The Limits to (Population) Growth

[GliderGuider]

I turned my response to Terry in Austin's challenge in the African Food thread into a standalone article on my web site. It has subsequently been republished by both Carolyn Baker and PlanetThoughts.org.

Since I riffed off (Ripped off? Not me...) Terry in Austin's memorable quote about bonfires, I thought I'd bring it back home to DU. Thanks a million for that quote, Terry. I've been using it since you came up with it, and it has real legs.

One of my very favourite quotes about population and ecology comes from an unnamed friend on the Internet:

Asking ,"How will we get enough food to feed this growing population?" is a lot like asking "How will we get enough wood to feed this growing bonfire?"

The point of the quote is that most people have the ecological cause and effect of food and population exactly backwards. The real problem is not that a rising population requires more food, but that an increasing food supply drives populations ever upward.

Happy 4th of July to all my progressive American friends.

Edited to add excerpt

[HamdenRice]

1. Malthusian bullshit

People have been breaking the correlation between food resource availability and population growth for 10,000 years, ever since they decided to plant some local grasses instead of wandering around looking for them.

The adherence to Malthusian thinking must be some kind of religious fundamentalist mental disease because it has been disproved over and over, every year since Malthus proposed it, yet no matter how discredited, some people simply can't discard it.

If Malthus were correct, Europe's population should be exploding while Ethiopia's should be declining. Yet that is not the case. That observation has no effect on Malthusians' thinking, however.

[GliderGuider]

2. The basic question is whether or not we're in overshoot.

And if we are, whether we will return to balance with the productive capacity of the biosphere voluntarily or involuntarily.

Do you think we are in overshoot?

[HamdenRice]

3. That's like asking an atheist whether the recession is caused by God being angry

Overshoot is a Malthusian concept. Malthusian economics rejects or fails to take account of a whole series of "first day in Econ 101" realities -- elasticity of demand, land/labor/capital ratios, substitution, pricing, etc. -- that make addressing its concerns an exercise in fantasy explication.

So the equivalent of your question is asking a paleontologist into the creationism museum to debate whether biblical characters harnessed dinosaurs or dragons to pull their wagons.

If you mean do I expect/hope for the grand human die off that gives so many Malthusians a dystopian hard-on, no.

Overshoot on what resources?

That said, the only resource constraint that I think is potentially catastrophic to human existence is the carbon carrying capacity of the atmosphere.

As for resources to produce food, definitely not. I've traveled through southeast China which is one of the most densely populated and intensely exploited agricultural areas on earth, and I've lived in western and southern Africa which are not densely populated, and drawn the conclusion that frankly most places on earth, like much of Africa, have a long, long way to go before it gets to southeast China levels of density and intensity of exploitation. In other words, most Malthusian discussion of food assumes that because there is a fixed amount of land, there is a fixed amount of land productivity. There isn't. China, though, makes a useful baseline for peasant systems that extract the maximum amount of food per unit of land.

Would life be pleasant if many more places had to intensify land use to southeast Chinese levels? No. Would we die off? Also no.

Fortunately, population growth estimates are crashing and zero population growth will be reached long before we are anywhere near the southeast China situation.

[GliderGuider]

4. And there we have it in a nutshell.

Thanks for clarifying your position.

[Nederland]

5. It will be voluntary

People will adjust to their lifestyle to their circumstances, just as they always have.

(I suppose you might choose to view the choices that people will be forced to make in the near future as "involuntary". If I could, I would spend all my time hiking, eating and sitting around reading books. However, the reality of the universe demands that I engage in some sort of activity that provides me--directly or indirectly--with food, clothing and shelter. Am I therefore "forced" to work? Yes, in the same manner that I am "forced" to breathe.)

Over the next 50 years will people be compelled to change the way they live according to fluctuations in the price of food and energy? Of course--but that is no different than the way things have been for the last million years. The big difference between the way things are now and the way things have been for most of human history is the quantity of choices that are available to the modern human. In the past, the vast majority of a person's time was spent figuring out how to get enough food to live for the next week. Today, I make enough money in a week to feed myself for a year. That fact frees me up to spend huge quantities of time to do other things.

The big difference I have with the Malthusians is that I see the above equation (1 week of work == 1 year of food) changing very little in the future. Even if the price of food triples, the equation merely shifts to 3 weeks of work == 1 year of food, which only represents a 4% drop in my non-food-acquiring activities. Sadly, that is not the reality for a huge percentage of the human population in the developing world that still spends most of its time trying to figure out how to eat for the next week. If the price of food triples, those people are going to die.

I would repeat that this is a sad state of affairs. However, it is not a new state of affairs--it is the way it has always been. Populations grow and shrink according to their ability to feed themselves. The cycles of drought and famine have always been with us, and it is difficult to understand what exactly the Malthusians think is different now. Malthusians seem to claim that people in the developed world are going to start starving due to lack of food. This is preposterous. The developed world produces ten times as many calories of food than it needs to feed it own population, and there is no way global food production is going to see a 90% decline.

This is not to say there will not be changes. Yes, global food production may drop significantly in the future (I doubt it, but it might). Energy will definitely become more scarce and therefore more expensive. The prices of raw material may increase significantly as a result of those first two occurrences. The result of these changes however, will not be a some sort of global catastrophe of the likes that the Malthusians predict. No, it will be a fairly slow sea change (yes, sea change) that will occur as people adjust and make choices about how they live. In other words, it will be much like the previous 150 years--where the first world went from being a population of 95% farmers to less than 3% farmers. A tremendous shift in how people live and spend their time, but not a change that many will look back upon and wish hadn't happened.

[Terry in Austin]

6. Bonfire

Thanks a million for that quote...

Happy to turn it loose, very glad to hear that it took. (If it reaches meme-hood, maybe it could be called the "bonfire of the inanities.")

Thanks for all the great work you're doing -- keep those ideas and articles coming!

:toast: