By John Feeney:
Update #1: See Brishen Hoff’s, Paul Chefurka’s, and Graham Strouts’s critiques of the Monbiot article as well.
Update #2: For a correct, non-deceptive comparison of population growth and consumption growth, click here for a recent example from former AAAS president, John Holdren.
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Sometimes I read something, such as a recent article by George Monbiot (whose work I’ve often admired, by the way), and realize the basics bear repeating.
Environmental and other writers speak often about resource consumption. On occasion they write something about population growth. Once in a while they tackle the whole package - population and consumption. When they do, they often make a simple error and come to the wrong conclusion.
Typically, it goes something like this: “Yes, population growth is a problem. But growth in consumption is occurring faster, so it’s an even bigger problem.”
Usually, they’re talking about total consumption of one or another or a combination of resources. And the comparison is an error.
Total resource consumption (of one or all resources) is the product of population size and average per person consumption. Naturally, we would expect the growth of the product to exceed that of either of two growing factors driving it! As an example, 2*2=4 and 4*4=16. Here the factors have increased by the same amount; they’ve doubled. But the product has quadrupled. A factor and the product are not comparable elements.
The more appropriate comparison is between the factors, population and per person consumption. There the data tell us the differences are not so pronounced, and it’s clear we cannot prioritize and say it is more urgent to address one than the other.
It’s the same error if you see a comparison suggesting economic growth far outweighs population growth as an environmental problem. Economic growth can, after all, be understood (PDF) as closely overlapping total consumption. It’s held to be driven by population multiplied by per person consumption. George Monbiot certainly sees it that way as he equates economic growth and total consumption in his fourth paragraph.
Obviously, I’m the last person to discount the importance of economic growth in ecological degradation. But we need to get our factors and products straight and realize both population and per person consumption require our complete attention. Naturally, I support efforts to address them simultaneously by tackling economic growth as a whole. But it makes no sense to prioritize and say we should address economic growth while dismissing one of the fundamental factors driving it.
Nor do we know to what degree a focus solely on reducing economic growth, as ecologically necessary as that is in much of the world, would reduce global population growth. (In some countries, at certain stages of development, economic growth and population growth seem to be negatively correlated.) At the root of it, the fundamental causes of population growth are basic ecological laws, not economic growth.
It makes the most sense to bring down population, per person consumption, and economic growth (where appropriate), in whatever ways will be sure to reduce them all. [1]
I’ve outlined this previously in some detail here and more succinctly here.
In a world in which we are already deeply into overshoot of the earth’s carrying capacity for humans, dismissals of the importance of population are absurd.
So if you happen to run into an environmental writer making one of the statements above, just think about factors and products. Oh, and you might suggest he or she not shy away from either factor just because the product is growing faster or just because it’s trendy among environmentalists to do so.
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[1] Notice as well that there are environmental impacts with great relevance to our very survival which can only be mitigated effectively by addressing population growth itself. The current mass extinction (PDF) is one.
Addendum: I sometimes wonder if some environmental writers think the scientists who emphasize the fundamental importance of population haven’t thought about issues such as total consumption or economic growth. Obviously they have. (One would have to be utterly naive, completely uninformed, or quite lacking in analytical thought to overlook such topics.) Wouldn’t it therefore make sense to consider more carefully the reasons why they nevertheless urge more attention to population?
96 responses so far ↓
Dave Gardner // January 31, 2008 at 6:38 am
Well, John, as you know too well - any excuse to avoid the taboo subject of overpopulation!
Dave Gardner
Producer/Director
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
http://www.growthbusters.com
J // January 31, 2008 at 8:29 am
What I really don’t understand here is the disconnect between intensity of resource use and exactly where population is growing the fastest.
With the exception of the United States, most of the “1st World” has its population growth slowing or leveling off. Meanwhile, many of the areas with highest population growth are the poorest, and are people living well below their means.
Now, clearly, people rich and poor are consuming resources at some rate (both directly and in the form of consuming resources for waste disposal/redemption). However, based on per capita consumption/energy use, the United States and other 1st World countries are using (I’ve seen estimates) 3-5X our “share” of resources. Meanwhile, the poorest millions in Africa and Asia probably use somewhat less than a whole “share” of total human resource use.
Thus on one factor you have, say “4″ for mean per capita resource consumption in the US (or resource use intensity), vs., say, 0.8 in Namibia. This means that resource use intensity is 5X greater in the US. In other words, one “less” US or UK citizen is equivalent to 5 “less” Namibians in terms of resource use; yet we rarely hear the “taboo” subject of overpopulation brought up in terms of a primary emphasis on the 1st World, where growth rates are perhaps not the highest, but where changes in growth rates will have a 5X disproportionate impact on things. This gives us some initial reason to focus on the 1st World — perhaps what is meant here, but one must remember that the anti-growth discussion started with Malthus as an argument for *leaving the poor to their lot, and starving themselves into lower population sizes.* Not only doesn’t this work, it’s a reprehensible method to inefficiently reduce resource use. (Malthus said that the rich would consume “prudently” so as to keep the economy going but not overmuch so as to overtax resources. Poppycock.)
Making the problem all the more complex in poor areas and (technically) simple in the richer Global North, women in poorer countries often/usually have less choice in childbearing, and men still see it as an important sign of virility (plus, if you’re a poor agriculturalist, having more kids is individually rational for you). In the Global North, kids and number of kids is much more voluntary. Add to this the fact that population growth slows most in poor countries not with the introduction of contraceptives or draconian measures, but when women achieve some political equality gains and *increase* resource use somewhat such that they also gain access to education and sufficient health resources.
So taking the factors into account, it seems clear that we should certainly work on bringing both population and use intensity down in the 1st World, but the way to address population in the 3rd World implies “development” with substantive equality — a project involving at least short-term increases in resource use.
THESE are the items that seem taboo to me. When we talk about population problems, our problems in the 1st World start at home; the places where growth is the fastest require more complex solutions than a simple mantra or approach of population reduction or contraception can possibly achieve. Implying that the fast-reproducing food can’t have their fair share of food and water until they have less kids while Bill Gates races around on Leer Jets and procreates little mega-consumers unimpeded is the true madness.
etbnc // January 31, 2008 at 10:45 am
From looking at your blog, J, I think I see where you’re coming from.
J, you might find value in a related post by frequent commenter, Trinifar:
Sustainability Requires Justice
http://trinifar.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/sustainability-requires-justice/
It does annoy me that some people claim to talk about population when they really mean to rationalize and perpetuate exploitation. For me that’s one of the reasons that human population is difficult to talk about: I have to make an extensive disclaimer and try to prove that I’m a compassionate, empathetic, and pro-social human being before a conversation can proceed to nuanced exploration.
I’m pretty sure John is an empathetic, pro-social human. That’s why I find value in this web site. I think there are ideas here that might help more people live decent lives. Sometimes I may forget to say that explicitly in my own outreach work, so thanks for the reminder, J.
Cheers
–
etbnc
BluePuzzle.org
mybluepuzzlepiece.blogspot.com
Magne Karlsen // January 31, 2008 at 11:16 am
Taboo. Strictly speaking, a taboo topics are such that it touch on the human spirit and soul, and trigger basic instincts. By doing just that, taboo topics give rise to irrational reactions, and what is more, intellectual dismay. Socially, culturally, and psychologically, this is the reason why taboo topics are best not mentioned in public.
