Our movers and shakers are panicked about population growth. George Monbiot writes that they don't understand the real problem:
When a major study was published last month, showing that the global population is likely to peak then crash much sooner than most scientists had assumed, I naively imagined that people in rich nations would at last stop blaming all the world’s environmental problems on population growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears to have got worse.
Overpopulation is concentrated in the poorest parts of the world:
Population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people . . . . The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.
Overconsumption is the real problem. And, historically, scolding the poor for overpopulation has led to racism:
The excessive emphasis on population growth has a grim history. Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor. Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.
Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”. These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.
That narrative continues today in the worldwide backlash against immigrants. If we truly want to solve the overpopulation problem, Monbiot writes, we should focus on the emancipation of women:
We know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.
And, as poverty decreases around the world, so will population:
A good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty. Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind, or the financial sector in Britain’s processing of money stolen abroad? Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?
If we blame the poor, we miss the boat. We should be blaming ourselves.
Image: USATODAY.com
6 comments:
It's rare that I disagree with Monbiot but I do think he's a little too quick to raise the 'racism' smokescreen. He omits any mention of the emergence of a new and massive "consumer class" out of the midst of these overpopulated areas, notably Africa and pan-Asia.
A few years ago I stumbled across a paper by three top Chinese economists on the subject of population growth, overpopulation, and the spread of middle-class expectations in China and India. Their conclusion was blunt.
There are many who want the standard of living associated with the West. The rapidly growing economy of both countries had created an entrepreneurial/knowledge-based middle class essential to this economic miracle. That, in turn, had drawn the peasantry to the cities in search of factory labour. Internal demand had lessened these countries' dependence on foreign markets. It was a perfect "rising tide floats all boats" scenario except for one thing - there are not enough resources on this planet to accommodate such demand.
Rather than population falling to some sustainable level it would continue to increase with Africa joining the club in this century. Population increases, demand increases, but access to resources falls. Their conclusion was the same. China and India would have to accommodate the expectations of their essential middle/upper classes but would also have to suppress the expectations of the multitude. One economist envisioned islands of prosperity floating on a sea of poverty. They recognized this could cause widespread social upheaval which they said would have to be forcibly put down.
When I read this stuff from Monbiot it's apparent that there are a few tiles missing from his Scrabble game. He sees a redistributive solution that is not feasible. The world is in an environmental emergency. He imagines a world in which the affluent nations will be clamoring for immigrants to avoid deflating their population base and economy. That's a straw man that he periodically trots out.
Monbiot doesn't like it but we're seeing an emerging rich versus poor world in which some nations, such as China, use their wealth to secure strategic assets such as productive farmland, in poor nations across the world. The European agri-giants do the same thing, stitching up farmland to grow strawberries in countries that are already food-insecure and experience periodic famine. And we're supposed to be the good guys.
Part 2 - He ignores that we've been pillaging this planet since the early 70s when humanity reached 3.5 billion (based on 1970s levels of consumption and longevity). That's when we reached Earth's carrying capacity. Since then we've more than doubled in numbers while also increasing per capita consumption and extending longevity across the board - developed nations, emerging economies and Third World. We have consumed wilderness wherever possible and, in the process, have caused populations of both terrestrial and marine life to decline by more than half. We've done all that in less than 50 years. Today the Earth's carrying capacity has degraded to something in the order of 2 billion.
The Earth can support 2 billion. We're closing in on 8 billion. Yet Monbiot says we don't have an overpopulation problem. We do have an overpopulation problem and it is compounded by an overconsumption problem and those are compounded by our waste/pollution problem and the resultant sum has run headlong into this worsening climate emergency. Focusing on one aspect of this scenario is like moving food around on your plate.
If human civilization is to survive long enough to rebuild the overconsumptive regions (that's us) and the overpopulated regions (that's them) will each have to trim their sails. Monbiot doesn't recognize that which is why his argument fails.
He also doesn't understand that early-onset climate change will be marked by massive heating in the tropical zones, where most of the overpopulated nations are situated. The developed world is mainly in more temperate zones that will have more breathing room, more time. They'll be overtaken first and we'll sit there and watch it happen.
Unfortunately, Mound, there are those who will see the reduction of poverty as a green light to follow the folly of the West. We are at a fork in the road. We can reduce consumption and share the wealth. Or we can keep marching down the yellow brick road. But there's no Emerald City at the end of the road.
.. mentioned this previously here n there
The countries with the most rapid population growth
rely on a marine based diet of protein..
Two guesses where overfishing, bottom dredging
and collapsing fish stocks are..
It bodes not well a'tall
No, it doesn't, sal. A solution requires collective action. And this pandemic has reminded us that collective action is easy to talk about but hard to achieve.
Monbiot does recognize, however, that the developed world cannot dictate solutions to the developing world, Mound -- despite the good intentions of people like Jane Goodall and others. The solution lies in trimming our sails. But accomplishing that increasingly seems out of reach. The economic growth juggernaut continues apace.
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