[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population?

Sat May 16 02:02:06 MDT 2009

The last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental
Ponzi scheme that has pushed us toward the ultimate tipping point.

by Kelpie Wilson, AlterNet

AlterNet (April 10 2009)

Without growth, there would be no economy as we know it. But modern
culture, by and large, doesn't see that it can exist only in the medium
of ceaseless growth and expansion, because a fish doesn't see the water
it swims in. Only today, in the recent, breathless moments of the
greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, do we begin to
perceive the waters around us.

Slowly, we are coming to realize that the last 200 years of economic
growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed the
final reckoning ever forward in time, until the future is now. Slowly,
we are coming to realize that Thomas Malthus was right.

It was the warrior cry of the radical environmental movement in the
1980s: "Malthus Was Right!" But Malthus, a mumbling country parson with
intellectual ambitions, had been transmogrified by capitalists and
communists alike into a fearsome bogeyman possessed of "dangerous" ideas.

Environmentalists who invoked his name were invariably corrected by
their progressive friends, who told them that excess consumption by the
rich was the problem, not the reproductive profligacy of the poor.

Yet, as we drive deeper into the greenhouse world, with its crazy
weather, water shortages and general degradation, more and more of us
from across the political spectrum are wondering how on earth we will
feed the three billion more people projected to arrive by 2050, or even
the six billion or so we already have.

It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine the Malthusian idea, to discover
what truths it holds and to see if they can be of any help.

Malthus' big idea, published in 1798 in "An Essay on the Principle of
Population", was that human population would always grow exponentially,
and that it would always push up against the limits of food production,
thus creating a permanent class of poor whose numbers could only be
checked by "misery" and "vice".

His Law of Population is based on this simple observation:

"Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the
seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has
been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to
rear them."

Later, Charles Darwin would base his theory of natural selection on this
observation. He saw that a super abundance of progeny allows natural
selection to work so that only the fittest survive.

Malthus wrote his essay in response to William Godwin, an outspoken
liberal of the day. Godwin wanted to abolish the aristocracy and
redistribute the wealth. He believed in the "perfectibility of man". As
a member of the landed elite, Malthus felt a need to address the
rabble-rouser Godwin and prove that even in a perfect society where the
working man received according to his needs, all benefits would soon be
wiped out by population growth.

The poor man's "lack of moral restraint" would ensure that his family
would continue to grow until they ate him out of house and home.
Starvation and disease would then do the job of reducing the population
to a supportable size.

Malthus made a big impression on the British upper classes (who had
access to concubines and prostitutes and hence no need for moral
restraint to curtail family size). Since the poor were destined to
continually breed themselves back into poverty anyway, there was no
point in improving their condition.

Politicians seized on Malthus' theory to end subsidies for the poor ("a
shilling a week to every laborer for each child he has above three") and
pass the Poor Law of 1834 that forced those seeking relief into
workhouses designed to be as much like prisons as possible. It's no
wonder then that Friedrich Engels declared Malthus' Law of Population to
be the "most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the
proletariat".

Karl Marx and Engels put their faith in technology and believed that
progress would continually expand agricultural production, mooting the
issue of population growth. While they thought Darwin's use of the Law
of Population to explain evolution had some validity, they insisted that
humans were exempt. Animals were only "collectors" of nature's bounty,
but humans were "producers" and masters of their own destiny.

Indeed, Malthus might have earned more respect for his Law of Population
if he hadn't proposed it just at the moment when human production first
tapped into the coal seams and oil streams that fueled the industrial
expansion. It is only today, when those resources have peaked, that we
are revealed to be much more like the other animals than we thought -
"collectors" of ancient sunlight, our fossil fuel inheritance, and not
the all powerful "producers" we thought we were.

As a progressive, I want to believe that humanity can control our
destiny. But as an ecologist, I have to accept the Law of Population. Is
there no way out? Yes there is. But it requires us to embrace what
Malthus called "vice".

Malthus saw three ways to control population growth: abstinence, misery
and vice. Abstinence was too challenging for most. Misery included
starvation, disease and death. That left vice: a category that included
prostitution, abortion and infanticide, but also "promiscuous
intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed and
improper arts to conceal the consequence of irregular connexions".

Blinders imposed by the church and centuries of violent repression of
women healers and midwives had so deeply branded contraception as an
"improper art" that even a revolutionary like Godwin could not advocate
it. He could only insist that redistribution of wealth would result in
more "moral restraint". Malthus found this laughable:

"I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will
ultimately be able to live without food. But Mr Godwin has conjectured
that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished ... the
best arguments for the perfectibility of man are drawn from a
contemplation of the great progress that he has already made from the
savage state and the difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But
towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress
whatever has hitherto been made."

When the radical Francis Place publicly advocated birth control in the
1820s, he was condemned for promoting vice by church, state and even his
fellow working men in the labor unions he helped to found. Nearly a
century later, Margaret Sanger finally opened her first birth-control
clinic in Brooklyn, NewYork, and contraception was only fully legalized
in the United States in 1965. The definition of "vice" evolved very slowly.

Malthus' list of vices included infanticide, which today stands well
apart from birth control, abortion, prostitution and homosexuality. And
yet, throughout history and prehistory, infanticide was probably the
most widely used method of curtailing population growth, mostly because
the contraception and abortion methods of the past were either
ineffective or dangerous to women.

Before the fossil fuel era, the need to prevent famine often dictated
infanticide, especially female infanticide, which relieved population
pressure by reducing the number of breeding females. It is good to know
this bit of history, because it gives us the proper context for updating
the definition of "vice".

Still, there are conservatives who would prefer to see famine and misery
rather than condone contraceptives, abortion, women's rights and
homosexuality. Among them is Pope Benedict, leader of the world's
largest religious organization, who has just condemned untold numbers of
Africans to death by opposing condoms for prevention of AIDS, because it
might lead to "vice".

There are also still progressives who insist that population growth is
not a problem. They should go back and read Engels, who hated Malthus
and thought the idea of population outstripping resources was ludicrous,
but still said this:

"There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people
will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase.
But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate
the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate
the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this
society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty ... it is for
the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when
and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ to the
purpose."

We are those people, and many of us now understand that the real vices
are found in war, injustice and repression. Increasingly, we realize
that we must work together for humane and liberating solutions to the
problem of human overpopulation, as we build a new, non-growth,
steady-state economy that provides for all.

_____

Kelpie Wilson is a freelance writer covering energy and environmental
issues. She is a contributing editor for Yoga Plus magazine and author
of Primal Tears (2005), a novel. An archive of her past articles is on
her Web site: http://www.kelpiewilson.com/

http://www.alternet.org/story/135518/

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