As I’ve previously discussed, the most disconcerting turn in the population debate in recent times (at least in the U.S.) is the anti-immigrant factions that have co-opted it.
But the approaching 7 billion mark has generated a new round of population chatter and news stories. At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I survey the twists and turns of the population narrative.
What does a scholar do when his work is cited by a mass murderer?
Naturally, he writes an essay about it, which serves as a vehicle to discuss “the vast demographic transformation overtaking the human race.” The scholar’s thesis also stands in contrast to much of the conventional wisdom you read about population issues:
We still do face a population explosion, but mostly of old people, opening the way for generational conflict as well. Added to the mix are modern-day Malthusians who want to drive down human population to arrest global warming or just for the sake of “the planet.” This century is likely to be dominated by eugenic thinking, and all the more so as different populations face the specter of demographic decline and environmental threat. Let us all try to keep our heads, maybe invest more in children, and remember our common humanity.
One of these days, we’re going to have an adult, non-alarmist conversation about population.
That would be a discussion that avoids Soylent Green imagery and talks, instead, about population in place-specific terms (which is how these guys do it). Most public debate on population, however, is conflated with a list of global concerns (peak oil, climate change, resource depletion, etc), which often makes for a simplistic, despairing conversation. This is my one beef with the Dot Earth theme, which is summarized by the tagline at Andy Revkin’s twitter feed:
Which Comes First, Peak Everything or Peak Us?
Because I see the two problems as separate, though I know this is not conventional wisdom. It’s also a touchy subject. Several years ago, I got into a heated debate with a peer (who is a freelance, environmentally-oriented magazine writer) when I argued that, for the United States, consumption was a much bigger problem than population. I had said that suburban sprawl and our materialistic, big carbon footprint lifestyles–not too many people–was way more responsible for loss of wildlife habitat and decline of ecosystems. After ten minutes, we were practically shouting at each other.
Which brings me to this opinion column by William McGurn, in today’s Wall Street Journal. He looks back at previous population scaremongering from three decades ago and notes:
The one difference between the 1970s and today is this: Back then, the worry was that poor nations would never advance. Today we know they can and are developing.
That’s precisely the fear: that as people are eating better and living longer and making their way up the ladder, they will want more of the things that we take for granted–cars, air conditioners, refrigerators, and so on. Indeed, the really big dreamers might even hope one day to have for their families the kind of carbon-footprint maximizing manse that Mr. [Thomas] Friedman has for his family in Maryland.
That would be this kings castle.
This is the ultimate challenge for Friedman and other messengers of peak doom: articulating legitimate global capacity concerns in a way that puts everybody on a level playing ground. In other words, whatever prescriptive medicine you are calling on for society to take, you better be prepared to take it yourself. Otherwise, you shouldn’t consider yourself a credible messenger.
UPDATE: A clarification from Revkin:
To be clear, my notion of “Peak Us” is about the cresting of both human numbers and appetites.
Hmm, thanks to the modern diet, plastic take out containers, and our party hardy ways, maybe the planet’s population problem will take care of itself.
Well, not exactly. But this new paper in PNAS, which is bound to make make a splash, finds that
slowing population growth could provide 16-29% of the emissions reductions suggested to be necessary by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change.
What surprises me most about the paper’s findings, as Grist reports, is that urbanization
can push emissions up by more than 25 percent, particularly in developing countries, because “urbanization tends to increase economic growth.” This trend is strong enough even to outweigh the energy-efficiency benefits of city living.
That’s so striking that I wonder if there’s going to be some push back from scholars on this. The other thing that I found odd about the paper is this sentence:
For example, change in U.S. population growth has a pronounced effect on emissions, despite its small contribution to global differences in population outcomes, because of the relatively high per capita emissions implied in the B2 scenario.
I take this to mean that it’s not the overall spike in world population that matters, it’s the carbon footprint, of which we know that the U.S. has the biggest. So about that population problem…
Seriously, am I detecting a weird contradiction here, or am I over-analyzing the study’s findings? The paper is freely accessible at PNAS, so if this sort of debate floats your boat, go have a look and then come back and set me straight.
