Population, economic growth and ecological damage - a peek under the hood

[GliderGuider]

Many ecological thinkers and activists have identified population growth as the primary force behind all the damage we are doing to the planet. As a consequence, they have dedicated themselves to promoting programs that address population growth directly - first to slow it, then ultimately to reverse it - in order to reduce the devastation. In my view, this focus on population is based on a fundamental error in system understanding, and will ultimately not have the desired effect. This is a brief sketch of why I believe that to be the case.

The question that comes up for me in response to concerns about population is,

"What drives population levels either up or down?"

It seems clear from my reading that what has driven population up in the past has been technological innovation - in transportation, communication, medicine, and especially in food production and the production of material goods.

The factors that drive population down appear somewhat more complex, but include things like the breakdown of economic security and a loss of confidence in the economic future (as in the ex-Soviet Union) and various saturation effects (as seen in Western Europe and Japan).

From this perspective, the population level is clearly a dependent variable, as is ecological damage. During times of expansion in the level of human activity and innovation, both population and ecological damage rise. During times of contraction, both fall. If this is true, it makes little sense to me to put effort into trying to modify a dependent variable (the output, population) in the hope that this will somehow modify another dependent variable, ecological damage, while the independent variable (the input - material and economic growth) remains untouched.

It makes far more sense to me to work at reducing our level of activity and innovation by inducing global economic breakdown. This should simultaneously reduce both our population and the ecological devastation we wreak on the planet.

Now of course this is a mischievous suggestion. I put it out there mainly to illustrate why I think programs aimed directly at either population reduction or ecological remediation are largely futile. They don't apply system leverage at the right place (hat-tip to Donella Meadows) and so will not generally have the desired effect. The proper leverage point is somewhere within our material and economic activities, but these leverage points are heavily guarded by the protective institutions we've created, as well as the "permanent growth" mindset that has infected everyone from world leaders to peasant farmers.

In my opinion, we who can see what's coming are left with two useful options. The first is to change the growth mindset in as many individuals as possible, creating a grass roots cadre that is prepared for and even wants growth to come to an end. The second is to wait. Our current system is letting out the most horrifying sounds of stress and distress these days, and many of us here probably feel that the point where the rupture begins to spread in zigzag cracks across the facade of civilization is scant decades (if not mere years) away.

[lalalu]

1. Wrong on every level.

Religion, corporate greed, ignorance, and the suppression of educated and free women is what spurs unnecessary increases in population growth.

It is not a coincidence that as a population becomes better educated and healthier the number of children they have decreases.

Religions benefit by having masses of ignorant people filling their pews and following their directives. Corporations love huge populations because they have people competing for low wages and substandard conditions. It is why corporations moved to China and India. Women are the ones burdened when they have too many children and are the ones who lose out on education. It then perpetuates a cycle of ignorant mothers raising ignorant children who adhere to ignorant practices. It is why child brides as young as 7 and 8 still exist around the world.

Ask any farmer or gardener what happens when a tree or plant is burdened with too much produce. One of the first things that must be done is thinning of a tree or plant. Too much produce will weaken the tree, increase susceptibility to disease and instability, will yield low quality fruit, and can increase the chances the tree will die. The same is true of the earth.

People need to just stop breeding so much and we need to stop supporting those who can't seem to absorb that message.

[GliderGuider]

2. Thanks for your input.

There are many factors that influence population growth and decline, that vary in relative importance from one region of the globe to another.

In counter to your argument that better educated, healthier women have fewer children (one that is widely shared), I will offer the demographic evidence around the collapse of the Soviet Union - a well-educated, non-religious, relatively affluent group of nations that faced a drastic decline in material and economic circumstances:



It may be that my argument isn't "wrong on every level", so much as it challenges a number of deeply-held preconceptions about population growth.

