The remaining two problems involve the increase in human population:
11. The world’s human population is growing. More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources. Rates and even the direction of human population change vary greatly around the world, with the highest rates of population growth (4% per year or higher) in some Third World countries, low rates of growth (1% per year or less) in some First World countries such as Italy and Japan, and negative rates of growth (i.e., decreasing populations) in countries facing major public health crises, such as Russia and AIDS-affected African countries. Everybody agrees that the world population is increasing, but that its annual percentage rate of increase is not as high as it was a decade or two ago. However, there is still disagreement about whether the world’s population will stabilize at some value above its present level (double the present population?), and (if so) how many years (30 years? 50 years?) it will take for population to reach that level, or whether population will continue to grow.
There is long built-in momentum to human population growth because of what is termed the “demographic bulge” or “population momentum,” i.e., a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people in today’s population, as a result of recent population growth. That is, suppose that every couple in the world decided tonight to limit themselves to two children, approximately the correct number of children to yield an unchanging population in the long run by exactly replacing their two parents who will eventually die (actually, around 2.1 children when one considers mortality, childless couples, and children who won’t marry). The world’s population would nevertheless continue to increase for about 70 years, because more people today are of reproductive age or entering reproductive age than are old and post-reproductive. The problem of human population growth has received much attention in recent decades and has given rise to movements such as Zero Population Growth, which aim to slow or halt the increase in the world’s population.
12. What really counts is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment. If most of the world’s 6 billion people today were in cryogenic storage and neither eating, breathing, nor metabolizing, that large population would cause no environmental problems. Instead, our numbers pose problems insofar as we consume resources and generate wastes. That per-capita impact—the resources consumed, and the wastes put out, by each person—varies greatly around the world, being highest in the First World and lowest in the Third World. On the average, each citizen of the U.S., western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes, than do inhabitants of the Third World (Plate 35).
But low-impact people are becoming high-impact people for two reasons: rises in living standards in Third World countries whose inhabitants see and covet First World lifestyles; and immigration, both legal and illegal, of individual Third World inhabitants into the First World, driven by political, economic, and social problems at home. Immigration from low-impact countries is now the main contributor to the increasing populations of the U.S. and Europe. By the same token, the overwhelmingly most important human population problem for the world as a whole is not the high rate of population increase in Kenya, Rwanda, and some other poor Third World countries, although that certainly does pose a problem for Kenya and Rwanda themselves, and although that is the population problem most discussed. Instead, the biggest problem is the increase in total human impact, as the result of rising Third World living standards, and of Third World individuals moving to the First World and adopting First World living standards.
There are many “optimists” who argue that the world could support double its human population, and who consider only the increase in human numbers and not the average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all Third World inhabitants adopting First World living standards. (That factor of 12 is less than the factor of 32 that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, because there are already First World inhabitants with high-impact lifestyles, although they are greatly outnumbered by Third World inhabitants.) Even if the people of China alone achieved a First World living standard while everyone else’s living standard remained constant, that would double our human impact on the world (Chapter 12).
People in the Third World aspire to First World living standards. They develop that aspiration through watching television, seeing advertisements for First World consumer products sold in their countries, and observing First World visitors to their countries. Even in the most remote villages and refugee camps today, people know about the outside world. Third World citizens are encouraged in that aspiration by First World and United Nations development agencies, which hold out to them the prospect of achieving their dream if they will only adopt the right policies, like balancing their national budgets, investing in education and infrastructure, and so on.
But no one in First World governments is willing to acknowledge the dream’s impossibility: the unsustainability of a world in which the Third World’s large population were to reach and maintain current First World living standards. It is impossible for the First World to resolve that dilemma by blocking the Third World’s efforts to catch up: South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mauritius have already succeeded or are close to success; China and India are progressing rapidly by their own efforts; and the 15 rich Western European countries making up the European Union have just extended Union membership to 10 poorer countries of Eastern Europe, in effect thereby pledging to help those 10 countries catch up. Even if the human populations of the Third World did not exist, it would be impossible for the First World alone to maintain its present course, because it is not in a steady state but is depleting its own resources as well as those imported from the Third World. At present, it is untenable politically for First World leaders to propose to their own citizens that they lower their living standards, as measured by lower resource consumption and waste production rates. What will happen when it finally dawns on all those people in the Third World that current First World standards are unreachable for them, and that the First World refuses to abandon those standards for itself? Life is full of agonizing choices based on trade-offs, but that’s the cruelest trade-off that we shall have to resolve: encouraging and helping all people to achieve a higher standard of living, without thereby undermining that standard through overstressing global resources.
