Thanks Rhian. An interesting reply.

Firstly, to what extent has population growth really slowed? While the percentage growth rate may have slowed a little, the increase in real numbers has not dropped much at all. The thing that matter is that it is still increasing very rapidly. And the combined effect of the number of people and the average per-capita impact on the resource base and environment is increasing more rapidly.

Secondly, the capacity for humanity to innovate is a double-edged sword. As well as improving the lives of millions and increasing efficiencies in resource consumption and waste production, it has facilitated population growth and an ever-increasing rate of resource consumption. So our innovative brilliance has worked directly towards taking us closer to the precipice of resource and environmental crisis and social collapse, within a much shorter timeframe than would have happened if we’d been a whole lot less innovative. It is an oxymoron to talk about sustained economic growth. The availability of that most amazing of resources – oil – has facilitated this innovation and expansion of humanity. And we are fast approaching the time when it will become much more expensive and less readily available.

Thirdly, it is a bit premature to say that a drop in living standards won’t happen due to population growth, or due to pop growth in conjunction with resource crisis. Again, this is bound to happen in a massive way as the availability of oil and the economics of everything associated with it (with means just about everything, full stop) changes radically.

I think Ehrlich was a visionary. He should have been heeded. His timelines were wrong, but his message was profound. His books; the Population Bomb and the Population Explosion are by no means harmful. I for one completely reject the notion that they are thought of as being amongst the worst books of last century, and I’ve got to very seriously question where people who think like that are coming from, in terms of their appreciation of continuous growth and sustainability issues.

Ludwig

It is a statistical inevitability that if something’s rate of growth is slowing in percentage terms, its growth in absolute terms will not be slowing as quickly, and may even continue to increase for a while.
US Bureau of Census historical data show that the world’s population growth rate peaked in percentage terms in 1962-63 at 2.16%pa, and has since fallen to 1.17%pa. That’s a pretty steep drop. The absolute annual growth rate peaked in 1989 at 88 million, and has fallen to 77 million. It also projects growth decelerating in both percentage and numeric terms to the middle of the century:

http://ask.census.gov/cgi-bin/askcensus.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=365&p_created=1079980014&p_sid=BuzjUgBi&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MTYmcF9wcm9kcz0mcF9jYXRzPSZwX3B2P

UN population projections show the same historic trend but anticipate an somewhat more marked deceleration on the next few decades.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2006/wpp2006_tables.xls

Ehrlich called for Indian males who have three or more children to be forcibly sterilized, and suggested adding “sterilents” to the domestic water supply in the USA. He called for an end to global food aid, and condemned “the assorted do-gooders who are deeply involved in the apparatus of international food charity.” He called for “luxury taxes” on cribs, diapers, and toys.

It is because we innovate that the catastrophes that eco-fascists like Ehrlich anticipate so gleefully never have, and never will, eventuate. But his apocalypic worldview continues to do enormous damage.

Rhian,

If an agronomist like William Paddock, who ought to have been able to understand the potential of the Green Revolution if anyone could, was also predicting famines in the 1970s, why would you expect an entomologist like Ehrlich to know better than he did about his own field? People, including you, make predictions on the best evidence available at the time. Sometimes they get it wrong.

It is true that population growth can be slowed down or stopped by affluence in combination with the empowerment of women. This is the very best outcome, but there are other ways it happens, such as a collapse in the market for labour, turning children from assets into liabilities, or a general economic collapse. (See Virginia Abernethy's book "Population Politics".) It would be nice to make everyone affluent, but where do you propose to get the energy, resources, and capacity to dispose of wastes? We are already in environmental trouble with the present population, even at its present miserable average level of consumption. Technology doesn't always come to the rescue. It didn't save the whole communities that were being wiped out by the Black Death or the Irish Potato Famine.