[AndyTiedye]

3. Chernobyl Might Have Had a Significant Impact on Those Figures

[GliderGuider]

5. If you can find some evidence I'd love to see it.

I'd probably lump Chernobyl in as one of the factors that causes a loss of confidence in the future. There were many other economic and social influences, however. The same demographic trends are seen well outside the three nations I graphed - throughout the ex-Soviet bloc in fact, including nations such as Bulgaria that suffered no direct impact from Chernobyl.

[lalalu]

4. I am not sure about your point and

would question the reliability on numbers from the Soviet Union.

In countries where actual births and statistics are recorded the reality shows that as the education level of the mother increases the number of births decease. There was one study where it was purported that a number of educated women with high salaries had increased the number of children they gave birth to. On further study it was shown that in fact they had not increased their birth rate but had just postponed giving birth.

By pursuing education and work during their most fertile years they had in fact limited the number of children they could give birth to because of biological reasons. Consciously or unconsciously when women are provided education and opportunities the birth rate goes down.

Also, the resources of the earth are not infinite and in many cases need to be replenished. There are too many people and many overpopulated parts of the world are learning that. India is having several outbreaks of dysentery because they cannot dispose of the waste of so many people. China has similar problems and as more of the countryside is annihilated the problem is growing. World health groups are increasingly worried about outbreaks because of overpopulated countries.

[cprise]

10. It would be quite a stretch to extend your idea not only to

the former Soviet Union, but to east Asia and India. The latter two became overpopulated without modern technology. And Europe became overpopulated before the onset of the industrial revolution.

I have also read studies showing that as infant deaths decrease, women end up having fewer children. Maybe there is a cultural memory of producing children to replace dead ones in an agricultural setting that curbs successive, more affluent generations' desire to have large families.

[GliderGuider]

11. Different regions have different demographic influences.

I would expect the USSR example to hold true for the industrialized West, but I don't know how much cultural memory of pre-industrial times is still embedded in Asian and Indian culture. Industrialization is a powerful force that not many regions have escaped.

I try to present alternatives to the revealed wisdom on population growth, in order to demonstrate that there isn't one single factor or even a single set of factors that is universally applicable in times of population decline.

My position is that humanity is at the top of a "plague species" population spike, and is probably within a few years (decades at most) of seeing that curve inflect down - with bloody little we can do about it, or time left to do it in. How the descent unfolds will be interesting to watch, but impossible to predict in any overall way.

[mjrr_595]

18. +100

One of the best posts I've read

[lalalu]

19. Thank You

[Speck Tater]

6. Sounds like "The Underminers" may be on the right track.

http://underminers.org/

“The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization,”

[GliderGuider]

8. Thanks, I hadn't run across it before.

It looks right on point. And any book that includes an essay by Carolyn Baker is on the right track as far as I'm concerned.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. "various saturation effects (as seen in Western Europe and Japan)" deserves more examination

You seem to leave that behind, despite your belief that these effects are a factor that drives down population; and concentrate purely on "our material and economic activities". Can you be more specific about what the saturation effects are?

[GliderGuider]

9. The sorts of saturation effects I'm thinking about

The sorts of saturation effects I'm thinking about would include things like high energy consumption per capita (no need for lots of kids to act as labour) and high population density. These obviously don't act on their own (culture plays a big role), but two effects in play are no need for children to ensure one's comfort and survival, and less physical room for more children.

The reason I "leave it behind" is that economic decline is a much larger factor in population decline than saturation effects. Saturation gives a logistic curve that's asymptotic to a limit, whereas socioeconomic collapse can actually inflect the population curve down

I expect socioeconomic collapses of one sort or another to play a much larger role in our collective future than the global saturation of demand for energy and material goods. As a result I think that any demographic model that depends on increasing levels of affluence is unlikely to be predictive for long.

