Overpopulation, Pt. 1

Overpopulation of the Earth is the root cause of environmental destruction and resource depletion. If there were far fewer of us, we wouldn't be worrying about these problems. That's not to say that effective regulation can't help, or that better technology wouldn't let more people live good lives. But our ever-increasing population of human beings crowds out other species and stresses our ecosystems past the point where natural processes can manage.

And the Earth is finite, after all. Whatever you think the population limit might be, there is a limit. Technology can certainly increase that limit, but not to infinity. Even if we could spread out into the rest of the universe, which doesn't seem at all likely right now, we wouldn't be able to expand fast enough to avoid this fundamental problem.

After all, the global population didn't reach a billion human beings until the 19th Century, but it doubled to 2 billion in another hundred years and doubled again, to 4 billion, less than 50 years after that (all figures just rough estimates, which is plenty good enough for this discussion). Currently, we're almost at 7 billion, and estimated to reach 9 billion in just a few decades. We couldn't possibly ship people off-planet fast enough to keep up with that, even if we had somewhere else to go.

So what do we do about it?

For Part 1 of this discussion, let's look at bad solutions. What won't work?

Well, China's "one-child policy," begun in 1978, seems to have worked, with the country claiming one quarter of a billion fewer births to its credit. That means that their economic growth hasn't been overtaken by population growth, as in many countries, leading to strong per capita gains.

But China is a dictatorship. Even if the rest of us would accept their methods, this sort of thing would be impossible in a liberal democracy. It would destroy us, destroy our system of government, destroy our way of life. Plus, it probably wouldn't work. In recent years, a huge black-market for fertility drugs has developed in China, as a way of avoiding these "one-child" restrictions. After all, it's not so much "one child" as "one pregnancy." By having a whole litter of kids in one birth, you can have your large family and avoid any penalties.

OK, how about the South Carolina plan? According to André Bauer, current Lt. Governor (Republican, naturally), if you feed poor children (among South Carolina Republicans, that's naturally assumed to mean "black children"), they'll just continue to breed. Fair enough, I suppose. But would we really be willing to starve children to death to solve the population crisis?

And it wouldn't work, anyway. Oddly enough, people are quite resistant to starving to death - and particularly in seeing their children starve to death. This would be a lot harder to do than you might think.

Well, then, maybe a kinder, gentler version of that? We could, for example, limit tax deductions to only two children, no more - or even increase taxes proportionally on large families. Of course, this wouldn't mean anything to upper class families, but it might be significant to the working poor. And it's the poor who tend to have large families in the first place.

But this would basically mean perpetuating an underclass mired in poverty. Not only isn't that the kind of society I'd prefer (or you either, I hope), but it would actually worsen the problem. As I noted before, it's the poor who tend to have the largest families. Keeping them poor, or even increasing their poverty, is certainly not the way to lower population growth.

Finally, I've heard it seriously suggested that propaganda might work. Make having large families a disgrace, an embarrassment, a social faux pas. Teach people the dangers of unrestricted population growth, the problems of pollution and resource depletion, the finite nature of the planet and our worries about the future. Won't informed people do the right thing?

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, people are far more likely to find excuses for doing whatever they want to do. Note that smoking cessation programs have had some success, but tobacco companies are still making money hand over fist. And that's something that directly affects a smoker's own health, and the health of his family, not just some vague "benefit to the planet" sort of thing. (Smoking isn't such a basic instinct as reproduction, either. Not ever close.)

To solve the problem, you need to work with human nature, not against it. I'll get to my suggestions in Part 2, posted here.