“Commander, do you see any real hope for homo sapiens?”
“I see lots of hope, if we can develop a real resolve. In China 100 million people have been lifted from poverty during the last 10 years. This is due in large part to their wsld policy.”
“But that was only the result of a totalitarian regime’s usurping the traditional freedoms of the people.”
“That’s true Chet. It’s unfortunate that people seldom want to do voluntarily what is best for their society. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. Just look at the military draft. It is a totalitarian solution to what the national leaders see as essential for the society. Your choices are to serve in the army or to emigrate.
“Forcing people who want to drive to pass a licensing examination is totalitarian. Of course it is not objectionable if you don’t want to drive. But even if you don’t drive, if you want to walk and cross the street you will want drivers who know they should stop for you. So driver licensing is a bit of a safety advantage for the drivers and the pedestrians.
“Korea went from a third world country to a first world country in 40 years. It took some money and some discipline to do it. It also took centralized planning and action.
“On the other hand more people live in poverty in the world than was true 10 years ago. One in seven of the world’s population is going hungry (1aaa) Not so much because of a lack of food as the lack of political will to get the food where it is needed.
“It was recently believed that globalization, freeing international trade, reducing tariffs and governmental subsidies and outsourcing work would reduce poverty. But population gains propel the curse of poverty faster than anyone could have projected. (2) As global warming reduces the rainfall in the food exporting nations and as the population continues to increase food shortages develop and more people die of starvation. The price of food keeps rising, even in recessions. People living on a dollar or two a day can’t buy food, even if it is available. One in six people in the world is either hungry or starving. Food grants from richer countries don’t buy as much food as they once did. And the grants get smaller every time a country enters a recession.
“The World Bank projected that from 1990 to 2015 320 million would be lifted above the $2 a day poverty level. They had to change their projection to about 75 million lifted from poverty in that ten year period. But in those years the population of the world increased by
about 2 billion people, many in those extremely poor countries. The fact is that poverty increases as population increases. We can’t thrust a hundred million babies a year into our world without negative consequences. In fact, to keep today’s average person’s $8,000 share of the wealth of the world constant we would have to add $800 billion dollars a year to the wealth of the world. Then we would have to assume that some of that wealth would trickle down from Wall Street and Fleet Street to the streets of Ethiopia and Gaza. But that’s not how an amoral free enterprise system works.
“Additionally, because more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. More crime now occurs, in part because of a lack of jobs, in part because of the violence born of frustration and anger, in part to fund the appetite for drugs whetted by the overwhelming need for emotional escape. Crimes against people generally increase because of anger. Crimes against property, such as burglary and robbery, generally increase because of financial need.
“I was impressed with the warnings of Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, when he warned of overpopulation. He wrote that the maximum population of the world was between
1.5 and 2 billion people. That’s the maximum! We reached that over a hundred years ago! We are now at 9 billion. It’s a problem that humans have created and it must be solved by humans.”
“Commander, I’ve read of maximal earth population being as high as 50 billion people.”
“There have been a couple of estimates made by physicists in which they calculated the amount of heat people’s bodies would put out and how that 150 watts per day per body would impact the earth. Using only this measure they concluded that the Earth could handle 40 to 60 billion people. But these projections did not include global warming from human industry, food needs, industrial needs for 50 billion people, the lack of fresh water, or all of the other factors.
“It is impossible to calculate how many people the Earth can handle without first determining at what level of comfort the people should have. If people want to live at the comfort level of Western Europe or the U.S. the calculations will be quite different than if everyone is to live at the comfort level of the average person in Bangladesh. Thirty average Indians use fewer resources than one American. So what is called ‘the carrying capacity’ of the world or the ‘ecological footprint’ of an individual are essential in estimating the number of people the world can support. Would you be content being a starving woman in Darfur dodging the rapists and the murderers who will conquer you and your country? Would you change places with a mother of ten living in a tin shack in a South African township? Would you choose to live in a favela in Sao Paulo with drug gangs in control of your slum neighborhood? Or would you prefer to live in a rambling ranch style home in Carmel, an ocean view luxury apartment in Monaco, or a seaside mansion on Chios?
“Just look at the roads needed. Americans complain about their crowded roads and freeways now. To keep an equivalent number of roads for a world population of 50 billion, if the sparsely populated U.S. kept an equivalent percentage of people it would have nearly 3 billion inhabitants. Keeping the same number miles of roads per person, it would need about 36 million miles of roads. If the roads were made of asphalt we would need more oil because asphalt is a petroleum product.
“It’s a matter of ecological economics. At what level of consumption shall the world’s population live? If we want to live at the level of Bangladesh perhaps we could support 14 or 15 billion people. If we want to live at the consumer level of a middle class American it would be closer to one or two billion people. But there are other considerations in determining a maximal population. We must consider how much of the society’s consumption is in renewable resources, like fresh water and food. Then how much is in non-renewable sources, like petroleum and copper. Then what are the lingering negative effects of the technology, such as the disposal of nuclear and non-nuclear waste, the production of carbon dioxide and methane, and the effects of other pollutants on the air and water.
“The ecological footprint may be said to indicate how many acres or hectares it takes to support a person. A hectare is ten thousand square meters or almost two and a half acres. The Earth has about eleven billion hectares, or 27 billion acres of biologically useful area. The biologically useful area is 22% water, 14% crop land, a third forests, a little less than a third of grazing land. About 2% of the land has been built on for cities and other building. The average hectare use is about two hectares, or five acres, per person.
“Perhaps the earth could handle 15 billion people if we regressed 3000 years in terms of housing, transportation and food. We would have to keep the farming capacity that we have today with our present yield per acre. But today’s farming requires huge fields that would be largely occupied by those 15 billion people. Of course we can build vertical farms that use hydroponics. Today’s farms require large machines powered by oil. They require great amounts of water, which would have to be produced expensively by desalinization. We would need many more times the amount of pesticides and fertilizers than we use today. No one could drive a car because of the lack of oil and the air pollution. We couldn’t all burn wood fires for cooking and heating, because there wouldn’t be enough wood and the fires of 15 billion people would pollute the air and increase the carbon dioxide levels. And then, common sense tells you that the advanced living standards of many counties today cannot be voluntarily ended.
DEATH AND DISEASE
“Ten million children are dying each year from disease and starvation. Children are born to AIDS infected parents in Africa, India, China and i
n most other parts of the world. Is this what you want for your grandchildren? The deaths may help to curb the population explosion but is it worth the sadness for the children? As great as the disease problem may be, with influenzas, AIDS, malaria, ebola, cholera, drug resistant tuberculosis and all the other afflictions of humans, it’s not enough to stop the planet’s strangulation death by the human python.
“Do you remember the study done in the late 1960s by John Calhoun? (3) In 1968 he put four pair of mice in a 10 foot by 10 foot enclosure. He provided them with a perfect air conditioned environment with plenty of food and water. By the time the population reached 150 all the good places to live and the major social roles were taken. Shortly after this population mark had been reached, mothers began chasing their babies from their nests— before trust could be established. Dominant males got tired of protecting their territories and quit. Females became more aggressive and took over the dominant roles. The males crowded together. Homosexuality increased. By the time the population reached 2200, in 1970, mating stopped and by January of 1973 the last mouse died. He did similar studies with rats. Might our human population do this? Or might we, like the lemmings, follow each other off a cliff? Is the ultimate control of population in our mammalian genes?”
NATURAL DISASTERS
"And Gulliver Returns" Book 1 Reversing Overpopulation--The Planet's Doomsday Threat Page 7