Now, the main reason why the mathematics of population explosion is a taboo field of study and interest, is plainly and simply that the problem of allowing for no more than two child-births per woman, actually touches on the most basic rights of the person. The idea that a woman should not give birth to more than two children in a lifetime, simply because the birth of three children per woman (in this modern world of vaccines and medicines and longevity of life) leads inevitably to population explosion, has its downside as we start pondering about God the Creator, who gave every normal woman the option of giving birth more than 15 times in a lifetime, at her own will and simple matter! Anyone who is saying that this kind of procreative behaviour is really not adviseable or even unsustainable ought to have his head checked, and his penis cut off. And hey: I’m not joking here. I know far too well about the anatomy of taboo topics. My destiny is such that almost every goddamn problem I am examining in my spare time invariably turns out to be taboo topics of sorts. I’m paying the social, cultural and political price for that, every waking hour of the day. I’m not joking.
John Feeney // January 31, 2008 at 11:23 am
Just a quick note that I’ve added some links to the article that didn’t appear when it posted last night. No change of substance; I just decided to beef it up a bit.
John Feeney // January 31, 2008 at 11:44 am
Hi J,
I hear you, but want to point out that there are definitely writers on the population topic who argue that countries like the US have the worst population problem in the world. Example:
Malthus said some things which sound horrible today, though they are sometimes probably misinterpreted as well:
http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/malthus3.html
But I don’t see any of today’s serious writers who address population (e.g., Bartlett, Diamond, Smail, Ehrlich, Meyerson, McKee, Brown, etc.) saying horrible things.
Population needs to come down in nearly all countries. Most countries, even developing countries, have passed their national carrying capacities (See the Footprint Network data) and have footprints above the average global sustainable level. Also, the economies of some major developing countries with very large populations are growing extremely fast, putting them on a collision course with ecological limits. Sure, there needs to be a particular focus on developed countries. But my view is that no one gets left out.
[EDIT:] Let me just add that while we can list a few environmental writers who do talk about population, they are a tiny minority. Go over to Grist and see how many of their writers cover it. Look at the environmental articles on Alternet or Common Dreams to see what percentage cover population. Try the environmental sections of the British papers - since they have environmental sections while the major US papers don’t. Or look over the websites of the major environmental groups to see how prominently they feature population if they feature it at all. The Sierra Club is known largely to avoid it, a group like NRDC avoids it almost completely as do almost all the mainstream groups. To find an environmentalist who doesn’t avoid it, you have to look to a very few authors, or to less-than-mainstream groups such as the Rewilding Institute, whose head, Dave Foreman does get it.
John Feeney // January 31, 2008 at 11:56 am
etbnc,
Thanks. It seems to be a never ending struggle. (I sometimes wonder if I should just have a canned disclaimer of the sort you mention, and paste it at the start of every mention of population. :-/ ) Sure there are people who coopt the population topic for reprehensible purposes. But that happens with all sorts of topics. My contention is just that we need to start with intellectual honesty. Without it, we’re sunk because we’ll avoid issues which, if not addressed forthrightly, could spell the end of us.
As I mentioned in a comment on Trinifar, we can face population honestly and address issues of social justice. We needn’t engage in either/or thinking.
etbnc // January 31, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Magne, knowledge can feel like a burden to me, too, sometimes. I like to think that if the load seems especially heavy, then perhaps it’s because the strongest people carry the biggest share of it.
Does that work for you? It works for me.
Cheers
–
etbnc
BluePuzzle.org/iceberg
etbnc // January 31, 2008 at 12:07 pm
John, regarding a standard disclaimer:
Well, why not? You could create a WordPress page and link to it.
I’ve pondered something like that for SustainabilitySoutheast.org. The main reason it’s not done already is that I’m a slow writer who is easily distracted.
Cheers
John Feeney // January 31, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Magne,
It’s a helluva mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. I think you’re right about the nature of taboo topics. But then the population topic was less taboo back in the ’70s when, for instance, Paul Ehrlich was on the Tonight Show (big late night talk show in the US) something like 20 times. What pushed it into more taboo territory seems to be a complex mix of world events and political wrangling. Here’s one quick take (PDF) on that:
But I do think that’s been changing some in recent times.
Paul Chefurka // January 31, 2008 at 12:27 pm
[Admin note: I had refrained from linking to the Monbiot article prior to Paul's comment. Subsequently, I changed my mind about that.]
I’m a bit burned out today from debuting a new talk last night ( http://www.paulchefurka.ca/ConvergingCrisis.pdf ) but I wanted to add a pointer to some seriously disturbed maunderings on this topic by George Monbiot:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/75474
I think Monbiot misses a crucial perspective on the population debate,which IMO is this: The problem the third world has is that the impacts of the resource constraints (food, water and energy) that are already bedeviling them will render insignificant any intervention, humane or otherwise. This isn’t a racist or eugenic position statement, it’s a statement of cold fact.
The present and future problem is not that third world population is putting pressure on world resources, but that decline of world resources is putting pressure on their population.
I’m still trying to work out a good way to express this, but it’s something like, “We are a problem; they have a problem.”
Paul Chefurka // January 31, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Sigh. Does anyone have a good way of previewing (even in another app) to catch tag problems?
[Admin note: fixed it]
John Feeney // January 31, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Paul,
I have to confess it was actually the Monbiot article which prompted my post. (I added the link a while ago.) You add another big point. I was just miffed at his way of dismissing population by comparing it to economic growth as though they’re comparable measures when in fact the latter is one of the drivers of the former.
Magne Karlsen // January 31, 2008 at 12:52 pm
etbnc,
Thank you. But you know what: the spiritual side of this world overpopulation, sustainability and social justice drama is very tough indeed. I just can’t take it anymore. As it turns out, all I want is to be honest about a lot of stuff that has much to do with the death of rationality. In my opinion, most of the problems faced in the world today, are of a more emotional or even spiritual origin. I’m personally losing out on every possible front, and I can only accept it as a matter of tough luck and ill fate. I can also make the claim that a many of the things that have happened to me over the past few years, have been unfair. Not that people care. Not that society gives a damn. And as we’re approaching the end of all possible gathering of scientific facts, proofs, and evidence, we are still going to see that Might Makes Right. I know this a little too well, I guess.
Trinifar // January 31, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Great post, great comments.
Breaking all the taboos: population growth is not the problem. The problem is that population, just like per capita consumption, is not declining.
Yes, I’m being coy but I hope in a good way.
Can you identify any region with more than a million people in which those people and the environment which sustains them would not be better off with a lower population density? We can find many such regions that would be better off with higher per capita consumption if the population density was lower.
Lower population is the key to better life for all people everywhere and it needs to occur in conjunction with a vast increase in human rights and welfare. Now that’s one hard problem to crack.
My rather obvious point is that speaking in such frank terms as these — which I think are quite true, honest, factual, supportable, compassionate, etc. — must come with the types of disclaimers referred to above. Otherwise, no one will listen or the point of the discussion will be sidetracked. We’ve come quite a way to get people to think even a little about personal consumption growth as a problem (and that job isn’t done, so I don’t mind if Diamond et al. beat that drum a little more). We have much farther to go to get population decline to be seen as benefitial, but go there we must.
Zero Population Growth (ZPG) changed it’s name to the Population Connection to avoid negative connotations. I’m not sure if that was wise or cowardly, but even ZPG is only a temporary goal on the way to negative growth.
I see no way forward that doesn’t tie population and consumption decline very directly and forcefully to the extention of human rights and enhancement of human welfare.
… ever the radical egalitarian.
Magne Karlsen // January 31, 2008 at 2:06 pm
John,
You see: this is the thing that I’ve got a hard time trying to swallow. “Population explosion” was a term that I’d already picked up at the age of ten. I know, very well, that back in the 1970s it was a topic for serious policy making measures. Like in China. Their one child policy did not arrive from out of nowhere!
Now, I believe you’re absolutely right about the reason why it has, as of today, become more of a taboo topic than it used to be thirty years ago. It has somehow ended up inside “a complex mix of world events and political wrangling.” I believe it has a lot to do with that relatively new scientific term of MANMADE climate change. Back in the 1980s scientists, politicians, and journalists alike used to discuss “the enhanced greenhouse effect” and “the acid rain” — while today, we’re making use of (and getting used to) more sinister terms, like “global warming” and “manmade climate change.” This change of language — especially the manmade bit, is making it much easier for us to link environmental problems with population explosion and overpopulation issues at a long range of other scales. As far as I can understand, there can actually be nothing scarier than the idea or notion that something which is manmade is indeed very destructive and scary.