[tama]

12. Consumption of refined oil products in Italy fell 14.8 percent year-on-year

Consumption of refined oil products in Italy fell 14.8 percent year-on-year in September to around 5.3 million tonnes, driven by weaker demand for new cars and auto fuel, industry group Unione Petrolifera (UP) said.
Petrol consumption fell 18.2 percent year-on-year to 662,000 tonnes last month, while diesel for road vehicles dropped 15.6 percent to 1.86 million tonnes, UP said in a statement.
New car sales plunged 25.5 percent last month, with the share of new diesel-powered vehicles registered falling to 52.7 percent of the total from 55 percent in September 2011, UP said.
UP represents major national and foreign refiners and oil product distributors working in Italy.
In the first nine months of 2012, demand for oil products fell 9.3 percent year-on-year to around 48.6 million tonnes.
http://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/News.aspx?ElementId=a1463ab6-7695-4466-9e53-a2c7f9ea8131

More bicycles sold than cars.

PS: fertility rate in Italy and all of of Europe has been long well under 2,1.

[tama]

13. Three main factors

1) birth rate - in industrialized west and socialist economies like Cuba and Kerala the birth rate has been long under 2,1.
2) infant mortality - close to zero in societies above.
3) overall mortality - In Russia vodka is the main factor behind increase in mortality

"Peak Oil" is the main factor of cutting down environmental devastation e.g. in Cuba which transformed from industrial oil based society into organic gardening during the special period; the social security network was not broken and new veggie diet improved the general health of people.

[GliderGuider]

14. Yes. As economic collapse progresses I think we'll see

A rise in infant mortality, due to infectious diseases made more prevalent by a decline in resistance due to malnutrition;
A rise in overall mortality due to alcohol; and
A further drop in birth rates as women decide to stop bringing children into the world just to watch them die.

Dropping oil consumption reduces economic activity (and vice versa, in a feedback loop), and that helps the environment while being hard on people.

The impact of oil shortages per se during the Cuban special period has been overstated. Oil consumption fell by just 20% over three years from 1989 to 1992, but the main social impact was economic, from the loss of trade with the Soviet Union. Wikipedia says this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period

The dissolution of the Soviet Union hit the Cuban economy severely. The country lost approximately 80% of its imports, 80% of its exports and its Gross Domestic Product dropped by 34 percent. Food and medicine imports stopped or severely slowed. The largest immediate impact was the loss of nearly all of the petroleum imports from the USSR; Cuba's oil imports dropped to 10% of pre-1990 amounts. Before this, Cuba had been re-exporting any Soviet petroleum it did not consume to other nations for profit, meaning that petroleum had been Cuba's second largest export product before 1990. Once the restored Russian Federation emerged from the former Soviet Union, its administration immediately made clear that it had no intention of delivering petroleum that had been guaranteed the island by the USSR; this resulted in a decrease in Cuban consumption by 20% of its previous level within two years.

http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=cu&product=oil&graph=consumption

The moral of the story is, don't put all your trade eggs in one basket. From this point of view modern industrial countries could weather oil shocks better than Cuba did. For a while...

[tama]

15. OK

The drop in Cuban energy consumption does not seem so different from what e.g. Italy is now going through. But there has been no increase in infant mortality in Cuba, on the contrary it's been dropping. There has been no increase of overall mortality, on the contrary "Manuel Franco describes the Special Period as "the first, and probably the only, natural experiment, born of unfortunate circumstances, where large effects on diabetes, cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality have been related to sustained population-wide weight loss as a result of increased physical activity and reduced caloric intake"."

Infant mortality dropping:
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=cu&v=29
Birth rate dropping:
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=cu&v=25
Life expectancy growing:
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=cu&v=30

Energy consumption per capita has been dropping, now less than world averadge and fraction compared to North America:
http://www.google.fi/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&idim=country:CUB&dl=en&hl=en&q=cuba+energy+consumption#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:CUB&idim=region:NAC&ifdim=region&tdim=true&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false

Cuba has a problem of aging population much like Europe, but the traditional family values and socialist community values of health care system seem to be doing better job of taking care of elderly than in many European nations where elderly are institutionlized and medicated into zombies by more and more technocratic and privatized "health care".

