Populate or Perish?

It is exactly two centuries since the English clergyman and economist, Reverend Thomas Malthus, first kindled fears about the catastrophic consequences of human fertility with his famous pamphlet, An Essay on the Principle of Population.  Malthus argued that it was in the very nature of things for human populations to rapidly outgrow their food supply until the numbers were cut back by various forms of misery, such as famine, war or disease.

In later editions of the essay he modified his views somewhat, suggesting that "moral restraints" like late marriage and sexual abstinence could also be effective in checking population growth.  But with his clergyman's distaste for sexual pleasure, he was very hostile to contraception.

Malthus wrote in opposition to the early utopian socialists such as William Godwin, who had forecast an idyllic future in which the state would wither away, private property would disappear, and people would live a leisurely life of peace and harmony.

Malthus was right to sneer at these fantasies, but he went much further, criticising the Poor Laws under which property was taxed to provide benefits for people who were unemployed or too ill to work.  As he saw it, this assistance simply encouraged the poor to breed more.  In one infamous passage he wrote that if society did not want a man's labour, that man had no right to expect any help:  "Nature tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her orders".

But even while Malthus was writing, scientific advances in agriculture and the colonisation of North America and Australia were working to confound his predictions, bringing about a massive increase in the world's food production.  And as a result of the fertility decline that had begun in most European countries during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, fears about overpopulation were often transformed into fears about depopulation in the first part of the twentieth century.

In 1904 New South Wales set up a "Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-rate and on the Mortality of Infants".  During the thirties a number of eminent economists in Western Europe, such as John Maynard Keynes, believed that the expected population decline would bring about long-term economic stagnation.

But after the Second World War, the Malthusian spectre returned with a vengeance, fuelled by the "baby boom" in western countries and substantial reductions in child mortality and overall death rates in the Third World.  The "population explosion" became an explanation to suit every kind of political agenda.  Depending on the commentator, it was the cause of economic stagnation -- never mind what had been said earlier -- war, hunger, crime, disease, psychological stress, child abuse, even "big government" and communism.

A recent study of the way in which population issues were discussed in American popular magazines in the forty five years after the end of the War showed that initially, environmental problems were rarely mentioned.  But starting from the late 1960s with the growth of the green movement, the environmental effects of overpopulation became a major focus.  By the 1980s it was the dominant concern, fanned by alarmist works such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb.

To highlight the dangers of population growth, conservationists used the concept of the environment's carrying capacity, developed by ecologists studying non-human species (though even there, not without its difficulties).  As mankind's population boomed towards the earth's carrying capacity, they argued, a bust was inevitable.  In a nuclear-armed world, this kind of catastrophe could mean the extinction of humanity and most other species.

So what is the earth's carrying capacity?  Obviously, there must be some limits to human growth, but there is an enormous diversity of opinion amongst experts as to the actual numbers.  The American biologist and demographer Joel Cohen has noted that in 1994 alone, published scientific estimates varied from less than 3 billion people -- which means that we are well and truly finished already -- to 44 billion, or over 7 times the world's current population.

In other words, while carrying capacity may be useful for mobilising anxiety about overpopulation, it is not a terribly helpful scientific concept, at least as far as humans are concerned.  As well as depending on often poorly understood natural constraints, it also hinges on individual and collective decisions and innovations in regards to technology, social and economic institutions, lifestyles, values and much else.

But despite the continuing overblown rhetoric about a population Armageddon, there is reassuring news.  The past three decades have seen unprecedented declines in fertility rates in a large number of developing countries.  Although it is extremely difficult to forecast future fertility trends -- both the postwar "baby boom" and the "baby bust" that followed it were unforeseen -- some United Nations demographers are now seriously proposing scenarios in which the earth's population reaches a peak of 7.7 billion within the lifetime of today's young adults, and then starts to decline.

Nevertheless, such doubts are unlikely to deter the zealots, some of whom make Malthus seem like a softie.  Lynn White, the historian whose famous 1967 article blaming environmental degradation on the Judeo-Christian tradition made him a hero to greens, later wrote an extraordinary essay called "The future of compassion".  This called for Christians to assist "a drastic global rollback in population", with White saying that while he hesitated to pray for a new Black Death himself, "perhaps, whether we pray for it or not, a global atomic war will once more temporarily solve the population problem".  We can only wonder to whom his prayers are addressed.

And then there is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, based on the West Coast of the United States -- where else? -- from where it publishes its newsletter, These EXIT Times.  Its long-term goal is that every human will choose to stop breeding, so that "Earth will be allowed to return to its former glory".  These EXIT Times presents itself as the moderate face of human extinction.  It dissociates itself from the activists who want to use involuntary methods -- those people are the real crazies.

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