Now, on another note. I’m not going to diminish my own contribution to the philosophical crisis we’re stuck inside, as for now. In May 2004, I had two essays published at the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique Norwegian web site. These were two very angry essays about the state of the world as I saw it, with a climate crisis, with a war against the metaphor of terror going on, while no attention what-so-ever was afforded to the half-mad reproduction activities of mankind. It took me about three minutes to prove to the readers of Le Monde Diplomatique’s web site, that three childbirths per woman is all that is needed in order to ensure continued population explosion to happen in this worldm, while two childbirths per woman equals a hope for a stabilization of the world’s population at about 9 billion souls by the year 2050.
The thing is: noone had ever spelt it out in this fashion ever before, and I quickly got to hear that the articles had made some impact around the world, as so many people had been linked to the web site. They had created some sort of a social storm, I guess.
After two or three weeks, the two essays were cencored out of the internet realms. I travelled to my native North Norway for the summer, wrote twelve essays on the civilization crisis I was sensing so strongly, then returned to Oslo only to find that the Club of Rome had issued a new question to this world, which was “Limits to Ignorance: The Challenge of Informed Humanity.”
http://www.clubofrome.org/archive/conferences.php
I wrote a thirteen-page response to this question, and all I can say about that is that my diplomatic skills are non-existent. It was probably the angriest zarking essay any of the international political elite members of the Club of Rome had ever encountered. As a result of all this, and also as a result of more spiritual events, I found myself in that tricky situation of being excommunicated from all social circles in the country. To my astonishment and anger, I also discovered that I was under constant police and military intelligence surveillance. So that was just how interesting my pieces of philosophic and artistic work really was, I thought, and just lost it. As for today, I’m sorry about many things, but I know a thing which is important in every way: I TRIED.
Yes, I tried. And I failed. I failed miserably. Time and time again.
And I realized that I could not become a social scientist or scholar, and I could not become an author of prose and plays. So, in summarizing my life so far, I have managed to become what feels like this country’s biggest secret. I have also become one seriously troubled nut case.
As a matter of fact, right now, I feel like sending Denis Diderot (1713 - 74) my regards. A passage of his play “Paradox of The Actor” (1770) gives me a little bit of solace. Diderot reflects on how he could possibly assemble all that hate around himself and his person, and concludes, as simple as this: “I was one of the Philosophes.”
Blair T. Longley // January 31, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I find Magne’s posts make the most sense to me, and I do not think it is a co-incidence that they also sound the most anguished:
“… allowing for no more than two child-births per woman actually touches on the most basic rights of the person. … the birth of three children per woman … leads inevitably to population explosion … Anyone who is saying that … ought to have his head checked, and his penis cut off.”
There is anguish in facing the chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life.
Consumption of resources is based on the abilities of different people to act as robbers in their environment.
The people whose ancestors were the best at being robbers tend to be wealthy, and the world’s systems are set up to enable them to rob more, while the people whose ancestors tended to be robbed in the past are now poor, and the systems are set up to continue to allow them to be robbed more.
At the same time, the way things are working is that women with access to education and opportunities tend to have less children, while the women who do not have more children.
Thus, the truism of fewer richer people and more poorer people.
That seems obviously headed towards unsustainable breakdowns,
of one kind or another, sooner or later.
The acute anguish comes from the fact that all of the old-fashioned solutions to chronic political problems have become insane, while talking about new solutions always breaches taboos.
The old-fashioned solutions are for people to fight for resources. The winners survive, and the losers perish. In that context, the more children, the better, since it builds a bigger army.
However, we now have weapons that are billions and trillions of times more powerful than ever in the past, that make it possible to kill millions and billions of people. Having a big army means nothing against weapons of mass destruction. Everybody dies but those who could hide in shelters. Nobody wins. Everybody loses. All of the previous social habits regarding how to survive have therefore become insane. However, inertia keeps those habits going, controlling the ways people think, and what they regard as taboo topics,
Our abilities to engage in robbery, including the ultimate form of robbery, which is killing, need to find far more intelligent ways to be expressed.
All of the past triumphs of the way that robbery and killing used to work to ensure survival are not going to work in the future.
The consumption and population equations are about rates of robbery and killing.
The multiplier effects in those equations are about how robberies and killings work to re-enforce each other.
The THEORY of what we should do is develop better artificial selection to internalize natural selection.
We should relocate the locus of death control from being between men trying to kill each other, so that the survivors can rob more, to women not reproducing too much, so that our species could rob just enough to sustain our survival.
The problem is that all of our social habits are based on the history of what used to work to survive, and that includes all of the taboo topics in society.
Effective population control must necessarily be new age warfare. The real peace treaties should be agreements about how many children women will have in different groups.
The breakdown of those peace treaties would mean we went back to the old-fashioned kinds of warfare, which we should not do, because our weapons of mass destruction would mean everyone would lose.
All of the so-called “peace treaties” bandied about in the world today are frauds.
They are deliberately not addressing the key issues of human and industrial ecology.
New age warfare should be the rational interference of some people in the lives of other people.
Precisely what it ought to be is an attack on the rights of women to have children.
There is no right without a remedy. There is no freedom without a force.
New age warfare should exist because there are chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life, and old-fashioned forms of warfare are no longer going to work to resolve those problems.
We do not need more love, what we need is more intelligent ways to hate.
Population control is really a form of death control. Population control should be seen as a form of war, and should be seen in the overall context of robbing resources.
The population and consumption equations should be seen in those real contexts.
The oversimplified situation is that women who have less than two children are committing suicide, while women who have more than two children are declaring war on their neighbours.
Real peace treaties would be contracts between people about how much they were going to rob, especially including how they were going to limit their own population growth.
The alternatives are to fight in ways that everyone will lose.
I do not think we will be able to go through the political miracles necessary for people to face the facts and come to the best mutual compromises.
If we did, then the main locus of death control would be in reproduction rates. If we did, then overall robbery rates would be brought into rational systematic balances through agreements between people that they would not rob and kill too much nor too little.
Instead, what is going to happen, which is why so many people feel so much anguish about this, is that the systems are going to go through wild swings from one extreme to the other.
Right now, we have the richest people committing suicide by reproducing too little, while they simultaneously are robbing too much by consuming too many resources. At the same time, we have the poorest people declaring war on the rich, by reproducing too much, and thereby attempting to be able to eventually rob more.
Since society is controlled by huge lies, and the people who are the biggest robbers and best killers are also the best hypocrites and liars, all of the truth about these topics is taboo.
The real alternatives to genuine peace treaties will be genocides.
Therefore, we should agree to genuine peace treaties and do what is necessary to enforce them. However, I share the general anguish that what looks far more likely than rational compromises through new age warfare is degenerations towards old-fashioned warfare going out of control and becoming unimaginably genocidal.
It is indeed the multiplier effect of robbing and killing, consumption and population, that is the total threat we are faced with.
Of course, it is not surprising that these are the most taboo social topics, and are exactly what we need to address to develop any genuine peace treaties in the future that would avoid worse fighting, that everyone would lose doing.
John Feeney // January 31, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Blogger Brishen Hoff caught the Monbiot article too, and critiques it a little more thoroughly. (I didn’t want to spend much time on it, but there are other problems with the article.)
http://ecologicalcrash.blogspot.com/2008/01/criticism-of-george-monbiots-latest.html
Also, FYI, here’s a very recent article on population at Truthout by Kelpie Wilson. It covers some anthropological observations not found in the typical article on the subject:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012908R.shtml
John Feeney // January 31, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Magne — I’m sorry to hear of what you went through as a result of those essays. I’m surprised that would happen in your country. I just hope you’re able to find more normalcy in your life now.