What is most noteworthy of all the graphs is that Cuba keeps on doing quite well with very low energy consumption per capita. Areas that are debt slaves to IMF and neoliberalism have practically no chance of following Cuban example of low energy well-fare without revolutions to gain freedom from neoliberal models of oppression, as we see in Greece where IMF is "predicting a 5-10% decrease in Greek life expectancy due to the debt crisis and austerity cuts." (http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/tag/greek-debt/)

[GliderGuider]

16. Energy is just one factor, of course.

Cuban culture is also very different from Italy, meaning they will respond to crises differently. Also, the trade relations are different. i wouldn't expect infant mortality to go up as a result of oil shortages, especially over the short term in a country with socialized medicine. It takes a larger economic collapse as well as a decline in medical care to cause that.

In Russia, birth rates dropped by 50% from 1988 to 1993, and death rates rose by almost 50% from 1991 to 1994, but infant mortality rates stayed constant throughout. That's the advantage of a government-run medical system.

There's no doubt that people can cope better with oil shortages than with hope shortages. Neoliberal policies are going to be catastrophic for these indicators.

[tama]

17. Russia is interesting

There is strong highly authoritarian and technocratic tradition - both Czarist and Communist party hierarchies, which have collapsed multiple times in recent history. As well as the anarcho-spiritual traditions of Tolstoi, Kropotkin etc., and the "datchniks" who are not much effected by the continuous collapses of the state hierarchy:

In the workshop I learned that Dr. Leo wrote his doctoral dissertation on the spiritual, cultural, and economic significance of the Russian dacha gardening movement. (A dacha is a small cottage in the country.) I believe his work at the University of Missouri at Columbia has an urgent relevance to the US as debates rage over the ability of people to evolve sustainable “foodsheds.” Agribusiness interests propose that broad-scale industrial agriculture is the only model that can provide reliable, inexpensive food and that the toxicity of inputs, soil depletion and energy inefficiency of the system is acceptable due to a lack of alternatives. Thus far, this view has been backed solidly by the USDA to the tune of billions in agricultural subsidies that underpin this model — financing the destruction of America's soil and food quality, and rewarding industrial agribusiness as the model to succeed.

But millions of home gardeners in Russia disprove all these ideas and offer a model in which people regain central control of their food system in a very direct way, by growing the majority of their food themselves. In a country with corporate farms using 83 percent of the agricultural land, some 35 million families produce more than 50 percent of the country’s food, growing on small plots which are typically some 25 x 35 yards in size. While these plots are not the best agricultural land, they are tended by people who care about the quality of produce, who improve the quality of their soils, and who eat and share what they grow. These dachnik gardeners, as they are called, collectively produce 92 percent of the potatoes grown in Russia, 77 percent of the vegetables, 87 percent of the berries and fruit, 60 percent of the meat, and 49 percent of the milk.

http://www.ecovillagenews.org/wiki/index.php/From_Russia_with_Love

It seems quite obvious that the part of the Russian population that suffers from hope shortages is the part that is most dependent from the state hierarchy - or those most hurt by the state hierarchy.

Next stage from dachnik gardeners is the Anastasia ecovillage-movement, which is very strong in Russia and has also some support from the Establishment: http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20080211.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=EjdRxCmPJsk

You are also familiar with Dmitry Orlov, who just wrote about Kropotkin: http://cluborlov.blogspot.fi/2012/10/in-praise-of-anarchy-part-i.html

[GliderGuider]

23. I finally got around to reading Orlov on Kropotkin and anarchism - fabulous series.

I was especially taken with Part III on Geoffrey West's work on the different efficiency parameters of natural vs. artificial organisms (bounded logistic curves leading to stability vs unbounded exponential or superexponential growth leading to collapse). Collapse is obviously essential in order to ensure the long term sustainability of human systems. Let's hope it happens sooner rather than later.

