Enough already
Firstly, the blog seems to be back up and running on most people’s computers. We owe our fawning thanks to Neil the computer man.
Secondly, and on a more downbeat note, is the world fucked?
Me and Mrs W were having a conversation this morning about the incredibly large population of the world. She saw an article- tucked away somewhere in the middle of the newspaper, as if it were a pretty trivial story – which said that some scientists had predicted it would be in only nine years’ time (2020) that we started to see the consequences of the huge population explosion since the second world war. There’d be chronic food shortages (even worse than the ones there already are), leading to many deaths from starvation. This would trigger civil wars fought between desperate factions in hungry countries. Thousands of people would flood into better-fed nations in the hope of improving their chances. And so on and so on. We’re all familiar with Doomsday scenarios in which one catastrophe triggers a dozen more which trigger the eventual collapse of Earth as the home of our civilization. Mostly we avoid considering them, because really, what else are we meant to do if we don’t want to despair? Or we just sort of think: well, if it’s not this it’s climate change, or nuclear war, or something – the world will wipe itself out sooner or later, so hey ho, I’m off to Asda. Or if we’re confident we think: oh, people have always thought, throughout the ages, that everything was about to come to an end. Really, things are never quite so dramatic. Humanity might mutate in all sorts of ways, but it finds a way to continue.
But I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently, because I read that novel ‘Freedom’ (mentioned honourably in my Best Things of 2010) in which one character becomes preoccupied with just this question. He begins a campaign – Enough Already is one of its names – to discourage people from having children, as that is the only way we can conceivably slow down the astonishing growth of the human race. He has quite a few problems with it, as (without wishing to spoil things) he does with most other things in the book. Even if you’re able to persuade people that the planet is on the brink of disaster, it’s another thing to continue ‘…so hey, stop having kids, could you? I know they’re cute and everything.’
Emily pointed out that improved education and contraception and general development in Africa and Asia might well have the effect of slowing down the explosion over the next thirty years, because history shows that as societies become more advanced, family units get smaller, because people don’t feel like they have to have eleven kids so two can survive, and also they want to do other stuff with their lives, etc. etc. The Pope generously deciding it’s OK to use condoms will be a step forward for Africa in particular. But, I don’t know, will this be enough? It looks to me like even if things slow down, we’re just going to have… well, too many people. A lot of the world is already shockingly over-full, a lot of people already can’t eat or live in decent conditions.
Hmmmm.
Um, does anyone have any detailed knowledge of this topic (as ever, I’m really only skimming the surface)? Does anyone have an opinion on how fucked we might be? And best of all, does anyone have a solution? It would really brighten up the end of a tough week.
Posted by Rhian on January 28, 2011
I was also going to make Heather’s point 3. We do need to keep replacing the population so we can support an ageing population, staff hospitals, care homes etc, fund state education and all the other things our taxes fund (although when all the retired people are put to work in the ‘BIG SOCIETY’ we won’t actually have to pay anyone to do the things we are stupidly paying skilled professionals to do now, so we won’t need to be bothering with taxes any more – everyone’s a winner!) Perhaps a bit of global population redistribution wouldn’t go amiss, Although it is getting quite busy here in the UK (this isn’t supposed to sound anti-immigrant, more that in the literal sense we do have quite a lot of people per square kilometre). Perhaps we should mix up the ageing and youngster heavy populations a bit.
So, over population, there is generally a global trend towards a declining birth rate, but this tends to coincide with an improved standard of living, which is likely to have a greater impact on resource use e.g. massive increase in car ownership in China and India.
I think we’re going to have to seriously look at GM food. My (limited) understanding is that the issue is with the companies who are developing it – producing plants that produce infertile seeds, so farmers can’t keep back some of the crop for the next harvest, developing crops that only respond to particular herbicides/pesticides that are produced by the same company etc. We’ve been genetically modifying crops and animals for millennia through domestication.
There’s a pretty crude ‘eco footprint’ calculator here: http://www.ecologicalfootprint.com/. You can see how many earths are needed to support your resource use. It’s a bit frightening. We are probably, pretty much, doomed.
Posted by Craig on January 24, 2011
Mars.
Posted by Josh (the magnificent one) on January 22, 2011
OH NO!
Another Josh is here.
Also, I should state that the “so what do we care” in my last comment was meant entirely ironically.
