening in these modern nations? It isn't war. The young Europeans and Japanese now choosing not to reproduce themselves were born after the end of World War II, during a half century of general peace. Even the thought of one European country invading another now sounds preposterous.

Nor are modern people having few children because of bad economic times. The principal developed nations (belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) had average per capita incomes of $9,977 in 1960 and $29,844 in 2000 (in constant 1995 dollars). Greater discretionary income might actually depress fertility in some places.

I visited Hungary in 1965 to investigate its very low fertility rate. I asked sociologist Rudolph Andorka what was going on. He speculated that it was "kichi vad kochi," a play on words in Hungarian meaning "child or car." Couples saw their choice as being between a second child and a car. Many chose the car.

Cars and children share at least one thing in common: They are expensive, particularly in urban surroundings. And "child or car" is an apt expression for more than just cars. How does a family decide when the choice is an additional child or a televison, stereo, washing machine, phone, computer, TiVo, DVD player, iPod, online service, cell phone, Caribbean trip, or private school? These days, throughout the modern world, there are many goods and services to tempt--all easier to obtain if you keep your family small.

If things proceed as expected, this postwar generation will live longer lives, in healthier circumstances, than any previous cohort of humanity. By any historical standard, they have it all, or almost. And they have decided to produce fewer children than any people in human history.

Is there any way to reverse this? There may be two.

The distinguished Australian demographer Jack Caldwell believes that in a few decades Europeans will wake up to what is happening, decide they want their nations to continue existing, and start having more babies. That is possible, but it will be a slow haul. Typically the task of reversing a population's "momentum" has been viewed from the other side: populations that have produced lots of children can continue to grow for many years even if fertility rates fall because there is so much "breeding stock" from cohorts born 20 or so years earlier.

But the same momentum works in the other direction. Even if Europeans follow Caldwell's scenario and decide 25 years from now that they should have more babies, where will the requisite number of parents come from? Not from the hollowed-out ranks of Germans, Dutch, Italians, Hungarians, and Greeks born during today's birth dearth.

The second solution is simpler: immigration. The modern countries are generally rich, certainly compared with the poor countries of the world. Wouldn't poor people want to go to rich places? Modern countries in a low fertility spiral will need workers. After all, who will empty the bedpans in nursing homes? Such tasks will likely be done by immigrants or their descendants. But will these nations with 10 percent unemployment rates welcome yet more immigrants?

Despite today's environmental hysteria, population growth really shouldn't be a central worry of the twenty-first century. How we should avoid the dynamics of population loss is the new question of the day. And the nations that answer that question best will be the ones that stand astride history.

Ben Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This is adapted from his new book Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future.

****************************************************************

It Will Be a Smaller World After All

By Ben J. Wattenberg Posted: Monday, March 10, 2003 ARTICLES New York Times   Publication Date: March 8, 2003

Remember the number 1.85. It is the lodestar of a new demography that will lead us to a different world. It should change the way we think about economics, geopolitics, the environment, culture--and about ourselves.

To make their calculations orderly, demographers have typically worked on the assumption that the "total fertility rate"--the number of children born per woman--would eventually average out to 2.1. Why 2.1? At that rate the population stabilizes over time: a couple has two children, the parents eventually die, and their children "replace" them. (The 0.1 accounts for children who die before reaching the age of reproduction.)

Now, in a new report, United Nations demographers have bowed to reality and changed this standard 2.1 assumption. For the last five years they have been examining one of the most momentous trends in world history: the startling decline in fertility rates over the last several decades. In the United Nations' most recent population report, the fertility rate is assumed to be 1.85, not 2.1. This will lead, later in this century, to global population decline.

In a world brought up on the idea of a "population explosion," this is a radical notion. The world's population is still growing--it will take some time for it to actually start shrinking--but the next crisis is depopulation.

The implications of lower fertility rates are far-reaching. One of the most profound is their potential to reduce economic inequality around the world and alter the balance of power among nations.

The United Nations divides the world into two groups, less developed countries and more developed countries. The most surprising news comes from the poorer countries. In the late 1960's, these countries had an average fertility rate of 6.0 children per woman. Today it is 2.9--and still falling. Huge and continuing declines have been seen in countries like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and (of great importance to the United States) Mexico.

The more developed countries, in contrast, have seen their fertility rates fall from low to unsustainable. Every developed nation is now below replacement level. In the early 1960's, Europe's fertility rate was 2.6. Today the rate is 1.4, and has been sinking for half a century. In Japan the rate is 1.3.