Thanks for the pointer.

[tama]

24. Yi Quan

I recently found exercise that suits me; and the philosophy and practice of Yi Quan comes to mind from West's work. It's based on standing still without moving, but with lot of internal movement happening, that strengthens body into and through self healing whole-force of bodymind. Whole Force is described also as feeling and balancing all Contradiction Forces - Up-Down; Forth-Back; Left-Right; together with Internal Smile. The goal of the practice is first microcosmic unification of "individual" body-mind Whole Force; and then ultimately unification with the macrocosmic Whole Force. The dimensional aspect of the practice reminds also of the shamanistic Opening of Directions as beginning of many Native Seremonies.

The practice of Yi Quan (as so many other practices) tends to produce heat, usually first at hands. This thermodynamic aspect of Whole Force (known perhaps best from Tummo Yoga) is very interesting in terms of also science and West's theory. Which does not go into potential physical-mathematical specifics of the thermodynamic aspect, but anyhow fits nicely in the general idea of entropy of Form -> Heat + creative negentropic jumps of and on the fractal scales, based on basic creative contradictions of chiral etc. dialectic oppositions.

[Iterate]

20. Gapminder

http://www.gapminder.org/ is Hans Rosling's site that integrates graphics and data. I can't begin to count the number of hours I've spent mousing around there. You probably already know about it, but I'm sure others do not.

One thing I really like about it and find most useful is the ability to easily track each nation through time. More often than not the results can be complex, or puzzling, or counter-intuitive. Sometimes nations seem to be drawn to an universally optimum level, as with lifespan, and other times variables seem to be culturally dependent.

Whether health and longevity either leads or follows economic development seems to be less important than the existence of the programs themselves. It's the old soap, water, vaccines, and calories argument, and it's convincing. Population increases, but the rate of increase declines. Decrease in infant mortality comes after the overall decline in mortality.

What drives population down significantly isn't economic disruption as much as society-wide warfare sufficient to disrupt the soap-water-vaccine-calories infrastructure. The example you have of the Soviet Union shows up clearly in a log-log plot of child mortality and pop growth. China too. The collection of countries in the lower left of that plot is pretty interesting, i.e. what do Japan, Serbia, Iceland, and Cuba have in common?

The site's pretty interesting for looking at historical CO2 by nation as well, but that's for another post.

[PATRICK]

21. This is fascinating

and is yet another way of looking at the large picture. We are going to hit a default ecological crisis adjustment in everything in the expanded biosphere. We can cope with that as isolated groups or let it roll over us since our civilization settings are going to clash with the full consequences.

Fundamental power structures and attitudes, stronger than the stark fear of actual consequences will make this crisis "tragic". There are "optimistic" scientists talking the same things and recognizing the futility of coping with our unsynchronized-with-reality economy/political structure. Which even mutes media and science to a disastrous dumbing down of survival reasoning.

Sauve qui peut. That is what the rich are/will be planning at everyone's expense who tries to bail the sinking Titanic. But we have immense capabilities locked away in phony debt pyramids and extreme waste of labor and production. Immense abilities in innovative science and engineering- repressed. A lot of people will transition from clinging to self-destructive maintenance of a doomed status quo to a despairing apocalypse. Real choices like that are simply not presented to the people. Real sacrifice or real work to live in a default realignment of the climate is not allowed to be seen, talked about or done. Meaningless money rules for the apocalypse. No wonder the whacko religionists love this omega power though every religion in essence preaches against Mammon. In any event, everything phony is the same. Money pyramids over the mummies of the race.

[GliderGuider]

22. Thanks! I think this is a good way of looking at the situation

For me the question is whether we can liberate any of the capabilities that are locked away and redirect them for survival purposes, or whether we have to wait for things to crack first. For the last half-dozen years my take on it has been that the catastrophe will roll over us well before the power structure changes.