Posted by Heather Jones on January 22, 2011
Just wanted to add 3 points
1. The desire to have children is a deep one for a lot of people. Not all, I acknowledge, but evolution has given us a pretty strong kick towards passing on our ‘selfish genes’. I’m a mum of two grown up sons. I always knew I wanted to have children and it was a hugely rewarding thing for me. Being a mother was a major part of my sense of identity and worth – possibly too much so, to be honest. I went through a v painful sense of loss when my sons grew into being largely independent from me, even though that was the aim all along (no sickly apron-strings here!) Had to reassess my value and identity as just me. Even had to take myself to task for almost regarding next phase as marking time until grandchildren come along (they might not of course, I’m not deluded… But I can’t help hoping that they do)
2. The one child policy in China – has that already been mentioned? It’s something I find myself instinctively recoiling from.
3. I don’t know the ins and outs but some of the pension crisis in UK is linked to the shifting balance of the population whereby we’re not replacing ourselves and hence fewer working age people will be having to support a larger number of long-living elderly. The problem I suppose caused by a previous baby boom.
Posted by Lydia on January 22, 2011
I have absolutely no idea about any of it, but it’s very interesting. It probably sounds bad, but before this and reading through all the comments and such I’d never really thought about it.
Posted by Josh on January 22, 2011
The problem with this is that social perceptions of childless people aren’t the most positive. You may not have noticed this, Mark, having such a young child, but among the middle classes, I have often noticed groups of friends (usually female) “gossip” about those of their friends who are childless and what must be wrong with them. Personally, I’ve never thought much about the whole child thing, but though it’d be nice to have one, not having one would save a lot of money and time, as well as the world
Posted by Clembear on January 22, 2011
Apologies for double post, but you get to see my self-editing – I’m never sure if using the word rape or its derivatives metaphorically is OK.
Posted by Clembear on January 22, 2011
Hmmm, well I’m going to be contrary as ever.
There is enough food. Its just not where it needs to be. We need to improve distribution and reduce food price volatility. Very do-able.
A lovely engineer was on Radio 4 recently pointing out that a lot of potential problems in Africa/Asia are fixable with existing technology. Its shocking how do-able a lot of problems are, they need money, infrastructure and will to solve. Infrastructure is tricky but possible. And a where are we powerlessness doesn’t fix’em. Food, water, and shelter are things we can work on.
And not looting Africa for minerals would help – its incredibly rich in materials for computers and mobile phones that we need to adequately pay for – wealth disparity will need to correct somehow.
I think its important to remember that we can change our world – we (I think all reading this) are massively wealthy and priveleged compared to the rest of the world, with a chance and opportunity to make the world and ourselves substantially better. Human ingenuity is amazing – we are capable of so much, so keep your chin up.
Posted by Clembear on January 22, 2011
Hmmm, well I’m going to be contrary as ever.
There is enough food. Its just not where it needs to be. We need to improve distribution and reduce food price volatility. Very do-able.
A lovely engineer was on Radio 4 recently pointing out that a lot of potential problems in Africa/Asia are fixable with existing technology. Its shocking how do-able a lot of problems are, they need money, infrastructure and will to solve. Infrastructure is tricky but possible. And a where are we powerlessness doesn’t fix’em. Food, water, and shelter are things we can work on.
And not raping Africa for minerals would help – its incredibly rich in materials for computers and mobile phones that we need to adequately pay for – wealth disparity will need to correct somehow.
Posted by Josh on January 22, 2011
I have a theory of things. It’s based on sine waves.
Most things, such as population, are based on sine waves. As more people are born the population goes up until some effect of this rise starts to slow it, it levels off then starts to drop and then slowly begins to rise again. This is a sine wave. However, things are very rarely this simple so you end up having loads of sine waves interacting with each other (climate effects population, political stance effects international aid etc.) and thus the sine waves are not easy to see.
On top of this, some sine waves are too big to see as such. Global population, for example has not been going for long enough to have completed one wavelength, and we therefore cannot see the shape of it. All we know for sure is that one day there will have to be less people and then some day after that there will be more people again.
If you’ve managed to gain any sort of meaning from all that then you are a better person than I.
In practical terms, however, I think that a couple of billion people are pretty screwed. But hey, it won’t be us rich, healthy western types so what do we care?
