Vol. 8: Two cheers for population growth
What’s worse than too many people? Try: not enough people.
“Infinite population growth is incompatible with a finite planet,” writes Olivia Nater, communications manager of the Population Connection, in a recent letter to the New York Times. “Ending population growth,” she adds, “is key to fighting climate change, biodiversity loss and natural resource depletion, and is a prerequisite for achieving sustainability.” (Click here.)
Such well-intended declarations seem to appear constantly in the Times and other respectable media—usually without rebuttal because, well, who could argue with such unassailable logic?
As a matter of fact, I could. Please hear me out before consigning me to the loony bin.
England’s great explosion
Consider a population explosion that occurred in Britain four centuries ago. The population of England, less than 3 million when Columbus discovered America, more than doubled by 1650, to nearly 6 million. Here was a genuine crisis: England’s available supply of arable land— the source of its food supply— remained finite, while the supply of trees— the source of its heat— dwindled. From 25% to 50% of the English population lived in poverty. Plagues and famine were common. So many of the rural poor migrated to England’s cities in search of jobs that London’s population grew from about 200,000 in 1600 to 575,000 in 1700.
More to my point, the English responded to this emergency by emigrating in droves to North America, which offered millions of acres of unoccupied land, not to mention abundant forests, lakes and rivers, all almost free for the taking. By 1790, more than 25% of England’s population had pulled up stakes and moved to America.
Yet the British government did not greet this depopulation with a sigh of relief. On the contrary, as early as 1718, Parliament prohibited the emigration of skilled workers from the British Isles to North America. The only thing worse than too many people, the Parliamentarians apparently concluded, was not enough people.
Today England’s population— just England alone, never mind Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland— is 56 million. That’s more than ten times as many people as lived in England during the supposed great population explosion of the 17th Century. So why does no one talk of an English population explosion today? Why were 6 million people too many in 1650, and why are 56 million not too many in 2023?
For essentially three reasons, all of which we can chalk up to human ingenuity: First, agricultural innovations vastly expanded England’s food supply. Second, alternative heating fuels— like coal, oil and gas— were developed to replace wood. Third, the need to earn the income to feed their growing population motivated the English to launch the Industrial Revolution. Necessity was the mother of these inventions— and the primary necessity, I would argue, was population growth.
The ideal number is….
Nevertheless, population pessimism persists, then and now.
In 1798, when the world’s population numbered less than 1 billion, Thomas Malthus predicted that sooner or later population would be checked by famine or disease. By 1968, when the world’s population had grown to 3.5 billion, Paul and Anne Ehrlich said much the same thing in The Population Bomb. And ten years ago, with the world’s population at 7 billion, Alan Weisman’s book Countdown argued yet again that there are too many people in the world.
At that time, biologists calculated that an ideal global population— the number at which everyone could live at a first-world level of consumption without ruining the planet— would be 1.5 billion. Yet even that drastic 1.5 billion figure is half again as many people as inhabited the world when Thomas Malthus said there would soon be too many people. Why is today’s world capable of accommodating so many more people than it could in 1798?
Here’s my wild guess: The world was changed by people— people who were able to focus on specific human problems precisely because there are so many more people now than there used to be.
Robert McCormick’s reaper vastly multiplied the amount of food a single farmer could produce. Edison’s electric light extended every community’s productive waking hours. Elisha Otis’s elevator enabled people to live and work happily in buildings ten or 20 or 80 stories high.
Curiously, Robert McCormick was the youngest son of a large family. Edison was the youngest of seven children. Elisha Otis was the youngest of six children. Where would we be today if, for the sake of global population control, their parents had been limited to one or two children?
You may accuse me of cherry-picking these examples, but try Googling your own favorite inventors and scientists. A case can be made, I think, that the younger kids in large families apply themselves more creatively, if only because the existing opportunities close to home have been reserved for their elders.
We don’t know how many potential Edisons and McCormicks were lost to China’s ludicrous recent “one child per couple” policy. We do know that the absence of siblings produced three generations of spoiled brats as well as a gender imbalance. We know that it destroyed Chinese society’s most effective organizing unit— the family. And we know that China today lacks enough young workers to support its aging population.
Mother Nature’s anarchy
But even if, as I contend, population growth has benefitted humanity, has it benefitted the Earth and its lower animal forms? Many good people routinely fault our species for overheating the Earth, polluting the atmosphere, threatening the ozone and otherwise tampering with the balance of nature. Yet the turmoil produced by humans since our arrival on the planet is small potatoes compared to the anarchy that reigned when natural forces were left to their own devices.
As I discovered while researching my book on the coal industry (In the Kingdom of Coal, 2003), some 225 to 350 million years ago much of the land in what we now call the Earth’s “temperate zones” consisted of large, muddy swamps where tropical plants, trees, ferns, and mosses grew and multiplied with reckless abandon. As these plants and trees inevitably invaded each other’s turf and collided, their accumulated leaves, twigs, branches, and trunks broke off and fell into the swamp bottoms or matted over the water’s surface in thick floating masses. Younger plants lived on these mats of dead plant life and eventually died as well, further swelling the accumulated plant debris.
Ah, yes: the good old days, before humans arrived to mess up the planet.
Benjamin Franklin, asked in 1783 what was the use of a hot-air balloon, famously replied, “What is the use of a newborn child?” And Franklin never even met Thomas Edison.
How about not enough insects!
While we have reached 7Billion take a look at the population of insects. It would be impossible to count them however their numbers are decreasing at 2% per year. Google that!