Population

It’s Not ‘Deaths of Despair.’ It’s Deaths of Children. (4/6/2023) NYT

A human population approaching 7 billion can be maintained only by desolating the Earth. If wild habitat is given over to human cultivation and habitation, if rainforests can be turned into green deserts, if genetic engineering enables ever-higher yields to be extorted from the thinning soils— then humans will have created for themselves a new geological era, the Eremozoic, the Era of Solitude, in which little remains on the Earth but themselves and the prosthetic environment that keeps them alive.
~ John Gray
"Stabilizing population not only helps eradicate poverty, it makes it easier to reach almost every other goal we seek. On a finite planet, where we are pushing the earth beyond its limits, every country should have a population stabilization policy." Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0
Milton P. Siegel, considered among the world's foremost authorities on the development of World Health Organization policy, revealed the influence of the Vatican in shaping WHO policy, particularly in blocking adoption of the concept that overpopulation is a grave public-health threat -- a concept which, in WHO's early years, enjoyed a broad consensus among member countries. Without this separation of population dynamics from WHO public-health policy, the Vatican would have found it much more difficult to subsequently manipulate governments on such issues as family planning and abortion. National leaders would have been able to refer to the international consensus, as demonstrated by WHO policy. WHO, they could have insisted, has determined that family planning and abortion -- like clean water, good nutrition, and immunizations -- are necessary to protect public health.
I think one can provide many illustrative examples of the way in which politics has interfered with the progress of health. And the influence of religion never did show itself until the Vatican began to use its influence through the church organizational structure, which, incidentally, probably is one of the best organizational structures the world's ever seen. So, one way or another, sometimes surreptitiously, the Catholic church used its influence to defeat, if you will, any movement toward family planning or birth control. Milton P. Siegel
The taboo of including population as key to ecological balance originated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro when a group of regressive Catholic and Muslim leaders organized by the then even more fiercely anti-family planning Vatican argued that efforts to stem population growth are part of a genocidal plot against the developing world (where population growth was exponentially growing due to medical and other interventions). In reality, the Vatican and the Catholic and Muslim leaders who spread this falsehood shared a different agenda: keeping women in their "traditional" subservient place by opposing family planning and denying women other life options than being wives and mothers in male-controlled families.

Again, during the 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the Vatican used these same alliances, under the guise of morality, to divert attention from the worldwide suffering of women and children due to inadequate reproductive health care and family planning, as well as to obscure the direct connection between exponential population growth and our growing ecological problems. These ploys were unfortunately successful, and it has become "taboo" to talk about population in relation to the environment, even in liberal circles. Stemming population growth (and hence access to family planning and to life options other than being mothers), however, is not only a key environmental issue but also a fundamental human right that is a prerequisite to social justice.
Riane Eisler, "The Right to Family Planning," contribution to GTI Forum "The Population Debate Revisited," Great Transition Initiative (August 2022).

World ‘population bomb’ may never go off as feared, finds study (3/27/2023)

‘Code red for humanity’: UN climate report (8/17/2021)

Humanity headed towards ‘ghastly future’: Urgent warning from top scientists (1/14/2021)

From COVID-19 to Climate Change, Human Overpopulation Is the Big White Elephant in the Room (6/26/2020)

Humanity’s survival on earth starts with having smaller families

Water Crises Loom for a Quarter of Humanity (8/5/2019)

Why We Must Talk About Population (10/2/2017)

Population ageing and rising inequality will hit younger generations hard (10/18/2017)

Trump Administration's Expanded Global Gag Rule Puts Lives of Women and Children at Risk (5/16/2017)

How Did The World Population Change?

Remember the Population Bomb? It's Still Ticking (6/15/2017)

Why is the Vatican a threat to Americans?

The whole planet is in a crisis of human population overshoot. James Howard Kunstler: Too Much Magic pg234
The world will get more crowded. And there´s a second prediction: it will gradually get warmer. Pressures on food supplies, and on the entire biosphere will be aggravated by the consequent changes in global weather patterns. Climate change exemplifies the tension between the science, the public, and the politicians. In contrast to population issues, it is certainly not underdiscussed - despite the fact that in 2017 the Trump regime in the United States banned the terms ´global warming´ and ´climate change´ from public documents. But the implications of climate change are dismayingly under-acted on. Martin Rees, On the Future, Prospects for Humanity
In July, 1970, we held at MIT a two-week international conference on world dynamics. A meeting was organized for the Club of Rome, a private group of about 100 individuals drawn from many countries who had joined together to attempt a better understanding of world problems. Their concern lay in the interactions of population, resources, industrialization, pollution, and world-wide disparities of standard of living. ... A detailed discussion of the world model appears in World Dynamics (Forrester, 1971). That model was refined in the “Project on the Predicament of Mankind” sponsored by the Club of Rome at MIT (Donella Meadows, et al, 1972; Dennis Meadows, et al, 1973 and 1974). The model of world interactions showed different alternative futures depending on whether social policies are adopted to limit population growth while a high standard of living is still possible or whether the future is ignored until population is suppressed by pollution, crowding, disease, water and resource shortage, social strife, hunger. Malthus dealt only with the latter, but it is possible for civilization to encounter other controlling pressures before a food shortage occurs. It is certain that resource shortage, pollution, crowding, disease, food failure, war, or some other equally powerful force will limit population and industrialization if persuasion and psychological factors do not. Exponential growth cannot continue forever. … Unless we choose favorable processes to limit growth, the social and environmental systems by their internal processes will choose for us. The natural mechanisms for terminating exponential growth appear the least desirable. Unless the world understands and begins to act soon, civilization will be overwhelmed by forces we have created but can no longer control JAY W. FORRESTER (1995)