These changes give poorer countries a demographic dividend. For several decades the bulk of their population will be of working age, with relatively few dependents, old or young. This should lead to higher per capita incomes and production levels. Nations with low fertility rates, meanwhile, will face major fiscal and political problems. In a pay-as-you-go pension system, for example, there will be fewer workers to finance the pensions of retirees; people will either have to pay more in taxes or work longer.

Among the more developed countries, the United States is the outlier nation, with the highest fertility rate--just under 2.1. Moreover, the United States takes in more immigrants than the rest of the world combined. Accordingly, in the next 50 years America will grow by 100 million people. Europe will lose more than 100 million people.

When populations stabilize and then actually shrink, the economic dislocations can be severe. Will there be far less demand for housing and office space? Paradoxically, a very low fertility rate can also yield labor shortages, pushing wages higher. Of course, such shortages in countries with low fertility rates could be alleviated by immigration from countries with higher fertility rates--a migration from poor countries to rich ones. But Europeans are actively trying to reduce immigration, especially since 9/11. Wisely, America has mostly resisted calls for restrictions on immigrants.

The environmental future, however, looks better. Past research on global warming was based on a long-term United Nations projection, issued in the early 1990's, of 11.6 billion people in 2200, far more people than we're ever likely to see. The new projections show the global population rising from just over six billion now to just under nine billion in 2050, followed by a decline, moving downward in a geometric progression.

With fewer people than expected, pollution should decrease from expected levels, as should consumption of oil. Clean water and clean air should be more plentiful. We know that many of these people will be richer--driving more cars, consuming more resources. We also know that wealthy countries tend to be better at cleaning up their pollution than poor nations. With fewer people, open spaces should also be more abundant.

Still, it is the geopolitical implications of this change that may well be the most important. There is not a one-to-one relationship between population and power. But numbers matter. Big nations, or big groups of nations acting in concert, can become major powers. China and India each have populations of more than a billion; their power and influence will almost surely increase in the decades to come. Europe will shrink and age, absolutely and relatively.

Should the world face a "clash of civilizations," America may find itself with weaker allies. It may then be forced to play a greater role in defending and promoting the liberal, pluralist beliefs and values of Western civilization. We may have to do more, not because we want to, but because we have to.

Ben J. Wattenberg is a senior fellow at AEI.

*****************************************************************

Item 3: http://www.overpopulation.com/articles/2003/000034.html

By Brian Carnell

Friday, May 30, 2003

Ben Wattenberg wrote a nice summary of the unprecedented changes in population back in March following the United Nations downward revisions of its population estimates.

Wattenberg wrote,

Now, in a new report, United Nations demographers have bowed to reality and changed this standard 2.1 [total fertility rate] assumption. For the last five years they have been examining one of the most momentous trends in world history: the startling decline in fertility rates over the last several decades. In the United Nations' most recent population report, the fertility rate is assumed to be 1.85 not 2.1. This will lead, later in this century, to global population decline.

It is startling to realize that the decline in fertility rates has occurred almost as quickly and unexpectedly as did the massive increase in population in the 20th century. As late as the 1960s, Wattenberg points out, total fertility rates in developing countries was averaging 6.0. Today, that average has declined by more than half and rests at 2.9 and still declining.

Once again, the population doomsayers completely underestimated the ability of human beings to modify their behavior for the pure selfish pursuit of self-interest. The same increase in wealth that led to the population explosion also ultimately created economic incentives for couples to limit family size. Once effective contraception, education and other goods reached even less developed nations, people decided on their own (for the most part) to have fewer children.

One area where Wattenberg underestimates the power of people to change is how Europe will face what Wattenberg calls the birth dearth.

Nations with low fertility rates, meanwhile, will face major fiscal and political problems. In a pay-as-you-go pension system, for example, there will be fewer workers to finance the pensions of retirees; people will either have to pay more in taxes or work longer.

No, they'll likely choose the third option -- replace such anachronisms with alternatives (and since people in those countries will likely be even wealthier 50 years from now than they are now, the current political objections to such a solution will likely decrease).

The real danger, which Wattenberg also mentions, is the possibility that the 21st century will end with China and India having huge advantages in population and at best a questionable dedication to liberal values (China, obviously, could remain a dictatorship while India has recently seen a revival of Hindu extremism).

The United States seems likely to maintain its middle road and continued world dominance. Unlike Europe, the U.S. total fertility rate hovers above 2.1 and it continues to accept more immigrants than any other nation. As a result, the U.S. population will likely increase by another 100 million people in the 21st century.

Source:

It will be a smaller world after all. Ben Wattenberg, New York Times, March 8, 2003.