Trinifar –
Well said.
Magne Karlsen // January 31, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Blair: “The acute anguish comes from the fact that all of the old-fashioned solutions to chronic political problems have become insane, while talking about new solutions always breaches taboos.”
- —
Interesting. I believe you are absolutely right in what you are saying here. Then, when it comes to the weapons we’ve got today, which are “billions and trillions of times more powerful than ever in the past,” well, it’s the saddest of all things, as the weapon systems themselves really craves for our maintenance of good, old-fashioned, head-strong and potentially murderous political leadership. I mean: I can always dream of a future farewell to arms, but then again: who do I think I’m kidding?
Now, as we are facing new problems concerned with climate change and how to make people in general to start wanting to do something about it, there is always the individual or personal carbon ration or quota, as proposed by George Monbiot and David Miliband.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1935441,00.html#article_continue
“Use that target to set an annual carbon cap, which falls on the ski-jump trajectory. Then use the cap to set a personal carbon ration. Every citizen is given a free annual quota of carbon dioxide. He or she spends it by buying gas and electricity, petrol and train and plane tickets. If they run out, they must buy the rest from someone who has used less than his or her quota. This accounts for about 40% of the carbon dioxide we produce. The remainder is auctioned off to companies. It’s a simpler and fairer approach than either green taxation or the EU’s emissions trading scheme, and it also provides people with a powerful incentive to demand low-carbon technologies. Timescale: a full scheme in place by January 2009.”
Now, this would be one tremendously good idea, I think. We could actually get a whole new global economic system founded on some measure of fairness. And of sharing.
But then again: who do I think I am kidding? As such a scheme would have a very big portion of old farts think about those revelatory marks on the hand and the forehead, you know. All sorts of superstitions abound here, and I’m only pointing to a system in which every individual person got a personal code and a simple carbon credit card. Such a solution would come with the potential of working wonders. But it’s all so new, so of course it must be tagged as taboo.
Magne Karlsen // February 1, 2008 at 4:54 am
John,
Thank you. Those essays were the starting point of a journey from nowhere to nowhere, I guess. I have no reason to believe that I will “find more normalcy” in my life, ever again. I have come to conclude that I’ve gone permanently insane. My only hope is that some of the people who work inside the health and welfare system recognize that the shit that keeps happening to me is too much and too bad, and that the time has finally come to start reacting on my behalf. But I don’t believe it is ever going to happen.
Magne Karlsen // February 1, 2008 at 6:25 am
http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html
“For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.”
- —
I believe that Stanley Milgram’s famous piece of experimental psychological work on “The Perils of Obedience” has a lot to tell us about many of the things that seem to be going wrong here. As for myself, I have come to accept as established fact that all those who work inside “the system” are ready to whatever is required of them, even when the practices and routines of “the system” requires of them to do and be downright evil. It’s driving me crazy, but I can do nothing about it. I just need to accept that this is the way it is. Like the social worker who advised me to read some of Foucault’s work told me: “we just can’t help you; the system is fascist and works to protect and preserve itself.” — So forget about all that you thoght you knew about the Scandinavian democracies. A social worker in Oslo felt like telling me the whole ugly truth about that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
Magne Karlsen // February 1, 2008 at 6:52 am
“WATCH THIS ERROR”: Now, one of the little voices in my head chuckles at all this. One of the other little voices are choosing not to cry, while a third little voice is advising me to please inject a spoonful of self irony.
http://www.lyricsfire.com/viewlyrics/Bob-Dylan/Visions-Of-Johanna-lyrics.htm
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so
seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live
dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and
all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the
hall
Oh, how can I explain ?
It’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna they kept me up past
the dawn.
- BOB DYLAN: “VISIONS OF JOHANNA”
Ashit Shanker Saxena // February 1, 2008 at 9:16 am
As taboo topics are de rigeur on this post, here is another one!!
As an economics-layperson, I could never understand why, if goods and services were sought to be moved freely across the world, could not humans do the same as and where they could find work to do.
Very often, migration barriers have been instituted by the ‘leaders’ of populations that have themselves migrated to lands on other continents or profited explicitly by the appropriation of resources from lands abroad.
In earlier times, there was hardly any proscription of human migration; people would travel large intercontinental distances across Asia, Europe and Africa - at least North Africa - to sell their wares, their employ or to even settle down where their services were required.
Magne has already brought up property rights on an earlier post and George has brought up sapience/wisdom.
The coming crisis, I believe, is going to shred the barriers that have been humanly constucted, barriers that have actually facilitated the ballooning of this mess though that is likely to be difficult to see till the current system in place begins to unravel.
Migration of peoples all over the planet would have brought about enriching cultural cross-fertilisation that could have ensured balance rather than the tipping-over that we anticipate today.
Although right now they are taken for granted, it is going to come up for questioning how entities such as governments could appropriate and grant corporate entities the rights to drill the wells, gouge out the earth, dam the waters, etc.
The so-called ‘nobles’ of a few centuries ago similarly held sway upon their lands granted them by the king/emperor while the ‘peasants’ hovered upon the fringes of the estates to subsist on whatever morsels were thrown to them. Eventually, that ’system’ had to break down due to its own internal inconsistencies.
I am afraid that the time is fast approaching, for the current ’system’ too, to face the consequences of the artificial barriers it has constructed and maintained across the planet.
Any attempt at facing this crisis is going to, necessarily, require the facing of those very basic questions that we have been avoiding to do for too long a time now.
Personally, I do not think that those questions are yet being asked but one waits in the expectation that our own doings, of the past and of the present, shall force us to do so sooner than later.
Alex Szczech // February 1, 2008 at 9:16 am
Monbiet really doesn’t get it. Depressing.
On the other hand, there was an excellent piece in our local paper last week about the lack of discussion of the population issue (as it relates to the environment) amongst the political classes. http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/zaleski/269259
Ashit Shanker Saxena // February 1, 2008 at 9:36 am
Magne,
I have only just read your referring to spirituality. I think that you are spot on and these are the questions that, as I have indicated above, I am waiting for the unravelling of the current system to force us to face up to.
Magne Karlsen // February 1, 2008 at 12:00 pm
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/delusional
… b: a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary; also : the abnormal state marked by such beliefs
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/sentient
1 : responsive to or conscious of sense impressions
2 : aware
3 : finely sensitive in perception or feeling
- —
Dear All.
First of all, let me just steal the little time that is needed in order to make a short announcement.
While I know, within myself (my brain, my soul, my heart, my spirit, my everything, except that which has anything to do with my personal and interpersonal sociability, which is non-existent; ie.: I don’t have many people to talk to, and those that I do talk to tend to misinterpret everything I say or figure that Magne Karlsen is hallucinating and being seriously delusional not only once in a while, but all the funkadelic time. People who do not know me, but know a lot of shadowy things about me, treats me like the living incarnation of pure evil. There is nothing I can do about that. I mean: as soon as people have taken their time to making their minds up, they tend to be steadfast about their sentient orientation.
Now, as fate has it laid out for me, I can only say that I am cursed, and that there really is no more than one remaining event in my life; and it would have to be my moment of death. The cruel truth is: I have lost my entire family. They all “know” that I am totally lost to this world and that I am totally out of psychological, spiritual and bodily repair — now, that’s it and that’s that. It is a good day to die.
http://theband.hiof.no/lyrics/it_is_a_good_day_to_die.html
- —
http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/seattle2.html
“The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s graves behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father’s grave, and his children’s birthright, are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.”
- —
As the story goes: “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. — And nothing, well that’s all Bobby left me.”
