Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  At the time my standard reply was, “Nothing. This is a case of the haves and have-laters. The haves (that’s us) are going to overpay for crummy early technology that barely works in order to make it cheaper and better for the have-laters, who will get it for dirt cheap pretty soon.” I then went on to say what I still believe: “The have-laters are going to adopt this technology so fast and so widely that very soon all 6 billion people on earth are going to be wired up, and the real thing we should be worried about, if you want to worry, is: What will happen when we are all connected?”

  Something similar has happened with fears about overpopulation. City dwellers have few children—the billion squatters the same as everybody else. Thanks to that by-product of urban growth, the core environmentalist panic about overpopulation is quietly being undermined, but the news hasn’t gotten around. The impact is so profound that the history of worry about human overpopulation is worth reviewing in light of its new punch line.

  The oldest story in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was set down in cuneiform four thousand years ago. It celebrated what has been called the first city in human history—the Sumerian capital, Uruk. Not coincidentally, Uruk was the first great center of writing. In the epic, a terrible flood wipes out every human and every creature except for those saved in an ark by the heroic Uta-napishtim. The Babylonian flood had a different cause than Noah’s flood in the Bible, which was written more than a thousand years later. David Damrosch writes in The Buried Book (2007):The underlying problem was not human iniquity, as in the Bible, but the fact that the human race was multiplying uncontrollably, and people had begun making too much noise. Disturbed in their sleep, the gods appeal to their leader, Enlil, who sends the Flood in response. Enlil’s action is violent, but it has a certain ecological logic: the noisiness of the human race is an outgrowth of overpopulation, a serious issue in ancient Mesopotamia, whose large populations often put the region’s resources under stress.

  It all reads like an early chapter in Steven LeBlanc’s chronicle of “constant battles” brought about by fecund humanity perpetually colliding with carrying capacity. Thomas Malthus told the same story in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); so did my teacher Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb (1968) put overpopulation at the top of the Green agenda. His book begins: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” It concludes with Ehrlich recommending “compulsory birth regulation,” including government-provided sterilants in water and staple foods.

  • What environmentalists did with the population issue I can illustrate with a personal account. In 1969 Ehrlich’s book inspired me to organize a public piece of reality theater, a hunger show we called Liferaft Earth. Modeled on the civil rights sit-ins of the time, it was to be a “starve-in.” Well-fed Americans would starve for a week voluntarily, to draw attention to all those in the world starving involuntarily and the millions more who would soon do so because of overpopulation. The “liferaft” was a parking lot surrounded by an inflated tube fence, with a door opening outward with the words “Are you ready to die?” on it. The conceit of the exercise was that all those still fasting inside the liferaft were alive, but they could abandon the ordeal at any time, exit through the door, and “die.”

  Sixty or so volunteers, mostly from the traveling performance commune called the Hog Farm, took part. The media showed up, hoping for an amusing or instructive story; no one knew how it would play out. The starvers learned that being stuck somewhere with water but no food was at first deeply boring and then deeply enervating. You sank into yourself, guarding every scrap of dwindling energy. To keep our spirits up and our perspective focused, at suppertime the Hog Farm’s leader, Wavy Gravy, would recite over a loudspeaker in an unctuous-waiter voice the courses of the fancy dinner we were not eating.

  A few sailed through it. Athletic yogis grew bright-eyed “eating the Void,” as they said. Most of us suffered. Many “died.” At the end of the endless week, the survivors gathered in a big circle for a discussion full of fiercely emotional crosscurrents. A chant emerged. At first it was a reverent “Omm,” but it grew into a groan and then became a vast cry of our pain and global pain.

  • Paul Ehrlich himself was involved in the next chapter. In 1972 the United Nations convened the first global forum on environmental issues in Stockholm. By then the bestselling Last Whole Earth Catalog had brought a million dollars to Whole Earth’s nonprofit parent, Point Foundation. Point spent one of its first and biggest grants to send a contingent of malcontents to Stockholm. The group included poets (Gary Snyder, Michael McClure), Indians (especially Hopi elders protesting coal mining at Black Mesa), San Francisco Greensters such as the pioneer whalesaver Joan McIntyre and overpopulation-spokeswoman Stephanie Mills, and the ever-ready Hog Farm, with their buses. One of the buses paraded through Stockholm dressed as a whale. When the tape recorder to play humpback whale songs broke down, the accompanying marchers sang in whale.

  A feud about how to deal with overpopulation surfaced in Stockholm, between Ehrlich and his nemesis, Barry Commoner, whose popular book, The Closing Circle (1971), directly criticized Ehrlich’s population-bomb thesis. Both were on panels in Stockholm, with Commoner slyly planting invidious questions aimed at Ehrlich among various Third World participants in the conference, and Ehrlich yelling back. Commoner’s argument was that population policies weren’t needed, because what was called “the demographic transition” would take care of everything—all you had to do was help poor people get less poor, and they would have fewer children. Ehrlich insisted that the situation was way too serious for that approach, and it wouldn’t work anyway: You needed harsh government programs to drive down the birthrate. The alternative was overwhelming famines and massive damage to the environment.