China and India were at about the same level of development in the 1950s. China didn't wait for affluence: it adopted tough Ehrlich-style policies. India didn't. Lets see where they are now (CIA World Factbook). Population growth rate: China 0.606%, 13.45 births per 1000 population; India 1.606% , 22.69 births per thousand. Infant mortality: China 22.1 deaths/1000; India 34.61 deaths/1000. Male life expectancy: China 71.13 years; India 66.28 years. GDP per capita (Purchasing Power Parity): China $7,600; India $3,700.

Rhian

You may think that some of the ideas that Ehrlich came up with about how to quell population growth are ‘ecofascist’, but have you spared a thought as to why such things were suggested?

The fact is that unbridled population growth is in no one’s interest. Even strong methods of reducing population growth can be in everyone’s interest, if they enable the demand imposed by the population on its life-supporting mechanisms to remain within the ability of those mechanisms to cater for the demand, in an ongoing manner.

That’s the essence of sustainability, and it has become the number one imperative for the planet.

It is a cold hard fact that the further we get out of balance, the harsher the restrictions are going to have to be to restore the balance. But those restrictions won’t be anywhere near as harsh as the restrictions imposed on all of us if the life-supporting systems collapse.

That’s all very basic. And that was the premise under which Ehrlich suggested things like forced sterilisations.

Far from being ecofascist, this outlook is fundamentally moral. When the population growth rate is set to exceed the basic supply rate of resources, then the moral thing to do is to suggest ways of fixing the situation. And quite frankly, only strong and immediate factors that very significantly reduce the birthrate, such as mass forced sterilisations, would have a chance of working, in many places.

True ecofascists are those that advocate and facilitate continuous growth.

“It is because we innovate that the catastrophes that eco-fascists like Ehrlich anticipate so gleefully never have, and never will, eventuate.”

Oh dear! Can’t you see that the vast majority of our innovations have facilitated population growth and greater per-capita impacts on the planet? Our innovations are very largely counterproductive in the longer term!

Unfortunately, one or more of the catastrophic scenarios that Ehrlich, a moral visionary, has warned us about will happen, due largely to the actions of true ecofascists.

Divergence,
I think you’ll find China’s economic growth owes more to its embrace of the benefits of globalisation – trade, the exchange of ideas and investment, and the move towards a more market-driven economy – than to population control. India saw the light later, but its growth accelerated from the early 1990s when it implemented programs of deregulation, and its real per capital growth is now pretty strong. Indeed, the CIA fact book you cite suggests that the one child policy is one of the most significant threats to China’s longer-term growth, because “ one demographic consequence of the "one child" policy is that China is now one of the most rapidly aging countries in the world”

People have made predictions of economic collapse due to resource exhaustion for centuries, and all have been wrong, because they fail to understand what economic growth is and how it works in a market economy. Most growth is not about producing and consuming ever-increasing quantities of the same old things in the same old way, it’s about innovation - finding new things to sell and better ways of producing the old ones.

As some resources become scarce and their prices rise, alternatives are found. Innovation substitutes cheap and abundant resources for expensive and scarce ones – the telecommunications revolution would not have happened if we still needed to send signals through copper wire. As economies get more affluent, an increasing proportion of consumption is of services rather than goods.

You’re right, technology didn’t solve the potato famine or black death. But these weren’t caused by over-population. Being human is always a risky business, but that not a reason to wish there were fewer of us.

We need to get policy settings right, and that means, particularly, correcting for stuff the market won’t do on its own, like addressing global warming. But if we do, I’m confident we can sustainably raise the living standards of the world’s poor

Ludwig
I didn’t call Ehrlich an “ecofascist” only to be insulting, I did so because his views echo fascism, notably:

– that individual freedom of action and conscience is secondary to what is perceived to be the collective good;
– that it is acceptable to inflict suffering on the innocent if is serves some “higher” purpose;
– that the state can and should exercise control over the totality of human life, including its most intimate and personal dimensions;
– that a central authority is best placed to determine and effect policies for the good of the polity; and
– that the use of force is the natural and appropriate means of achieving these objectives.

I can understand that you might disagree with allowing people to make their own choices about fertility, but I can’t see how this can be called “true ecofascism”