"In 1969, President Richard Nixon established a separate Office of Population within USAID and gave it a $50 million annual budget." In 1970, President Nixon signed a bill creating a commission to evaluate national population growth, which he described as “explosive In every way as we head into the last third of this century.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/17/archives/nixon-signs-bill-creating-commission-on-population.html.

Also in 1969, He spoke before Congress on the issue.:" "Special Message to the Congress on Problems of Population Growth."

http://www.population-security.org/09-CH1.html

Unfortunately, churches and conservative groups went ballistic at the recommendations of the Commission: The recommendation boldly confronted explosive issues:
  • Abortion – decriminalize it;
  • Contraceptives – remove the remaining legal bars to their availability;
  • Sex education – make it available to all through schools and community institutions;
  • Immigration – freeze legal immigration at 400,000 a year and stop illegal immigration;
  • Equal Rights Amendment – support it and other efforts to ban all discrimination based on sex.
So here we are. Letter to the New York Times (2/18/2021)
>

HOW POPULATION GROWTH CONTROL THREATENS THE PAPACY

“It is small wonder humanity will not be saved. Evolution drives us to breed, drives us to procreate, and drives us to accumulate material possessions. Evolution always pushes us toward the brink, and culture piles on, hurling us into the abyss. Nietzsche was correct about our lack of free will—as Gray points out in Straw Dogs—free will is an illusion. It is not merely the foam on the beer: it is the last bubble of foam, the one that just popped. It’s no surprise, then, that we are sleepwalking into the future, or that the future is a lethal cliff.”—Guy McPherson
Our forebears took many millennia to reach a population of one billion, which occurred around 1800 or 1820. It then took more than a century for human numbers to reach two billion (around 1930). Soon, in the middle of the twentieth century, an unprecedented frenzy of survival and reproduction began, and the human population tripled in the span of one lifetime. It reached three billion by 1960 and four billion by 1975, and thereafter it added a new billion every twelve to thirteen years. Meanwhile total energy use quintupled between 1950 and 2015. In those sixty-five years, people burned a quantity of fossil fuels that had taken 150 million years to accumulate. More than three-quarters of the anthropogenic greehouse gas emissions in human history occurred during those sixty-five years. The world's motor vehicle fleet grew like kudzu, from forty million to nine hundred million, over the same time span. These and many more accelerating trends made the post-1950 world very different from all that had come before it. Collectively, they vaulted us into a new time period in both human history and the history of the earth: the Anthropocene. J.R. McNeill essay in Living in the Anthropocene.
"In the past fifty years we've doubled our irrigated cropland and tripled our water consumption to meet global food demand. In the next fifty, we must double food production again. Is there really enough water to pull that off ? In his book When the Rivers Run Dry environmental journalist Fred Pearce describes in vivid, firsthand detail the stark reality of impending water crises in more than thirty countries around the globe. We now withdraw so much water that many of our mightiest and most historic rivers - like the Nile, the Colorado, the Yellow, the Indus - have barely a trickle left to meet the sea." (From the World in 2050: Laurence C Smith)
"...humanity is already the first species in the history of life to become a geophysical force. We have, all by our bipedal, wobbly-headed selves, altered Earth's atmosphere and climate away from the norm. We have spread thousands of toxic chemicals worldwide, appropriated 40 percent of the solar energy available for photosynthesis, converted almost all of the easily arable land, dammed most of the rivers, raised the planet sea level, and now, in a manner likely to get everyone's attention like nothing else before it, we are close to running out of fresh water. A collateral effect of all this frenetic activity is the continuing extinction of wild ecosystems, along with the species that compose them. This also happens to be the only human impact that is irreversible." E. O. Wilson, The Creation.
"Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population." Peter Farb
throughout the history of life on Earth, there have been periods where a given species has, for one reason or another, spurted it's numbers upward temporarily. There's been a surprisingly good supply of food, the weather has been just right, somehow there have been no predators...something has happened, and the numbers went up. They always went down again, and always the same way; by an increase in the death rate. The large numbers of the species starved when the food ran short. They fell victim to some disease, when as a result of being on short rations they were weaker. They made good marks for predators. It always went down. And the same thing will happen to mankind, we don't have to worry. The death rate will go up, and we will die off through violence, through disease, through famine. The only thing is, must we have our numbers controlled in the same way that all other species have them controlled? We have something others don't; we have brains. We can foresee. We can plan. We can see solutions that are humane. And there is a solution that is humane, and that is to lower the birth rate. Isaac Asimov
Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six ? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest --and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result ?' (From a novel: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn p181)
Human beings are a biological experiment...If we choose to eradicate ourselves from the earth...the earth will regenerate because the earth has all the time in the world. Whatever happens to us will not have a lasting impact on the world. In time, the world will regenerate. It will come back green, and the waters will be clean again. It's just that there won't be any people here. That's all. We're not needed. We're parasites. We don't help the Earth, we take. So if all the people disappear, then the Earth is going to regenerate because there'll be peace here again. Oren Lyons
"Bush administration officials have spoken out against an agreement, reached at a 1994 U.N. conference in Cairo, that calls for controlling population growth by expanding access to health care and being more responsive to women's needs. U.S. officials argue that certain phrases in the agreement - including "reproductive health services" and "reproductive rights" - condone abortion as well as sex and condom use among teenagers." Source here 12/30/2002.
"...high birth rates in the emerging nations mean a constantly growing supply of new people eager to join the global labor market, which translates into 80 million births each year, most of them in Asia. That continent's population is expected to grow from 4 billion today to about 5.2 billion by 2050. These people will want work, no matter what the cost. The economic machinery must constatly produce new jobs, if only to keep these burgeoning masses of people reasonably fed, clothed, and housed." Gabor Steingart, The War For Wealth p135.
Every expansion of human activity reduces the population size of more and more species, raising their vulnerability and the rate of extinction accordingly. A 2008 mathematical model by a team of botanists predicted that between 37 and 50 percent of rare tree species in the Brazilian Amazon rain forest, "rare" defined as having populations of fewer than ten thousand individuals, will suffer early extinction, caused by contemporary road building, logging, mining, and conversion of land to agriculture. The lower figure, 37 percent, applies to areas developed in part but protected by careful management.. Half Earth, Our Planet's Fight for Life: Edward O. Wilson