  I was for Ehrlich and against the ecosocialist Commoner. But Ehrlich’s predicted famines never came, thanks largely to the green revolution in agriculture, nor did the need for harsh government programs. Instead, Commoner’s thesis of demographic transition turned out to be mostly right, though in a way unanticipated by him or anybody else.

  • For decades, environmentalists organized their fears around the prospect of perpetually soaring human population, and early estimates from UN researchers reflected those fears. A population optimist, Wallace Kaufman, wrote in 1994: “Fortunately, population growth is likely to level off between 12 and 15 billion midway through the next century.” In the apocalyptic, highly influential 1972 book, Limits to Growth, the authors foresaw exponentially increasing population reaching a condition of “overshoot” of Earth’s carrying capacity, followed by a population crash. That expectation still prevails among many Greens.

  The theory’s Malthusian premise has been proven wrong since 1963, when the rate of population growth reached a frightening 2 percent a year but then began dropping. The 1963 inflection point showed that the imagined soaring J-curve of human increase was instead a normal S-curve. The growth rate was leveling off. No one thought the growth rate might go negative and the population start shrinking in this century without an overshoot and crash, but that is what is happening. (Of course, if climate change becomes catastrophic, the Limits to Growth overshoot curve will be duplicated, not by population smashing through carrying capacity but by a collapsing carrying capacity smashing down population.)

  By the late 1990s, I knew something strange was going on with population and birthrates, but I didn’t know exactly what until I read “The Global Baby Bust,” a 2004 article by Phillip Longman in Foreign Affairs. “Some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world’s total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline,” Longman wrote. “The phenomenon continues to spread. By 2045, according to the latest UN projections, the world’s fertility rate as a whole will have fallen below replacement levels.” In the article and in his 2004 book, The Empty Cradle, Long
man explained the cause: “As more and more of the world’s population moves to urban areas in which children offer little or no economic reward to their parents, and as women acquire economic opportunities and reproductive control, the social and financial costs of childbearing continue to rise.”

  Development expert Paul Polak points out that the need for extra children among the rural poor is thoroughly rational:A one-acre-farm family in Bangladesh needs three sons to get ahead—one to help with the farm, one to get a good enough education to land a government job capable of supporting the family from small bribes, and one to get a local job that pays enough to keep his brother, the one aiming for a government job, in school. But to end up with three sons means having eight babies, two of which are likely to die before the age of five, leaving three boys and three girls.

  What happens in the cities is described by George Martine in the 2007 UN report Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth: “In urban areas, new social aspirations, the empowerment of women, changes in gender relations, the improvement of social conditions, higher-quality reproductive health services and better access to them, all favour rapid fertility reduction.” In the village, every additional child is an asset, but in the slum, every additional child is a liability, so the newly liberated women in town focus on education and opportunity—on fewer, higher-quality children.

  That’s how urbanization defused the population bomb.

  • The magic number is 2.1. If every woman in the world has 2.1 children, on average, then the growth rate is exactly zero; population neither grows nor shrinks. (The number is 2.1 instead of 2 because some children die before they reach the age of reproduction.) Just as the population exploded upward exponentially when the birthrate was above 2.1, it accelerates downward exponentially when it’s below 2.1. Compound interest cuts both ways. Fewer children make fewer children, who make fewer children.

  Demographics, they say, is destiny. Everybody gets born, moves around, and dies. The statistics of those three events define our world.

  Demographically, the next fifty years may be the most wrenching in human history. Massive numbers of people are making massive changes. Having just experienced the first doubling of world population within a single lifetime (3.3 billion in 1962, 6.6 billion in 2007), we are discovering that it was the last doubling. Birthrates worldwide are dropping not only much faster than expected, but much further. It used to be assumed that birthrates would get down to the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman and level off, but in most places the birthrates continue to dive right on past that point with no bottom in sight. Meanwhile the “population momentum” of the already born and their kids will carry world population to a peak around midcentury and then head downward.

  How high a peak? The UN’s “median” projection in 2008 was that population would reach a little over 9 billion, but that figure is based on the assumption that birthrates in developed countries will start rising again for some reason. Because that seems unlikely, I think a more probable peak will be 8 billion, followed by a descent so rapid that many will consider it a crisis.

  For every woman you know (or are) who has no children, some other woman has to have 4.2 just to keep the population even, and they don’t. Geneticist William Haseltine puts it harshly: “There’s a very odd phenomenon which seems to be a cultural invariant: once women gain economic independence, they do not reproduce our species.” In most cases, just the prospect of economic independence does the trick, and that’s what moving to cities provides.

