Is Our Planet Overpopulated?

Is our planet overpopulated? The answer is plainly and resoundingly "yes." It's not the fact of overpopulation that's contentious. It's more a problem of how that fact is exploited, spun.

The Guardian has an excellent discussion with Heather Alberro, a lecturer in global development at Nottingham Trent University.

What is the optimum number of humans?

Nobody knows. Overpopulation is defined as when a species exceeds the current capacity of its ecosystem. We’re consuming the resources of 1.6 planet Earths each day.

Whether the human footprint stands at 1.6 or 1.7 our planet's sustainable capacity is arguable. What is inarguable is that our species has vastly exceeded "the current capacity of its ecosystem." We are heavily overpopulated. Period.

Some, like George Monbiot dispute this. Our problem, he argues, isn't that there are too many people, it isn't the burgeoning populations of China or India or the swelling numbers of Nigerians. It's the developed world hogging all the resources in his mind.

There's the intellectual problem. Monbiot focuses on one issue, the developed nations' excesses, and then uses it as a smokescreen for the overpopulation problem. His ideology blinds him to the reality that there are many factors contributing to these existential threats, be it climate change, overpopulation or wildly rampant over-consumption. He doesn't see the synergy at work here and, without that, we'll never find the holistic solution to these threats, all of which end in one thing - collapse.

If you're overpopulated you have to rapidly de-populate. You can do it through the mass use of reproductive technologies or you can leave it up to famine, disease and wars. That's our choice and, at the moment, the developed nations are opting for the default option: famine, disease and wars.

If you have an appetite problem, over-consumption, you have to slash consumption. In this case, massively. 

Here's our problem. Let's go with the 1.6 X figure. Even our oh-so progressive prime minister is an ardent disciple of perpetual exponential growth. He wants to grow the economy because that's all he knows. We've been playing that game since well before Confederation.

Mulroney, in his dotage, recently claimed that Canada should open the gates to immigration with a view to rapidly doubling our population in order to achieve even more growth.

Ours is a finite planet. Agreed? Sure. What that means is growth is a net-sum problem. We can take more but that just means there'll be less for others not just today but also for future generations to boot. As we take more the deficit deepens. We have to pillage the Earth's reserves. We're leaving the cupboard bare and our grandkids will have to live with that. They'll pay, not us.  Does that sound very progressive to you? That's animalistic behaviour for a species of intellect and conscience. It's perverse.

Yes, that's right. I said the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth is perverse.  Think about that, Justin.

The things that brought us to this point, especially neoclassical economics, have outlived their utility. Most of them failed us in the early 70s when humanity began to exceed our planet's sustainable carrying capacity. That's when we ran out of room for continued growth. That's when we needed to change course. We haven't and our problems have worsened to the point where they genuinely threaten our continuation on Earth.

Even Adam Smith in his 1776 classic, "The Wealth of Nations," realized that this form of growth could only last about 200 years, tops. And he was writing well before the Industrial Revolution, the age of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. You see, we've exploited resources and developed technologies to take Adam Smith's 200 year limit and stretch the living hell out of it. And look what we have wrought.

Then there's the biggest and most immediate of our scourges, climate change. This is the culmination of both overpopulation and excessive consumption. It takes many forms although you wouldn't know it to hear our leaders discuss it. They're zeroed in on atmospheric pollution, the emission of a number of powerful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, CO2 in particular.  Even with just that one problem they've shown us over the past two weeks in Glasgow we can't count on them to deal with it.

They've got the blinkers on. They're looking at 2030 and then 2050 and then 2100. They've got sharp elbows when the discussion turns to slashing emissions by this year or that or leaving the very worst fossil fuels, coal and bitumen, in the ground where they can do no further damage.  

Justin isn't giving up on bitumen. Xi and Modi aren't giving up on coal. There's a great friggin surprise. They've been promising wondrous things for years but they just don't deliver. 

Let's start a betting pool. By what year do you think these leaders will get down to tackling the heat and chemical contamination of our oceans?  The atmosphere is a tough nut to crack but the oceans, they're a real bugger. They can kill us off faster than anything.

