Population

I’ve been lately pondering the fact that overpopulation is the elephant in the room in every conversation about the environment. Six billion is simply too many people for all of us to live in the way that we might if there were only a billion or so.

Personally, I have no concept of numbers like “billion.” I can get my arms around “144.” That’s how many strands of 100 foot fibre we ran today. It took a couple of hours with three or four people working. It was a lot. Running one would have been quick and easy … but 144 was a lot. A thousand would have taken days. A million … well … here’s a decent story about that many grains of rice.

Given my personal failure to get an intuitive grip on even a couple of hundred things, I have no firsthand experience with the mystery that is a “billion people.” The conceptual difference (for me) between 3,000+ people dying in New York in September of 2001, and 250,000+ people dying in Indonesia in 2004 is primarily due to cultural proximity and the fact that I’ve been to New York. I simply don’t have a gut feel for the difference between thousands and hundreds of thousands of people dying. They both feel horrifyingly, sickeningly huge. “More people than everyone I know by name,” breaks my mind.

This, combined with our remarkable lack of intuition for the effects of exponential growth, means that it’s easy to miss the core reasons that we’re driving species into extinction and changing the weather with our growing foulness. The world is large, but an interesting world (for me) has space in it for whales and snow leopards. Both of these creatures only flourish given large swathes of unspoiled wilderness. They need hundreds of square miles of territory, with many Trophic levels supporting them. If we move all the herbivores to factory farms, or poison the krill out of the environment, we lose the whales and the tigers. An interesting world is much smaller, in terms of space for humans, than we might think based only on arable acreage.

Consider just me: I could poop anywhere. When there are a village of us, we need to poop downriver. With a city, we need sewage treatment. With a state or nation, we need water use policies … and as a world … we might realize that there is simply no more place for our crap to go. Or we might not realize it. Most people who “disagree” with global climate change (and evolution), do so with intuitive and abundantly commonsense arguments that make perfect sense if time is approximately the length of a human life, and if there are maybe a couple of hundred humans in the world. 100 humans would have a lot of trouble changing the weather. Species don’t segregate among populations of 200 within a single lifetime. Six billion over millions of years do either without even trying.

So what to do? Nature knows how to handle overpopulation. I don’t think that we’ll like selection criteria that plague or starvation use as the means of reducing our populations. With sufficient economic opportunity, families shift from the third world model of “short life, many children” to the first world “long life, few children.” However, the economic realities of giving all six billion of us the same lifestyle I have mean that – I think – we won’t have very many snow leopards or whales left when we’re all eating Arby’s and wearing Nike. Hell, we’re well on our way to jellyfish sushi instead of tuna or salmon as it is. Thanks medyani.

We might also cull ourselves. What other creature could? How to do it, exactly? How to avoid falling prey to the usual flaws of eugenics – blinded by my own biases?

This is why I ask about things about which we might be wrong. Someday, my beautiful and intelligent group of friends, we are going to be making decisions that affect a lot of people in very profound ways. Some of you already are. Doing it without self-awareness is a short road to horror.

Then again, making no decision at all is also a short-road to horror. It’ll be 10 billion in no time.

Caveat: To those of you who have decided to have kids – I love you and I love your kids. I think your kids in particular are awesome. I do not think it’s irresponsible for any particular individual to have a child or three. I’m talking about all of us at the same time steadily increasing our population until there are no whales or healthy people left.