  Because urbanization is currently taking place most rapidly in developing countries, the drop in birthrate is most rapid there, which means those nations are aging the most rapidly, though the effects won’t be felt for a while. In Mexico the birthrate dropped from 6.5 in the 1970s to about 2 in 2008, and it is still falling. By midcentury, Phillip Longman predicts, “Mexico will be a less youthful country than the United States.” Fertility rates are falling so fast in the Mideast and India, he says, that those regions are aging at three times the rate of the United States. China—now at a 1.73 birthrate—is headed toward “demographic meltdown” with its urbanization and one-child policy, because “by 2020 its labor supply will be shrinking and its median age will be older than that of the United States. By midcentury, China could easily be losing 20-30 percent of its population per generation.” Even now, Chinese families complain about the “4:2:1 phenomenon.” Each young adult becomes solely responsible for the care of two aging parents and four aging grandparents. The prospect, Longman says, is that developing nations may get old before they get rich, and that is its own poverty trap.

  • The countries that got rich before they got old are in increasing trouble themselves. The average birthrate in long-urbanized developed nations is down to 1.56 children per woman; in some places it’s below 1.2. Those are extinction numbers. It is already in the cards that Russia, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain, and Germany will have fewer people in 2050 than they do now. And by then the majority will be old: past childbearing, past being economically productive, with few or no children to care for them, stuck in a national economy that is expiring for lack of young workers.

  Longman points out that in Italy, with its birthrate of 1.2, by midcentury, “almost three-fifths of the nation’s children will have no siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles—only parents, grandparents, and perhaps great-grandparents.” Instead of having children, Italians are buying pets. So is everyone in the developed world.

  How did Japan get itself into a seemingly permanent recession after the dazzling prosperity of the 1980s? Longman told a San Francisco audience:Japan boomed through the end of the 1980s, so long as declining fertility was still increasing the relative size of its working-age population. . . . Japan’s long recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused its working-age population to begin shrinking in relative size.

  Because Japan welcomes no immigrants, it is facing the world’s worst elder-care crisis. At Global Business Network, we predict that Japan’s standard solution to labor problems will be applied. Highly sophisticated, lovable robots and robotic environments will take care of Japan’s elderly, and then the technology will spread to the rest of the developed world.

  The nation with the most alarming outlook is Russia. The birthrate is 1.14. The average Russian woman has seven abortions. One of the demographers at Global Business Network chiseled the nation’s epitaph in a 2008 report:There is no historical precedent for a national population which is simultaneously aging and shrinking, as is occurring today in Russia. Ecological examples suggest that this demographic trend produces a literal death spiral which is impossible to arrest. Russia entered the “aging and shrinking” situation in the 1990s as a product of a collapsed economy, the rise of HIV transmission from intravenous drug use, major environmental toxification, and extremely poor personal health habits. In Russia, adult male mortality in every age group from 15 to 64 has increased 40 percent-plus since the end of Communism.

  • Environmentalists have every reason to rejoice at the defusing of the population bomb, because the aggregate human impact on natural systems, including the atmosphere, could be going down fast. Brazil’s birthrate of 1.3 children per woman, for example, may be the best protector of the Amazon rain forest. A population with that birthrate halves in forty-five years, and then halves again in the next forty-five years. In one formulation, that means more resources per person—good news both for the people and the resources. But from another angle, it could mean perpetual economic crisis, which would be terrible news for the environment. In an economic crisis, there is neither money nor attention for responsible stewardship. There is no long-term thinking or action. Wars become more likely, and wars are deadly for the environment.

  An enlightened environmental program on population should now focus, I suggest, on softening the impact of the depopulation implosion. Greens can take a bow for dramatizing the importance of population early and for promoting the education, birth-contro
l techniques, and prosperity that helped reduce birthrates worldwide. Hats off to Paul Ehrlich for one of the great self-defeating prophecies in history. And now it’s time for follow-through, for a nuanced shift. The most effective environmental population program in this century is gently pronatal.

  No one knows how that would work in most countries, however. In Europe, birthrates have been declining steadily for four decades. How do you reverse that? Pope Benedict complained in 2006, “Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.” Governments have tried everything to encourage more children. The Australian government has a three-child policy—“One for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”—and its birthrate remains at 1.8. Singapore’s advice flipped from “Stop at two” to “Three children or more if you can afford it,” and the birthrate there remains one of the lowest in the world at 1.04. All the developed nations of the world are running out of babies and headed for economic decline—with two instructive exceptions.

  The United States and France have the highest birthrates in the developed world, just below replacement level. America does it with immigrants and churchgoers. First-generation immigrants have strong family values and large families. (That will dry up as the source countries age quickly and cease to export young people.) Devoutly religious couples, who abound in the United States, pay more attention to God’s instruction to be fruitful and multiply than to the heavy economic and opportunity costs of large families.

  France does it with socialism. Every mother gets maternity leave at nearly full pay—twenty weeks for the first two children, forty weeks for the third child—and her employer has to keep her job open. Fathers get paid paternity leave. Child care is free. Nursery school is free. Large families get tax credits and free public transport. Parents of a third child get a government bonus of $1,500 a month for a year. France’s birthrate rose from 1.92 in 2005 to 1.98 in 2007.