Magne Karlsen // February 1, 2008 at 12:38 pm
One more thing. As I’m never going to forget about the said importance of showing every sign of self irony. I might even live for another 30 years, you know, ’cause as it happens: noone knows of the day and the hour.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2K1Z6Qd87y4
- —
http://www.guitaretab.com/r/rage-against-the-machine/15461.html
“No escape from the mass mind rape. Play it again jack and then rewind the tape. Play it again and again and again. Until ya mind gets locked in. Believin’ all the lies that they’re tellin’ ya. Buying all the products that they’re sellin’ ya. They say jump. Ya say how high. Ya brain dead. Ya got a fuckin’ bullet in ya head.”
- —
Hmmm. I think I’ve said this before: I’ve got my head filled up with little voices. I can only admit that Zack De La Rocha’s voice takes a prominent place in there.
Neil // February 1, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Interesting, but I didn’t read Monbiot that way, at all.
I don’t think he’s assuming the economy can grow 16-fold by 2100. He’s saying that based on the claims of economists that the economy will grow by 3% each year (it is the economist’s hope that it will do that today, as well) the economy will grow 16-fold.
And while Monbiot MAY have made a mistake comparing EG with one of its factors, P, it doesn’t really matter. He’s correct from the perspective that addressing economic growth is far more important than addressing JUST population.
In other words we could focus our efforts solely on population, ignoring per-capita consumption and still be worse off.
Addressing economic growth must take priority over virtually everything else precisely because it would deal with both population increase and increase in per-capita consumption, the two factors that facilitate it.
John Feeney // February 1, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Neil,
Well, this wasn’t the focus of my post, but here are Monbiot’s words:
“By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by roughly 1600%. . . . So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth.”
So yes he does seem to think that could happen.
First, if you accept the idea that economic growth can essentially be equated with total resource consumption (As Monbiot does in his paragraph 4, second to last sentence, and as I assume you might as a staff member at CASSE), then he absolutely made that mistake. [1] It’s as simple as the bit of arithmetic I presented.
And it matters a great deal, because he used that arithmetic mistake essentially to dismiss population and spread the misconception that it’s not a fundamental ecological problem. His words: “It’s an important issue, but nowhere near the top of the list.” This at a time when population has been discounted and dismissed to the bottom of the heap despite being one of the key elements in ecological degradation. He didn’t even acknowledge that population growth is one of the two drivers of total consumption (which he equates with economic growth!); he just used the article to dismiss the importance of population, a topic on which he’s virtually never written.
I have always emphasized the importance of both population and per capita consumption. To de-emphasize either is a huge mistake and is misleading.
Monbiot, in his article, tries hard to de-emphasize population.
I spend more time on population than per capita consumption only because others wrongly de-emphasize it so much. I work to end that.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve always talked about the problem of economic growth. Population seems to be one of its drivers, at least under some circumstances. But I don’t think we have evidence to say that causal link goes perfectly two ways. We can’t say economic growth is the sole (or even a major) driver of population growth. (In fact, some analysts contend the opposite in terms of certain stages of the demographic transition.)
So we can’t say that if we were to stop economic growth we would stop population growth. We’d likely influence it in some way, but would not stop it unless our route to stopping economic growth were, in part, directly through the avenue of stopping population growth. And in that case, we’d better not be de-emphasizing the importance of population.
Monbiot’s article was, I suspect, an effort to rationalize his avoidance of the population topic. There is a serious problem with environmental writers doing that and I don’t think we should excuse it just because they do identify another problem correctly.
[1] One might separate population growth and economic growth to some degree, but would still be left with the equation, total consumption = pop size * per capita consumption, in which case it remains flatly wrong to say population is “nowhere near the top of the list.”
John Feeney // February 1, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Magne —
Good to hear it.
Alex — Thanks for the link. That’s a good article.
Ashit — You raise some important issues. I don’t know how they’ll play out but suspect they’ll be looming larger in the coming decades.
Magne Karlsen // February 1, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Okay, so Rage Against The Machine is the most exquisite band name that I know of. We have a Very Big Growth Machine on our hands here, and it functions, just like Blair T. Longley here has said it repeatedly (he does that every time he leaves a comment here, so it had better be terribly important to him to get this message across for the others to digest, understand and ponder about), as a big lie factory: “Society is controlled by huge lies, and the people who are the biggest robbers and best killers are also the best hypocrites and liars, all of the truth about these topics is taboo.”
I need all of you people to understand that I am only expanding on the rather harsh discussions that have taken place on this forum since the UN climate change conference in Bali, and especially since Ken Whitehead’s essay “Sowing the seeds of a future society” appeared on this blog. I can feel that the general impression of the state of affairs on this planet is quickly growing grimmer and grimmer. I believe it has a lot to do with the sorry outcome of the Bali Conference, and I can easily sense that there is something going on in the blogosphere of ours, as we speak. I see that more and more people are becoming ever more disillusioned with the future of this planet, and I see that on all sorts of forums. Of course we are up against a spiritual drama of the most complex nature: human nature, that is, and not the nature of dolphins.
Now, in order to say anything useful about the spiritual sides of the questions that threatens to drive us all mad here, it is very important to understand that the ruling class of our societies knows about everything that we do. We are not talking about stupid, ignorant people here. Not at all. We are talking about people and stratas of people who are quite cunning. They know very well what they are doing. They know that the immediate future of this planet is in the rough. They even know that we are all trapped on this planet, and that there can be no magical escape from the proposed destiny of the species (again: let me refer briefly to the discussions that took place in Ken Whitehead’s “Sowing the seeds of a future society” thread).
I don’t know how to do this, but do it I must. It is very important that people come to terms with the fact that we’re in deep shit if we do not find a remedy to all the poison that is routinely injected into our brains by television companies from all over the world. I mean: we’re actually about to amuse ourselves to death here. It reminds me of a thing that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana wrote: “Here we are now, entertain us.”
While the world is like a kettle which humanity has placed on the stove for boiling, the entire media jungle of this world is, all of a sudden and at this moment in time, in the midst of a Britney Spears frenzy which can only go as evidence of madness on the part of the extremely powerful media groups of this world. I mean: the general media picture of our times is seriously beyond belief.
- —
Blair: “The acute anguish comes from the fact that all of the old-fashioned solutions to chronic political problems have become insane, while talking about new solutions always breaches taboos.”
This is the thing that bugs me. The politics of our times have become insane. The political leaders of this world has turned superstitious. Frankly speaking, I really came to understood that back in 2004, when the American election was sold to the public as “The Armageddon Election.”
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=822
And as concerns ordinary people, there is no way anyone can say that there is not a 2012 psychosis in the making here. The final ending point of the Maya calendar is threatening to make a whole lot of otherwise intelligent and level-headed people start to panic.
Al Gore and the IPPC are talking about a window of opportunity which lasts until 2016. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals are supposed to be met by 2015. All the while people are having nightmare dreams about what might happen in 2012, and the point is: if we can’t come up with a remedy to all sorts of spiritual problems, we are going to find that a golden opportunity seriously got lost.
I mean: there’s such a lot of blogs around the net that starts out with the assumption that there is a real need to SAVE THE WORLD. Which means that spiritually speaking, in the heart and soul of people like you and me, there is always a chance that a general realization of impending doom is actually taking place; a general realization that come what may, there is always the chance that the actual saving of the planet would be a foolish undertaking, as the environmental destruction and ecological degradation has already gone too far. I’m thinking about the general impression that we should have to start leading the lives of nineteenth century red indians in order to fix it all, and that would certainly be too much. So we could equally vote against the idea of taking any climate change mitigating steps at all. As it would all be too little too late, anyway.
Am I rambling here?
- —
Trinifar // February 1, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Magne: The politics of our times have become insane.
It seems so, but have politics ever been sane?
I think what’s different today is we have a new set of issues — global issues — that are more dramatic that anything we’ve faced before. If the response to that as seen through the lens of the media didn’t look rather crazy, I’d be shocked. Focusing on one bit at a time, I think you can find a lot of rational behavior.
[I think most of us allow ourselves to be innundated with a barrage of competing views, sucking up information from a wide variety of sources, and in doing so it's quite easy to conclude humanity is just completely screwed up. These days I don't try to drink from that firehose very often. It's just too painful.
I don't think we (humans) have ever been much different than we are now. Today, though, we have newspapers, books, radio, TV, and the Internet to continually stimulate our minds — and most of us don't take any "media downtime." It's funny, in a sad way, how for many people downtime is watching TV or reading a novel (just a different kind of input!) and never consider just sitting quietly (meditation) or taking a walk alone (yet another form of meditation). I've gone through periods where the silence was scarier than the noise, but those times were the result of personal strife. I do love the feeling of centerness that comes from regular unplugging from all media.]
Steven Earl Salmony // February 1, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Dear Friends,
Perhaps all of you will be permit me to sharply, but ever so slightly, disagree with Magne when he suggests that we are on a journey “from nowhere to nowhere, I guess.”
As an alternative, let me present this certain journey of ours in a different way: from nowhere to NOW HERE, I suppose.
Steve
Ashit Shanker Saxena // February 1, 2008 at 9:47 pm
John, Magne, Trinifar,
I am very glad that words such as ’spirituality’ and ‘mediatation’ are cropping up here!!
For me, it is the increasing moving away from true understanding and wisdom of what sentient ‘existence’ is all about that has culminated in our ’situation’ today.
SO, any hope of turning back the degradation shall have to necessarily address the most important issue of values based on various world-views.
Of course, currently, such talk is likely to be thought of as too fuzzy-wuzzy by the dynamic interpreters and implementers of the current paradigm of GDP-measurement et al.
It will take the onset of impending collapse to make sizeable numbers of humans to even consider these most fundamental concerns.
Magne, no need to feel so despairing. The ‘drama’ has to play itself out. Meditation can indeed maintain the internal equipoise of anyone so keenly sensitive to our predicament.
Ashit Shanker Saxena // February 1, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Steve,
My comment above is also addressed to you. I take it that by ‘NOW HERE’ you are pointing towards living in the present moment as opposed to the deemed FUTURE VALUE (FV) that one reads in ECON 101.
John Feeney // February 1, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Another more comprehensive critique of the Monbiot piece, hitting a number of important points, is here:
http://zone5.org/2008/02/01/monbiot-on-population/
Tim Murray // February 2, 2008 at 12:30 am
Monbiot is the global beacon of Greendom. His column of the 29th will give succour to those in the environmental movement (almost everyone) who ignore the “P” in the Ehrlich/Commoner IPAT formula. Monbiot has set the cause back years. Unless. Unless a guy like John Feeney who has an “in” with the British press does the following: Establish himself as a central clearing house of the many caustic and insightful criticisms of Monbiot’s position and then consolidates them into an edited book entitled “Contre Monbiot: His Population Fallacy Rebutted”. I would be happy to send along what I have. Monbiot needs to be taken down on this one.
Trinifar // February 2, 2008 at 2:04 am
Monbiot points to two facts which I think we all accept:
(1) population growth is way below 3%/yr and slowing down
(2) consumption growth isn’t
I’ll add a third:
(3) most people are not very aware of the seriousness of either population or consumption growth.
In light of (3) I can’t see beating him up for focusing on (2). Also I take his math examples as purely illustrative, not definitive. 3% annual consumption growth is a 24-year doubling time, that’s frightful, much higher than population growth in all but a few (or none?) of the world’s countries.
He says explicity: Stabilising or even reducing the human population would ameliorate almost all environmental impacts.
That’s pretty clear.
After some thought, I completely agree with his last line: But to suggest, as many of my correspondents do, that population growth is largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.
The focus is right, in my opinion. It’s the excesses of the rich which are largely to blame for the crisis. He’s taking the developed countries to task because our enormous per capita consumption even with little or no population growth far exceeds the damage done by poor countries with high population growth. As the Brits would say, spot on.
From a post I’m writing:
The population growth issue needs to be factored. It’s not one big issue but rather two (or more). Rich countries need to reduce population — a very hard sell, but true — because of how far they exceed fair and reasonable levels of consumption (tragedy of the commons). Poor countries have a different problem. Their high population growth rates need to come down quickly — even before they go through demographic transition — in order for them to get to a level of consumption that can satisfy basic needs for all. In the first case it’s about learning not to steal from the commons, in the second it’s in order to get the poor a fair share. Thing is, if the rich don’t stop stealing more than their fair share, the poor don’t have a hope of getting theirs.
Under the best of conditions, it will be decades before the rich countries reduce their population significantly, but they can reduce excessive consumption in a heartbeat. (You can’t encourage people to die; but you can take away their toys with a high carbon tax.) While I wish he expressed himself in the terms I used above, Monbiot’s tacking in the right direction.
John Feeney // February 2, 2008 at 3:44 am
[I've made several minor additions to this comment prior to any response from Trinifar.]
Trinifar,
I don’t see how you could write what you did.
First let me say again, Monbiot’s article was clearly an effort to dismiss the importance of population and justify his avoiding it. He said,
“It’s an important issue, but nowhere near the top of the list.”
If one accepts that total consumption = population size * per capita consumption, then that assertion is patently false.
Are you talking about the growth of total consumption as he is? The comparison isn’t valid. That was the central focus of my post.
The rate of population growth is slowing. I don’t know the exact status of the growth of per capita resource consumption as a whole. With regard to some resources it may be speeding up, though with regard to some it’s not. And generally it’s run close to population as a contributor to total consumption. I detailed that here.
What comfort is there in a slowing of population growth when we’re long past being in overshoot and are presented with projections of adding the equivalent of the global population of 1950 to the earth in the next 40 years? You think that justifies discounting the importance of the population issue?
To try a refinement of an analogy I tried on you recently: If a bullet is 10 feet from your head, traveling toward you at 1300/fps, is it some comfort that it may have decelerated from 1500/fps?
Once we went into overshoot, the gun had been fired. Now it’s a desperate attempt to avert being hit.
I’m baffled by your comment. The reason to do so is because he went out of his way to minimize the importance of population!
Talk about the importance of per capita consumption. That’s great. But it’s not great if you do so by spreading the myth that population is “nowhere near the top of the list.”
As well, given that 98% of environmental (and other) writers talk constantly about per capita consumption while ignoring population, I’d venture people are more aware these days of the per capita consumption problem than of the population problem.
He says flat out, “By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by roughly 1600%. . . . this means that in the 21st Century we will have used 16 times as many economic resources as human beings have consumed since we came down from the trees. . . . So economic growth this century could be 32 times as big an environmental issue as population growth.”
And his math example of comparing population growth with economic growth is just plain deceptive and invalid.
Yes, he just means it would make things better. He could have said the same of any trivial but legitimate problem.
First, when people (e.g., his correspondents) in developed countries complain about population, they’re as often as not talking about what they see in their own countries. More importantly, when many of us talk about “population growth,” we mean “population size and growth.” Pointing to population, then, in no way lets rich countries off the hook. Their population size needs to come down just as is the case with nearly all other countries. We’re already deeply into overshoot and no amount of per capita consumption reduction possible in the real world is going to be enough, alone, to undo that. So any rational talk of population growth has to refer to present size as much as anything else.
I would add that there need be no “blaming” of anyone. People are people. The blame lies in various structures of civilization. This “you’re blaming the poor” idea is, IMO, a propagandistic tactic to avoid the issue.
Also, some major developing countries with very large populations are rising fast economically and so rising fast in per person consumption. In a world already in overshoot, that makes population growth there a very serious problem. Fortunately the best ways of solving it are desired by the people of those countries and are nothing but helpful to them.