Posted by Roger on January 22, 2011
I think one contributory factor is that as each country of the world develops, so does their medicine. Although the family unit is smaller in these developed countries, each individual lives longer (on average) requiring food to eat, space to live, filling up the post office queue, etc. I am not advocating euthanasia by the way.
Posted by Lisa D on January 22, 2011
My mother’s a sociologist and my stepdad studied environmental science at MIT so I hear all manner of scary shit at the dinner table. George Carlin had a routine (during his really dark period) in which he said he was sick of this “Save the Planet” bullshit. “The planet will be fine: it’s PEOPLE that are fucked,” he said in the most disturbingly cheerful way.
Posted by Alex on January 22, 2011
This is another one of those topics where I have some incoherent thoughts, but nothing I can really articulate, and definitely nothing that everyone else hasn’t already said, and said it better. So normally I would chicken out of commenting.
But, err, I just thought I should say that the blog still isn’t exactly working normally for me. Had to click on several differnt things to find it. Sorry… But I did find it so that’s better than it has been at times.
Also- sorry to use the comments for my own ulterior motives again but if you enjoyed The Secret Gaygent’s blog the last time I spammed you, then I am fairly confident you’ll like this one more: http://thesecretgaygent.blogspot.com/2011/01/chatting-to-johann-hari.html
It’s an interview with Johann Hari. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?
I hope this all makes sense. I had a deadline today and I’ve been celebrating.
Posted by Aislinn on January 22, 2011
I’m very much in the Asda camp.
Posted by Kate W on January 22, 2011
My not terribly well informed point of view on this is that something will happen to redress the balance, probably related to either climate change (e.g. lots of us will die in catastrophic floods/a tsunami) or epidemic disease. Bubonic plague killed 100 million people in the 1300s and while we have much, much better medicine now, we’re still not immune from widespread infectious disease – we seem to have staved off avian flu and swine flu, but new germs develop all the time.
That sounds terribly doomy, but isn’t intended to be. What I’m trying to articulate is that no population can continue to grow forever; it will either be limited by the availability of food, predated by another species or die of some disease. We’re getting more and more efficient at producing food, but humanity can’t continue to grow for ever – if we don’t run out of food, we will run out of habitable land.
Population control would be a solution, just as cutting carbon emissions would be (at least partially) the answer to climate change, but people don’t want to stop having children in much the same way as they don’t want to stop driving or using electricity. We’ve got used to consuming as much as we can, and I think it will take something pretty dramatic to make us change that behaviour.
Posted by Megan on January 21, 2011
I should point out that I used to worry about this sort of thing quite a lot, but found that if you dwell on doom and things you really don’t have any control over, it is very hard to get on with life.
Posted by Ingrid on January 21, 2011
Dont really have any answer to that.
About a year ago I started to worry about this sort of thing. Over populating, nuclear war, death and the world just generally ending. I ended up basically really really freaking my self out! So since then I just try not to think about it… possibly not the best solution. Sorry
Tough week? Know how you feel. Well hope the next one goes better. xx
Posted by Sam on January 21, 2011
I oddly have been quite preoccupied with this of late, especially as I recently had an exam about Environmental Concerns and the question was essentially “We’re fucked. Discuss.” The downside was sitting in a room alone for nearly three hours pondering our demise, the upside was I talked about Skynet in my exam.
I am about to go on at some length, about a specific issue, with little hilarity there in so if you are reading this and not interested then firstly why? and secondly, skip to the end.
One of the major problems we have is no one discusses what happens to the people, we look at these doomsday scenarios and how it effects us globally, rising sea tides wiping out nations and towns etc. And whilst we do need to find ways of stoping these things, the likelihood is we will only slow them. With Global Warming we can vastly reduce our carbon output, that just offsets the warming, which while being fantastic is not a permanent solution, and we need to think of how we’ll cope. These problems, over-population, global warming etc will all lead to the relocation of people, and this is where if anywhere the world will end.
The human race has a remarkable ability to adapt and survive, however it usually survives after nearly tearing apart itself in the process, the Cold War for example. People draw battle lines based upon ideologies and they take us to the brink, in the past the human race has always managed to survive this, but as the problems get bigger, so will the conflicts.