I’m not sure how much you can read into one particular comment thread. But there has been a discernible anti-immigration zealotry expressed by Grist readers over the last week, in response to this post.
On the thread, Randy Cunningham pleaded with his fellow greens to be more compassionate. He finally gave up, despairing:
Most of the comments posted on this article have depressed the hell out of me. I love the environmental movement, and what I have been hearing here reminds me of when I used to hear my beloved grandparents use the N word. It embarrassed me. This conversation embarrasses me. It is a parade of our dirty laundry. If I were introducing someone to our movement, this is the last place I would want them to look. It feels mean. It feels selfish. It feels xeonphobic. It feels frankly racist. I want to take a shower after reading the latest entries.
This underlying sentiment of many population ideologues–what I call “green bigotry”– is what I discussed here in reference to the Grist post. I’m guessing it’s a hold-over from the Abbey-Brower-Foreman wing of the environmental movement, and that the hardcore sentiments on population are felt strongest by greens who came of age in the 70s and 80s.
Steve Bloom, a a long-time activist with the Sierra Club, who is also a frequent blog commenter (and a frequent critic of mine), tries to downplay this prevailing enviro mindset, in a comment at my site:
Grist threads in general have been infested by wingnuts for some years now, so I don’t think there’s much special going on with this one.
In other words, nothing to see here, just a bunch of crazies foaming at the mouth. If only that were the case.
[UPDATE: Heh, a day after I wrote my post, this appears in the Guardian]
Perhaps unbeknownst to them, Roger Pielke Jr. and Joe Romm agree that population is not an important variable to the climate change equation.
There’s a related issue that Roger doesn’t address in his post, when it comes to coupling population with climate advocacy: religious blowback. If you’re someone that believes all constituencies need to be engaged in tackling global warming, then you don’t want to needlessly antagonize millions of evangelicals, many who in recent years have become concerned about climate change, thanks to folks like Richard Cizik.
As Cizik has explained to me several times, conservative evangelicals have an instinctual suspicion of environmentalist agendas largely because of the population issue. Never mind that mainstream enviros don’t go down this road anymore. The impression remains.
Now as Roger points out in his post, family planning is not population control, but in the minds of many Christian fundamentalists, it’s one and the same. My point is this: if you’re a climate “realist,” you need to recognize that you run the risk of alienating a huge demographic (and important ally) if you play the population card.
The evangelical frame into the climate change debate is much different than a secular green frame. If you’re a smart, secular climate advocate, it doesn’t matter if you hail from the Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers camp, the same way it doesn’t matter if you’re a liberal activist and you’d never vote for Lindsey Graham.
What should matter to climate advocates, above all, is widening their tent. An initiative that links reducing greenhouse gases with population control measures is bound to keep a very important sector of the American public from visiting that tent.
Yesterday, in response to a story in the NY Times, entitled “Sudan Court Fines Woman for Wearing Trousers,” Andy Revkin posted this meta thought at Dot Earth about the future of women in the developing world and how that ties into humanity’s prospects for sustainability:
In a broader sense, then, there appears to be simmering tension over “who wears the pants.” How that gets worked out probably will help determine whether there is a relatively smooth journey toward more or less 9 billion people on a finite planet in the next few decades.
An astute Dot Earth reader offers an excellent anecdote about women in Saudi Arabia. It speaks to the importance of culture in all this. (Savage Minds: where are you? You’re missing a golden opportunity.) Here’s the kicker from the comment (which should be read in full):
So changing a cultural or religious taboo is not something outsiders can impose upon a society without fierce resistance. The change, if it comes at all, must come from within, and the pioneers will pay a painful price.
Even without climate change and its projected impacts, this would be a major problem.
“The Population Bomb” is number three on Daniel Drezner’s top ten worst books in international relations.
First, he [Ehrlich] 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.
That’s not an unfair assessment, though I consider “The Population Bomb” a product of its times.
But if you’re talking real fallout, why is Pollock’s “The Threatening Storm” number ten?