Moreover — and the importance of this cannot be overstated — pure numbers, independent of things we usually think of as consumption, are a huge problem for biodiversity. I’m not blaming the poor there; Hell, it’s arguably the policies of the rich which have promoted population growth in poor countries, some of which are the locations of great biodiversity. I’m just stating a fact, a fact which applies to the US and many poor countries alike.
I agree with the passage from your post which doesn’t seem to agree with everything which came before it in your comment:
I don’t think you’re blaming the poor there so how is Monbiot’s assertion spot on?
There I suspect Monbiot would say you’re blaming the poor. I know that’s nonsense, but you just said he was right about blaming the poor. What then am I supposed to make of your statement?
I don’t know how to say it; that would make very good ammo for the population deniers. It makes it sound easier to reduce consumption than it is. (See Fred Myerson’s essay here titled, “Population growth is easier to manage than per-capita emissions.”
We won’t make any huge change in consumption overnight. And you don’t have to encourage people to die to reduce population growth; you can encourage the births of fewer people.
Obviously, since we can’t make massive changes in population very fast, for humanity’s long term wellbeing we need to start ASAP. That’s what we should be encouraging, rather than brushing it off as “nowhere near the top of the list” or as paling in comparison to economic growth (as did the title of the article everywhere but his own site), an element to which its comparison is invalid.
Trinifar, I just don’t get what you’re doing here. His article will be used now as fuel by all those who want to claim population isn’t a problem. It’s already being used that way. It’s the same problem we went around with regarding the Diamond article which is now being used as ammo by those who want to claim “consumption, not population, is the problem.” First, population is a driver of total consumption. Second, the problem is 100% both population and per capita consumption, and these dismissals of population are inexcusable. Monbiot’s is the most egregious. He’s tacking in precisely the wrong direction by rationalizing his avoidance of the population topic.
I hated writing the post above because I like the person I’ve seen in a video or two of Monbiot and figured the post, if he happened to see it, would probably alienate him. But I cannot in good conscience support his article and must in good conscience rebut it. It will indeed be a setback to the environmental cause, as Tim Murray suggests, in its negation of the importance of population. Dismissals of the importance of population have the potential to go down as one of the most destructive instances of intellectual dishonesty in history.
So why, in your first comment, did you say, “Great post.” Evidently you completely disagree with it. My head is spinning.
Graham Strouts // February 2, 2008 at 4:29 am
Great coverage and nice blog, thanks! It is disheartening to see opinion leaders like Monbiot, who commands great respect amongst environmentalists over here in the UK and Ireland, come to address the population issue in such a confused and misleading way.
Zone5 » Monbiot on Population // February 2, 2008 at 4:34 am
[...] [Update: See John Feeney’s excellent response to Monbiot here.] [...]
Steven Earl Salmony // February 2, 2008 at 6:08 am
Dear Ashit,
You understand me well enough. Economics as it is currently ‘practiced’ is no help to us.
Steve
Magne Karlsen // February 2, 2008 at 8:55 am
Trinifar: “I think what’s different today is we have a new set of issues — global issues — that are more dramatic that anything we’ve faced before. If the response to that as seen through the lens of the media didn’t look rather crazy, I’d be shocked.”
Never before in the history of mankind has the species been lumped together as a functional (or dysfunctional) whole that is faced with the same global problem. The closest point I can think of in order to illustrating the common crisis we are faced with here, as a species, must be the advent of nuclear warheads: a development that caused a lot of fear on the part of the human spirit. But I think the emotional and spiritual reactions to the current threats of global warming and manmade climate change are even worse than the reactions to the nuclear war threat. It’s like: if the whole of mankind was ever going to have to meet up with one version of God or another, it would have to happen like it does right now, as Mother Nature herself seems to be turning against us.
Now, it should actually go without saying — as a matter of commonsense — that the problems of global warming and climate change shall have to be solved on a global level, and that it is going to prove extremely difficult to find solutions to this crisis under the lisence of nation states. But as it happens it is like Blair T. Longley is saying, that every possible solution to our common problems are bound to be greeted as parts of a large taboo area which seems only to be growing in size. Any political or humanistic thinker who SERIOUSLY questions the wisdom of protecting national and private interest in this time and age, will soon (as judged by social elites) become something like an intellectual villain.
Thinking along the lines of the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, what people consistently fail to understand is that the nation state is an abstract entity. The nation state exists only in as much as borders are written into the map as dotted lines. All the while, the Earth itself can never be seen as an abstract entity. The Earth is real. The Earth is an object you can touch. — But the nation state is nothing more than a historical fact; often a result of diplomacy and war.
- —
Trinifar: “Focusing on one bit at a time, I think you can find a lot of rational behavior.”
Right now, I must say it is very difficult to even look for any evidence of rational behaviour. As I can see how people around me are experiencing strong neuro-psychological reactions, and I can hear how they actively don’t talk about anything that might have anything to do with the state of the environment. In my native North Norway, the environment itself seems to have become a taboo topic.
- —
Steve: “… let me present this certain journey of ours in a different way: from nowhere to NOW HERE, I suppose.”
It’s like me thinking along the lines of moving on from a nuclear age to a NEW CLEAR AGE. — One in which nuclear power had not a thing to do with weapons of mass destruction, but rather was one of the best sources of non-fossil energy available to mankind. We’re definitely not there.
- —
Ashit: “Magne, no need to feel so despairing. The ‘drama’ has to play itself out. Meditation can indeed maintain the internal equipoise of anyone so keenly sensitive to our predicament.”
I’m despairing on the part of my own personal predicament. As for the future of mankind, I’m definitely not among the worst propagandists of impending disaster. I think, with time, people are going to “get over it”, and actually stop doing all the things that they ought not to be doing, and start doing more of what they should have done for centuries already. That is: taking good care of this planet’s ecosystems and not destroying them in the methodical and systematic manner as it is being done today.
As for my personal future, the answer, I believe, is “No.”
George Mobus // February 2, 2008 at 9:38 am
I’m actually confused by these arguments.
First, why the either/or stance? John is, I think, correct to point out that the problem is some combination of population and consumption rate growth. Both levels and growth rate accelerations are relevant to the math.
But I’m also confused by the use of a linear combination. I would have thought it clear that the interplay between population (size and growth rate) and consumption (per capita average amount and growth rate) involves complex positive feedbacks (and possibly, though not really well understood negative feedbacks) that create a non-linear combination.
Maybe John, you were trying to keep the math simple to illustrate a point, but it seems to me the best argument for why we need to address both consumption AND population together is that they are interrelated in these complex ways.
Of course we need to keep in mind the relevant time scales for rates of change in either of these two factors.
Personally I would think that what could be done quickly to start mitigation of our total set of global problems would be for the western world to immediately reduce their consumption rates through a combination of achievable efficiency increases, conservation, and the three Rs, followed by abandonment of entertainment and luxury consumption. My favorite kicking boy these days is the flat-panel, wide-screen, wall-mount TV with 2000 channels. It and things like the Superbowl excesses are icons of the misplaced values of American consumers.
However, in the slightly longer-run we need to be mitigating population problems world-wide. First we need to drastically reduce the rate of population growth in developing countries. It is not really the case that consumption in developed countries do more damage than that in developing countries. It is a different kind of damage, and it interacts (again the real complexity) with damage caused by developed countries removing underground natural resources. But above ground increasing population sizes diminish soil fertility, water supplies, and woodlands at astonishing rates. These kinds of immediate ecological impacts are what has caused collapses in pre-industrial and pre-historical communities (the kind Diamond has written about).
But I also think we cannot ignore the population sizes in the developed world. The evidence to-date strongly suggests that a population of 6.5+ billion is already as much as three times larger than the planet can sustain over the long haul. In the end it really does boil down to carrying capacity of the natural systems and a balance between human needs and what nature can sustain. We have no control over those global systems (and I seriously hope we don’t make the mistake of geoengineering without knowing what we are doing - experiment on Mars someday, maybe, but not here!). So we must find the balance between human and all other natural systems usage rates.
My main concern is that we begin to understand the problems as systemic and hence non-linear, complex, and not mere linear combinations. If we do, I believe these kinds of to-and-fros will give way to a beginning of solution finding.
George
John Feeney // February 2, 2008 at 10:14 am
I agree, George. And I’m confused and baffled by this argument myself.
Yes, I’m simplifying when I write that total consumption = pop size x average per capita consumption. That’s an accepted simplification, first published (AFAIK) by John Holdren in 1991. It’s explained and referenced here. It’s a basically a simplification of the I=PAT equation he and Ehrlich developed earlier (later elaborated on by the STIRPAT team). I use it because it’s basically valid [1] and can be understood by anyone. I’m always aiming at a general readership. Also, in this case it was especially applicable since the same equation is used by some to refer to economic growth which Monbiot equated in his article with total consumption.
You ask about the either/or. And I’ve been asking the same thing. I keep emphasizing that we must stop prioritizing between population and consumption as though one were clearly more important than the other. It’s not, and de-emphasizing either is a grave error. Literally!
[1] Though it may not reveal important detail, clearly total consumption does equal population size times average per capita consumption. It’s a decent starting point and shows nicely the folly of trying to minimize either factor.
Magne Karlsen // February 2, 2008 at 10:23 am
RE: - I think, with time, people are going to “get over it” …
Problem is: there’s such a lot of spiritual aspects here, that people will have to get over. I think it can only be fair to say that the current ecological crisis quite naturally make a lot of people (most people?) think along lines like these: Apocalypse, Armageddon, Inferno, and “Oh, my God!!! What have we done?!”
And that is the worst spiritually dimension to the current ecological crisis and clash of civilizations on a political level. I think it’s hardly possible not to catch oneself thinking along these lines, and I think it is important that we recognize this as one of the most fearsome obstacles to change which is available to the people who live down here, on ground level.
The other most important spiritual aspect is the fast expanding 2012 psychosis. I’ve read things on the internet, and heard people make some of the most mysterious statements as concerns the forthcoming spiritual awakening that is going to, supposedly, be a key element of something that is still unknown, and is going to happen in 2012. If anyone can understand what I mean?
http://survive2012.com/
http://www.2012.com.au/Site.A.html
http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/
Believe me: people are having spiritual problems that needs to be adressed, because the only thing they will ever make for is new obstacles to much needed social and lifestyle changes. As a matter of fact, such spiritual realizations can only make for good reasons to accept fate and do nothing in order to change it.
Just one thing: I’m deeply worried that political, financial, industrial, and military elites of our age and times are highly superstitious about things that concern the whole of humanity. I’m thinking of people and organizations of people who are all against any kind of political or economic change what-so-ever, and will be willing to do whatever it takes in order to secure business as usual and status quo. Which is not going to be difficult to them, as the population as a whole is spiritually inclined to being scared by the prospecct of any change at all.
Uh. I wish I was able to get this message across, in a manner that wasn’t so full of confusion. I’m very disoriented here, and I can only believe that there are still things waiting for me to digest and consider, and then swallow.
Magne Karlsen // February 2, 2008 at 10:35 am
George: “My favorite kicking boy these days is the flat-panel, wide-screen, wall-mount TV with 2000 channels.”
– -
Although I would put up my hatred of Hummers and SUVs prominently on my angry list, I totally agree with you. As for things like the Superbowl excesses, about 70% of all adult males living in Norway are diehard fans of one English football club or another. My own favourite football club has always been Liverpool F.C. — But I can only admit that my interest for a sport in which some kickers of round balls (the stars) can make more than £140.000 a week … hm … well, my interest has dwindled seriously over the past few years …
John Feeney // February 2, 2008 at 12:50 pm
George,
I’m glad you mentioned this. It dovetails nicely with the Jeffrey McKee book I’ve been reading. After extensive research he concluded that only addressing population growth could really help with the current mass extinction crisis. And that’s a crisis which I think is grossly underplayed by almost everyone.
It’s also true that that’s an area of “consumption” which is not well captured by the “ecological footprint” measure. It’s authors freely admit that. So the footprint of many developing countries would actually be higher if the measure did account well for that factor. (There are several other factors, too, which it doesn’t measure well. If we account for them it becomes clear that we’re deeper into overshoot than we might guess, and that consumption reduction alone is not close to being enough. But that is a topic for an article I’m working on.)
Trinifar // February 2, 2008 at 1:14 pm
John,
You are quite right to be confused by my two comments. The first, with the “Great post, great comments” remark — was sincerely offered and I stand by it.
I liked your writing style, your emphasis on population and consumption, and, after quickly reading Monbiot’s article (too quickly it turns out), it all seemed to hang together quite well.
It was only after following the rest of the discussion, especially Neil’s comment (which begins “Interesting, but I didn’t read Monbiot that way, at all”
that I realized I may not have read Monbiot closely enough. So I read his piece again slowly as well as some of the critiques you and others pointed to that I hadn’t read before. Seemed to me the response went too far.
So I wrote the comment which disagrees with some of your post — which I still think is a “great post” and yet (like most everything in this world) could be improved. There I alluded to the time sensitivity of the two factors with respect to a crisis tipping point as well as the fact that the rich are the drivers of pretty much everything these days. It’s all rather too succinct and clumsy so I’ll go finish the post I’m writing and see how that sits with you.
I do think you are being a bit unfair when quoting Monbiot like this:
If you look at the context of what you quote, he’s merely emphasizing if you project forward current economic estimates and the desire of governments for economic growth, then you’ll get ridiculous numbers like a 16-fold increase. He’s not saying that’s what he thinks will happen, just that we are insanely growth-oriented.
I disagree. There is no need for developed countries to have an ecologicial footprint an order of magnitude larger than others; we could converge to a much less consumption-driven lifestyle while stabilizing population at 8 billion (as in Brown’s Plan B 3.0) then begin to reduce our numbers.
But the larger point on which we agree is it’s in everyone’s interest to reduce both population and consumption. In light of the climate crises we need a large reduction in GHG emissions quickly, by 2020 by many estimates, to avoid permanent damage to the ecosystem and all the strife that would entail (like a large loss in carrying capacity). We can’t meet that short term goal with population reduction (due to latency), but we can with a reduction in consumption. This doesn’t mean population issues are not absolutely as important as you suggest and I also believe; lowering the fertility rate nearly everywhere is vital. Monbiot oversteps in minimizing population, but he says a lot that’s very sensible in that article.
This is already too long a response and not conveying what I want to say. I’ll try to get my related post up soon.
George Mobus // February 2, 2008 at 1:15 pm
John:
I should have added that the reality involves a dynamic system. The I=PAT formula may be a good framework to start from, but until you get the dynamics (how it works over time) and how all of the factors interrelate you will not get an accurate idea of what is happening and what should be attended to in what manner and how hard!
Here is what I mean; a simple set of relations that capture the deeper, dynamic essence of this problem.
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Background/IPATDynamics.gif
This is a discrete time model. The little t is a time step and Δt is the step size to the next time step. Each of the factors’ values at time t+Δt are a function of the values of the other factors at the previous time step as well as of its own previous value. This is what makes the system difficult to understand in fact. Yet this is the set of equations (and a huge number of break-out equations) that must be modeled in order to really get a handle on this situation.
OK. I understand that you (John) are writing for a general audience, but I’m betting the larger audience you are actually reaching is comprised of people like yourself, and the regular commenters here. And these are the people who are going to actually work on finding solutions by deeply understanding the problem.
Just like the climate models that are used to better u