How the Vatican influences population growth policy (12/27/2016)

Winning Abortion Wars: 4 Words Needed for the Battle: “Religious Authoritarianism” and “Republican Party” (4/22/2016)

The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections 2010-2050 (4/2/2015)

A 20-Rule Manifesto For New No-Growth Economics (8/30/2011)

Many species, when food is plentiful, increase their population and exhaust their food supply, at which time their population must die back. A similar process occurs when a culture decides it is superior, accompanies an expanding empire, and finally exhausts itself and disappears.

'Growth' is not a suitable goal for a sustainable economy. Jared Diamond in his book, Collapse, warns of the consequences when the economy overtakes the environment. Population overshoot now threatens human habitability of the earth.

* In 1972 the club of Rome computer models showed that growth cannot be unlimited and recent studies show their forecast is on track. Republican's ideas about population, resource use, and market fundamentalism assure that as we reach resource limits, the results will be catastrophic. See this video. (Bill McKibbon)

* The pressure of population has caused the plundering of the planet: fisheries are collapsing, glaciers melting with declining fresh water, desertification accelerating, crop land shrinking, soil deteriorating, forests clearcut burning diseased, species going extinct, and weather becoming more extreme. Although the IPCC has escalated the warning, Republicans ignore these problems. See Guy McPherson's web site: "Nature Bats Last".

* Mass extinction has already begun. Republican efforts to defund the EPA are most likely suicidal for humanity.

* We live on a planet that is unique as far as telescopes can see. Republicans refuse to acknowledge that the climate is rapidly deteriorating and see no need to stop profligate burning of fossil fuels, slow population growth, or even to take care in harvesting resources or controlling pollutants. If they can make a buck, they would rather destroy the planet. Most likely, they will.

With Republican policy of disaster capitalism, humanity is doomed to an inhospitable planet if not extinction. That is their legacy for their grandchildren. They are like Jim Jones on a planet-wide scale.

Humanity has become an invasive species and is,on a geological time scale, on track to destroying the habitability of the planet, our only home. It might have been ok 2000 years ago to "be fruitful and multiply", but not any more. We need to shed the millenniums old religions that have us on track for our own destruction. Are we smart enough for that ?

Malthus wasn't wrong, just early.

