Collide-a-scape

The population issue has bubbled to the surface this year, with Fred Pearce calling concerns of population growth a “green myth” and Philip Longman, more recently in Foreign Policy magazine, warning about a planet of graybeards.

It’s nearly impossible to discuss population without mentioning Paul Ehrlich’s role in the debate, and usually he comes out not looking so good. But in an interesting twist, one demography researcher argues that maybe Ehrlich’s dire predictions didn’t happen because…well…policymakers took them seriously. Here’s the thrust of the argument:

Alarmism is useful when it grabs the attention of policymakers and a public that is overloaded with information, but it is also risky. Both Pearce and Longman take jabs at Paul Ehrlich because his “population bomb” never exploded. What they fail to note is that Ehrlich’s predictions could have proven right, except that he was successful at scaring a generation of policymakers into action. Funding towards population programs increased greatly in the wake of such research.

A counter argument to this was made in 2009 by Daniel Drezner:

Ehrlich’s book committed a triple sin. First, he was wrong on the specifics. Second, by garnering so much attention by being wrong, he contributed to the belief that alarmism was the best way to get people to pay attention to the environment. Third, by crying wolf so many times, Ehrlich numbed many into not buying actual, real environmental threats.

What do you think?

Before global warming, the issue that worked up enviros was population. It’s mostly a sleeper these days because of the (religious and racial) politics surrounding it, so all the big green groups shy away from it, or otherwise tread (very) carefully. But earlier this week, Fred Pearce snapped the slumbering giant awake with this post, which I largely agree with.

After outlining how the “population bomb” is being defused, Pearce turns to the real problem:

Rising consumption today is a far bigger threat to the environment than a rising head count. And most of that extra consumption is still happening in rich countries that have long since given up growing their populations.

You can’t imagine how much this enrages people who insist that, after climate change, overpopulation represents the greatest danger to the planet. This is not to deny that humans can and do overshoot the carrying capacity of their environment. But it’s place specific. Often we see it happening in some of the most impoverished lands, where culture, political instability and a marginal environment is at work.

This is not to say it can’t happen in rich places. For example, in the Southwest of the United States, where I’ve covered a lot of environmental and archaeological stories, we know that the arid, drought ridden, water-challenged landscape is going to shrivel up beyond the point of sustainability for the booming population that has flocked there in recent decades. It’s inevitable. History tells us this. But people love it out there (and I’m not just talking Vegas!), as do I. So we’ve got all these sprawling desert cities that got that way not because of overpopulation, but because of a demographic shift and lifestyle preferences (gotta have those lush lawns and golf courses in Phoenix and Tucson).

Still, we’re a rich country by most of the world’s standards, so we can afford to keep up the mirage that we’re immune to overshoot. Now, in the U.S. it so happens that the population zealots have joined in an unholy alliance with the anti-illegal immigrant bigots, making for toxic bedfellows. Don’t get me started on that.

UPDATE: In the comments, Jonathan Gilligan, an Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University, offers Bangladesh as a telling example of a nation that has made major quality of life strides but still has limiting “place-specific aspects” that could derail its progress, especially when factoring in anticipated impacts from climate change. Gilligan also offers some additional insights here.

Goes to this post at Green Inc.

And quoting a well-known American environmentalist, there’s this catch-all reasoning, which only die-hard greens will embrace and which will alienate most everyone else:

Overpopulation is the driving force behind virtually all environmental problems — air pollution, water pollution, the extinction crisis, global warming , yet it is rarely ever addressed by conservation groups. They are really afraid of touching the issue and appearing anti-human.

That’s from Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. I’ve covered endangered species issues in the West for many years. Overpopulation is not the problem–not by a long shot. Mostly, it’s the sprawl of residential and commercial development that has chewed up wildlife habitat. Not teeming hordes of people. Just their wasteful, highly consumptive habits.

There’s a number of good reasons why overpopulation (and its toxic surrogate, immigration) is the third rail of American environmental discourse. Just ask the Sierra club.

Looks like we got ourselves a long-term situation in Pakistan. As Tod Preston points out,

among the many challenges confronting the nation—including a growing Taliban insurgency—one significant problem remains largely undiscussed: its rapidly expanding population.

In his post at The New Security Beat, Preston notes that

Pakistan’s population nearly quadrupled from 50 million in 1960 to 180 million today.  It’s expected to add another 66 million people—nearly the entire population of Iran—in the next 15 years.

What do these numbers add up to? Well, because “public schools have become increasingly overcrowded,” Preston writes, “more parents have turned to madrasas in an attempt to educate their children–or at least their sons. It’s no secret that some of Pakistan’s madrases have ties to radical religious and terrorist-affiliated organizations.”

What does this portend? Preston paints the obvious picture:

It seems likely that enrollments in madrasas will swell, and more children will face a future with no schooling whatsoever. Clearly, this is not a recipe for a more peaceful and stable Pakistan.

Clearly, national security experts should be talking more about family planning.

No environmental issue, other than global warming, generates as much controversy and misguided rhetoric as overpopulation. (The disclaimer at the top of the Wikipedia entry that I link to speaks for itself.)

The population issue has loomed so large in the environmental movement that greens these days have a tendency to consider it part of the global warming equation. It’s not.

So Joe Romm is to be applauded for his post today, aptly headlined, “Consumption dwarfs population as global warming threat.”

Romm is obviously smart enough to recognize that Al Gore’s or Thomas Friedman’s carbon footprint dwarfs that of a family of ten living in a mud hut in Haiti or the Philippines.

So this makes me wonder if Romm’s simplistic posts on catastrophic floods and wildfires are cynical attempts to rouse greater public concern.

I think he’s taken the wrong tack there and that it undermines his otherwise credible stances, be it on the hydrogen  economy or, as he demonstrates today, on population.

I will say this: the obvious teeth-gnashing by his acolytes in the comment thread of the post is enjoyable.