With the relocation of people there comes issues of nationality, culture and boundries. The pacific islands are the most underthreat, so take Tuvalu for example, these would then be a people without a home, purely hypothetically if we settled them in Australia (despite this blog’s community project prowess I’m not sure we have the authority to decide that) would they then be Tuvalian or Australian? We see even now after generations of attempted integration in the US, black people are still victimised and marginalised despite them being exactly the same, here we have an entirely new culture being forced into another. Or do we strip these people of their culture and identity? I can’t imagine doing such a thing, but it makes for a safer integration into society, but at the same time is an utterly horrendous concept to entertain. Economically this also causes problems as the new host nation has to maintain a large number of new citizens, and the economy of the old nation is gone. These are where the flash points will arise, throughout history conflict has come from differences, money and oppression and we need to try and address these issues before they arise as the more suddenly it arises the more damage it will cause.
And the main reason we will not be able to do this is because we can not act as a global community. We can not even seem to operate as a state community, people complain about taxes and decisions with regards to state programs unless it benefits them personally, if we can not operate as states how can we possibly imagine to operate on a global scale? The way it will happen is through people, individuals with a common goal and agenda, such as the “Enough Already” campaign. We need to communicate with each other through the internet, through social media, to get movements together, to educate people and get information out there. Be it information about how we can solve these problems through reducing our emissions, through having less children and the reasons why this is good, or through information about cultures to better create a sense of global community.
In times of hardship and conflict people automatically band with those with them in a way that seems illogical and almost fanatical at times, the amount of patriotism that occurs during times of war is disproportionate to how people actually feel about the issues. If we can try and create a sense of global community, that these people are the same as us, when the hardships come we will hopefully band together and protect everyone, not just ourselves. It is only through working together than human kind gets anywhere.
If you take the Iranian “elections” where social media was used to create a mass of worldwide support for those individuals living under the regime, and it is an example of how we can then sympathise, empathise and side with people we would seemingly have nothing in common with, because we banded together under the banner of democracy. We need to find our banner to unite us during the coming doomsday scenarios, and that is the task that faces us.
I know I have meandered, and not communicated with the most clarity, and it is because I don’t have all the answers, and no one person does, and no one will, which is why we need a global response.
I hope that made some kind of sense and was at least thought provoking.
Posted by lisan66 on January 21, 2011
Malthus (Thomas or Robert, can’t remember which, but he’s an economist) said that we’d run out of food because food growth is smaller than human growth in An Essay on The Principle of Population, and he wrote that in the 18th century (I think….my memory is obviously failing here!) Anyway, it hasn’t happened yet, because technology has let us grow more food, quicker than we should be able to. Basically, if you’ve no problem eating cloned carrots and vegetables that are grown in test tubes we’ll all be fine!
Posted by Rachael on January 21, 2011
One of the many reasons why I have no plans to reproduce. I worry about this quite alot but most of the time I try not to think about it, so thanks for bringing it up! Although I realise that if more people didn’t keep trying to forget it and did something about it instead we might have more hope.
Posted by Megan on January 21, 2011
Lady Watson Howes is right; more ‘advanced’ (which is kind of a eurocentric/borderline-jingoistic way of putting it in sociological terms, but can’t really think of a better word at present) countries (ie. more economically stable, technologically advanced, better educated in Western sense, etc.) have smaller families. This is why Japan, which has far too many people still, has some of the smallest families in the world, but also have loos that sing and clean your arse for you. IIRC, there is no population growth in a handful of European countries where the population is going down as people decide one, or none, is enough in terms of children.
Now, I have no solutions, aside from, yes, better family planning in places where that isn’t the norm and helping communities (on a smaller scale) be more self-sufficient and less dependent on aid. Still, that’s a pretty tall order.
Sorry I can’t be super chipper cheerful about this. I don’t think 2020 is the end of anything, though. All we can do is help when we can and do our best.
Posted by Misha on January 21, 2011
The end of the world is one of those odd things that i have a habit of becoming so preoccupied with that I can get suicidally despairing in the space of about an hour. (Train of thought usually being, well we’re all fucked anyway). Cheery, I know.
I suppose either we’ll come to our senses and sort things the fuck out, by having less children, less carbon emissions etc. Or we’ll all die. We’ve just got to hit tipping point really.
I don’t know, is the answer. And already thinking about this is sending me into a heart racing state of panic.