Anthropologist, Peter Ward, wrote in his book, "Under a Green Sky," that five of the six mass extinctions have resulted from ocean acidification.  Here's an excerpt from Ward's book:

"First, the world warms over short intervals of time because of a sudden increase of carbon dioxide and methane... The warmer world affects the ocean circulation systems and disrupts the position of the conveyor currents. Bottom waters begin to have warm, low-oxygen water dumped into them. Warming continues, and the decrease of equator-to-pole temperature differences reduces ocean winds and surface currents to a near standstill. Mixing of oxygenated surface waters with the deeper, and volumetrically increasing, low-oxygen bottom waters decreases, causing ever-shallower water to change from oxygenated to anoxic. Finally, the bottom water is at depths were light can penetrate, the combination of low oxygen and light allows green sulfur bacteria to expand in numbers and fill the low-oxygen shallows. They live amid other bacteria that produce toxic amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and the flux of this gas into the atmosphere is as much as 2,000 times what it is today. The gas rises into the high atmosphere, where it breaks down the ozone layer, and the subsequent increase in ultraviolet radiation from the sun kills much of the photosynthetic green plant phytoplankton. On its way up into the sky, the hydrogen sulfide also kills some plant and animal life, and the combination of high heat and hydrogen sulfide creates a mass extinction on land. These are the greenhouse extinctions."

But, hey, calm down. That's thousands of years off isn't it? Is it? These changes tend to come on far faster than we imagine. It was once thought that North Africa was transformed into desert over thousands of years. Recent studies show that it happened in just 100 to 200 years.

What the scientists found was that, far from shifting gradually from wet to dry, the climate in the Horn of Africa changed in perhaps as little as 100 to 200 years, incredibly quickly in geological terms. The reason north Africa warmed up, they believe, was a cyclic change in Earth’s orientation toward the sun (called precession) which caused more sunlight to fall during the Northern Hemisphere's summer. But the precession cycle is slow, taking 23,000 years to complete. So why was the changeover in the Horn of Africa so quick?

“It shows something really surprising,” says [Columbia University geologist Peter] deMenocal. “It’s evidence that climate doesn’t respond gradually to gradual forcing. It would be wonderful in global warming if everything just kept pace with the gradual rise in CO2, then we could plan for this, we would know what is going to happen, there would be some predictability in it."

But what researchers like Tierney and deMenocal are increasingly finding is that climate doesn’t change in a linear fashion, but suddenly and seemingly unpredictably. That’s because there are positive feedback mechanisms that start to kick in and speed things up. For example, when the Arctic sea ice melts, as it has increasingly in recent years, the area of dark blue heat-absorbing ocean increases, raising temperatures, melting more ice, which in turn raises temperatures still further in an snowballing process.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, the oceans.  Not only could they trigger a mass extinction event but, in the shorter term, we face a variety of threats from over-fishing, oceanic dead zones, and seabed mining. Fish are the main source of protein for an estimated 70 percent of the world's population, mainly the poor and vulnerable.  Yet Asian and European fishing fleets routinely pilleage even the inshore fish in these regions. Somali pirates have said they have to seize passing ships because they can no longer feed their families from their devastated waters.

Even our freshwater resources, our rivers and lakes, are now succumbing to algae blooms that de-oxygenate the waters causing fish stocks to die off. The culprit? Agricultural run-off. Take that, Lake Winnipeg. Take that, Lake Erie.

Geez, I'd better wrap this thing up. A quick word on our terrestrial depredations. We're killing the earth, the soil, through industrialized agriculture; excessive reliance on chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides; deforestation and our relentless destruction of what little wilderness remains. Among other things this is causing a loss of biodiversity, an accelerated extinction of species, the very lifeforms on which our own lives depend. Over the course of less than two centuries we have exhausted much of our groundwater reserves, the aquifers, we have incautiously drained for irrigation. Now we've altered the once predictable precipitation patterns on which agriculture depends and introduced in their place floods and droughts and heat domes. Brilliant.

Man, have we made a mess of this place. Some of this we can't undo. Much of it, however, we can if we're willing to change.   Nature is telling us what we must change. We merely need to heed it. Damn our hides if we don't. One thing that I know - we'll never succeed if we single out one of these existential threats to the exclusion of the others.  That simply will not work.