I have described these 12 sets of problems as separate from each other. In fact, they are linked: one problem exacerbates another or makes its solution more difficult. For example, human population growth affects all 11 other problems: more people means more deforestation, more toxic chemicals, more demand for wild fish, etc. The energy problem is linked to other problems because use of fossil fuels for energy contributes heavily to greenhouse gases, the combating of soil fertility losses by using synthetic fertilizers requires energy to make the fertilizers, fossil fuel scarcity increases our interest in nuclear energy which poses potentially the biggest “toxic” problem of all in case of an accident, and fossil fuel scarcity also makes it more expensive to solve our freshwater problems by using energy to desalinize ocean water. Depletion of fisheries and other wild food sources puts more pressure on livestock, crops, and aquaculture to replace them, thereby leading to more topsoil losses and more eutrophication from agriculture and aquaculture. Problems of deforestation, water shortage, and soil degradation in the Third World foster wars there and drive legal asylum seekers and illegal emigrants to the First World from the Third World.
Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years. For example, destruction of accessible lowland tropical rainforest outside national parks is alre
ady virtually complete in Peninsular Malaysia, will be complete at current rates within less than a decade in the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, on Sumatra, and on Sulawesi, and will be complete around the world except perhaps for parts of the Amazon Basin and Congo Basin within 25 years. At current rates, we shall have depleted or destroyed most of the world’s remaining marine fisheries, depleted clean or cheap or readily accessible reserves of oil and natural gas, and approached the photosynthetic ceiling within a few decades. Global warming is projected to have reached a degree Centigrade or more, and a substantial fraction of the world’s wild animal and plant species are projected to be endangered or past the point of no return, within half a century. People often ask, “What is the single most important environmental /population problem facing the world today?” A flip answer would be, “The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!” That flip answer is essentially correct, because any of the dozen problems if unsolved would do us grave harm, and because they all interact with each other. If we solved 11 of the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble, whichever was the problem that remained unsolved. We have to solve them all.
Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.
Examples of those unpleasant solutions to environmental and population problems abound in both the modern world and the ancient world. The examples include the recent genocides in Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia; war, civil war, or guerrilla war in the modern Sudan, Philippines, and Nepal, and in the ancient Maya homeland; cannibalism on prehistoric Easter Island and Mangareva and among the ancient Anasazi; starvation in many modern African countries and on prehistoric Easter Island; the AIDS epidemic already in Africa, and incipiently elsewhere; and the collapse of state government in modern Somalia, the Solomon Islands, and Haiti, and among the ancient Maya. An outcome less drastic than a worldwide collapse might “merely” be the spread of Rwanda-like or Haiti-like conditions to many more developing countries, while we First World inhabitants retain many of our First World amenities but face a future with which we are unhappy, beset by more chronic terrorism, wars, and disease outbreaks. But it is doubtful that the First World could retain its separate lifestyle in the face of desperate waves of immigrants fleeing from collapsing Third World countries, in numbers much larger than the current unstoppable influx. I’m reminded again of how I picture the end of Gardar Cathedral Farm and its splendid cattle barn on Greenland, overwhelmed by the influx of Norse from poorer farms where all the livestock had died or been eaten.
But before we let ourselves give way to this one-sidedly pessimistic scenario, let’s examine further the problems facing us, and their complexities. This will bring us, I feel, to a position of cautious optimism.
To make the preceding discussion less abstract, I shall now illustrate how those dozen environmental problems affect lifestyles in the part of the world with which I am most familiar: the city of Los Angeles in Southern California, where I live. After growing up on the East Coast of the United States and living for several years in Europe, I first visited California in 1964. It immediately appealed to me, and I moved here in 1966.
Thus, I have seen how Southern California has changed over the last 39 years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing. By world standards, Southern California’s environmental problems are relatively mild. Jokes of East Coast Americans to the contrary, this is not an area at imminent risk of a societal collapse. By world standards and even by U.S. standards, its human population is exceptionally rich and environmentally educated. Los Angeles is well known for some problems, especially its smog, but most of its environmental and population problems are modest or typical compared to those of other leading First World cities. How do those problems affect the lives of my fellow Angelenos and me?