Already humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, which is why we should change to a sustainable lifestyle, cut back on fossil fuel use, stop deforestation, discourage large families, make birth control easily accessible, allow women to choose, and not oppose gay marriage.

Mass migration is already taking place from stressed areas of the world. It will increase as climate becomes more hostile, wars displace people, Europe is fragmenting as mass migration occurs. Right wing movements world-wide oppose immigration and, heavily armed, they will react with violence. Police will be militarized to deal with terrorism, a heavily armed population, and protect the wealthy.

There is now a global surplus of labor. As income inequality increases, as it does naturally, wages fall, living standards will increasingly be at subsistance levels or below.

There does not appear to be a technological solution for the deteriorating condition of the planet. Work has started on it though.

A good reason to oppose the Republican agenda, because It surely leads to apocalypse.

See the long term forecast in environment

States Rejecting "Abstinence-Only" Funding Federal --Government Has Spent Millions On Sex-'Ed' Approach, Now 15 States Not Interested 07 Jan 2008 CBS News reports: The government has provided states a $1 billion during the past decade for abstinence-only programs. But many say it just doesn't work, and they point to the teen birth rate's first rise in 15 years as proof. A growing number of states are taking a stand and actually rejecting federal abstinence-only funds. New Mexico just became the 15th.

See the map here.

Letter from Africa: What can Ghana learn from Norway? (12/22/2015)

More Life, Less Death (10/10/2015)

Overpopulation, OverConsumption in Pictures (4/1/2015)

Environment groups have a problem with population (3/7/2014)

Sir David Attenborough: If we do not control population, the natural world will (9/2013)

U.N. estimates 9.6 billion people by 2050 (6/14/2013)

Why Malthus Got His Forecast Wrong (12/12/2012)

Population: A Threat Caused By Religion (2003)

7 Billion and Counting

Crowded, stretched world welcomes 7 Billionth Baby (10/2011)

Human Population Explosion

Population: the Elephant in the room

Fertility Rate and Life Expectancy (see this graphic presentation.)

From Right-Wing to Pro-Choice: The Shifting Goalposts of “Abortion Neutrality”

The Vatican Role.

U.S. teen birth rate up again, fewer pre-term babies (3/18/2009)

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NSSM 200, How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy by Stephen D. Mumford

What Stops Population Growth ? Video Hans Rosling

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is the inability to understand the exponential function. Albert A. Bartlett, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Colorado.

Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies (3/19/2014)

Consumption unsustainable: UN TIME BOMB: The human race is already consuming resources faster than the Earth can sustain, the UN report said, and an expanding population will make it worse (10/27/2007)

Eating the Earth

Socioeconomic Equity: A Critical Element in Sustainability

Ten Million Children Worldwide Die From Lack of Health Care. (Does the 'pro-life' movement know about this ?)
According to Teresa Cerojano in The Associated Press, "More than 200 million children worldwide under age five do not get basic health care, leading to nearly ten million deaths annually from treatable ailments like diarrhea and pneumonia, a US-based charity said Wednesday."

15 Shocking Tales of How Sex Laws Are Screwing the American People

Human Rights Watch (on Sex Offender Laws)

Links

Population Connection

Pretransitional Population Control and Equilibrium (pdf)

Population Growth, Carrying Capacity, and Conflict: Steven A LeBlanc and Dwight W Read

Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century (12/8/2015)

Organizations and individuals actively working in population and related fields are listed below.

Tour of the Human Predicament and What to Do About it

Videos

The World in 2050: Laurence C Smith video (55 minutes)

Population and Water; The Elephant in the Room Could be our Friend. (20 minutes).

How Much Degrowth is Enough? Sept. 2012

The Human Predicament and What to Do About It Feb. 2012

Overpopulation Means Civilization Collapse2011

Bibliography

8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape our World Jennifer D. Sciubba

The Great Demographic Illusion by Richard Alba

All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change: Michael Klare.

FALTER, Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Bill McKibben

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

The population bomb by Paul R Ehrlich

Countdown - Our last best hope for a future on earth ? Alan Weisman

Reasons and Persons Parfit

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision, Volume I: Comprehensive Tables (ST/ESA/SER.A/379).

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy, by Stephen D. Mumford

The Tragedy of the Commons: Garrett Hardin

Why is Population Control Such a Radioactive topic ?

IMPLICATIONS OF WORLDWIDE POPULATION GROWTH FOR U.S. SECURITY AND OVERSEAS INTERESTS (12/10/1974)

Population: the last taboo

Collapse: Jared Diamond

10 Billion: Danny Dorling

The Population Bomb: Paul Ehrlich

The Coming Anarchy: Robert D. Kaplan

The Stork and the Plough: Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NSSM 200, How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy by Stephen D. Mumford

See Freakonomics for an argument for a women's right to choose.

Lake of Fire (2006 Movie)