The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in Los Angeles are those directly related to our growing and already high population: our incurable traffic jams; the very high price of housing (Plate 36), as a result of millions of people working in a few centers of employment, and only limited residential space near those centers; and, as a consequence, the long distances, of up to two hours and 60 miles one way, over which people commute daily in their cars between home and work. Los Angeles became the U.S. city with the worst traffic in 1987 and has remained so every year since then. Everyone recognizes that these problems have gotten worse within the last decade. They are now the biggest single factor hurting the ability of Los Angeles employers to attract and retain employees, and they affect our willingness to drive to events and to visit friends. For the 12-mile trip from my home to downtown Los Angeles or its airport, I now allow an hour and 15 minutes. The average Angeleno spends 368 hours per year, or the equivalent of fifteen 24-hour days, commuting to and from work, without considering time spent driving for other purposes (Plate 37).
No cure is even under serious discussion for these problems, which will only get worse. Such highway construction as is now proposed or under way aims only at smoothing a few of the tightest points of congestion and will be overwhelmed by the increasing number of cars. There is no end in sight to how much worse Los Angeles’s problems of congestion will become, because millions of people put up with far worse traffic in other cities. For example, my friends in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, now carry a portable small chemical toilet in their car because travel can be so prolonged and slow; they once set off to go out of town on a holiday weekend but gave up and returned home after 17 hours, when they had advanced only three miles through the traffic jam. While there are optimists who explain in the abstract why increased population will be good and how the world can accommodate it, I have never met an Angeleno (and very few people anywhere in the world) who personally expressed a desire for increased population in the area where he or she personally lived.
The contribution of Southern California to the ongoing increase in the world’s average per-capita human impact, as a result of transfers of people from the Third World to the First World, has for years been the most explosive issue in California politics. California’s population growth is accelerating, due almost entirely to immigration and to the large average family sizes of the immigrants after their arrival. The border between California and Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively against people from Central America seeking to immigrate here illegally in search of jobs and personal safety. Every month, one reads of would-be immigrants dying in the desert or being robbed or shot, but that does not deter them. Other illegal immigrants come from as far away as China and Central Asia, in ships that unload them just off the coast. California residents are of two minds about all those Third World immigrants seeking to come here to attain the First World lifestyle. On the one hand, our economy is utterly dependent on them to fill jobs in the service and construction industries and on farms. On the other hand, California residents complain that the immigrants compete with unemployed residents for many jobs, depress wages, and burden our already overcrowded hospitals and public education system. A measure (Proposition 187) on the 1994 state election ballot, overwhelmingly approved by voters but then gutted by the courts on constitutional grounds, would have deprived illegal immigrants of most state-funded benefits. No California resident or elected official has suggested a practical solution to the long-standing contradiction, reminiscent of Dominicans’ attitude towards Haitians, between needing immigrants as workers and otherwise resenting their pr
esence and their own needs.
Southern California is a leading contributor to the energy crisis. Our city’s former network of electric streetcars collapsed in bankruptcies in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rights of way were bought up by automobile manufacturers and subdivided so as to make it impossible to rebuild the network (which competed with automobiles). Angelenos’ preference for living in houses rather than in high-rise apartments, and the long distances and diverse routes over which employees working in any given district commute, have made it impossible to design systems of public transportation that would satisfy the needs of most residents. Hence Los Angelenos are dependent on motorcars.
Our high gas consumption, the mountains ringing much of the Los Angeles basin, and prevailing wind directions generate the smog problem that is our city’s most notorious drawback (Plate 38). Despite progress in combating smog in recent decades, and despite seasonal variation (smog worst in the late summer and early autumn) and local variation (smog generally worse as one precedes inland), Los Angeles on the average continues to rank near the bottom of American cities for air quality. After years of improvement, our air quality has again been deteriorating in recent years. Another toxic problem that affects lifestyle and health is the spread of the disease-causing organism giardia in California’s rivers and lakes over the last several decades. When I first moved here in the 1960s and went hiking in the mountains, it was safe to drink water from streams; today the guaranteed result would be giardia infection.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Page 66