POPULATION: The Multiplier of Everything Else
PMC’s President, Bill Ryerson, wrote a report for the Post Carbon Reader. Below is an excerpt from the report and a brief video statement by Bill Ryerson.
To download the full report, visit:
http://www.postcarbon.org/Reader/PCReader-Ryerson-Population.pdf
POPULATION: The Multiplier of Everything Else
When it comes to controversial issues, population is in a class by itself.
Advocates and activists working to reduce global population growth and size are attacked by the Left for supposedly ignoring human-rights issues, glossing over Western overconsumption, or even seeking to reduce the number of people of color. They are attacked by the Right for supposedly favoring widespread abortion, promoting promiscuity via sex education, or wanting to harm economic growth. Others think the problem has been solved, or believe that the real problem is that we have a shortage of people (the so-called “birth dearth”). Still others think the population problem will solve itself, or that technological innovations will make our numbers irrelevant.
One thing is certain: The planet and its resources are finite, and it cannot support an infinite population of humans or any other species.
A second thing is also certain: The issue of population is too important to avoid just because it is controversial.
The Post Carbon Reader will be available in October 2010 from Watershed Media. The distributor, University of California Press, is providing a 20% pre-order discount to my network. Simply visit this link and enter pre-order discount code 10M9071. Following is the text of a press release about the article.
August 19th, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Bill,
I got your Post-Carbon article yesterday and already started setting up a subcommittee of the Sustainability Committee of the League of Women Voters to talk about implementing a political agenda around your recommendations on the last two or three pages. I also forwarded it to my network of sustainability activists out here on the peninsula, 50 or 60 people. I called it the most important article I have forwarded to them – ever. It is an amazing article and does the best job I have yet seen of summing up where we are right now.
Congratulations!! I think you really hit a home run. Good things will come of this.
-Don
August 31st, 2010 at 6:25 pm
Dear Bill and Don Wilkins,
Thanks for all both of you and others in PMC community are doing to protect biodiversity from massive extirpation; to preserve Earth’s finite resources from reckless dissipation and its frangible ecosystems from irreversible degradation; and to assure a good enough future for children everywhere.
Regardless of what we believe because it is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially correct, religiously tolerated and culturally syntonic to do so, whatsoever is is, is it not? Please assist me by examining research of the population dynamics of the human species. The implications of this research appear to be potentially profound. If human population dynamics is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other species, then the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers in our time could be the proverbial “mother” of the human-induced global challenges looming before the family of humanity. If this global challenge continues to be ignored, the human family could end up winning some Pyrrhic victories over subordinate global challenges but losing the larger struggle for survival itself.
Please note the following perspective from Sir Fred Hoyle that dates back to 1964, a time prior to the publication of Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” and the Club of Rome’s seminal work, “Limits to Growth.”
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“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance… and one chance only.”
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It appears to me that Sir Fred Hoyle was asking people years ago, when I was still a teenager, to carefully consider and rigorously examine a superordinate situation that was too dangerous to ignore… that dwarfed other already identified global challenges. Rather than seriously scrutinize population dynamics leading to the human overpopulation of the Earth, which would require experts to rivet their attention on the placement of the human species within the natural order of living things, the topic was avoided, just as it is being ignored now. At the beginning of my lifecycle in 1945 there were about 2.8+/- billion human beings on Earth. Only 65 years later 6.8+/- billion people are members of the human community.
So much time has been wasted recently by the brighest and best of my generation. The implications of such an unfortunate failure of nerve appear to be far-reaching. We cannot address problems, the root cause of which we refuse to acknowledge.
Representative democracies led by human beings with feet of clay could readily become a force too formidable to ignore with remarkable speed, I believe, but first humankind needs to be helped to see why a force too formidable to ignore is necessary as well as to understand more adequately the nature of the primary human-induced global challenge that presents itself to the family of humanity in our time; that takes its shape in the form of a colossal looming threat to future human wellbeing, environmental health and the integrity of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.
Research by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel appears to indicate with remarkable simplicity that human population dynamics is essentially similar to the population dynamics of other species.
Since many too many population experts remain silent about this research and blogmeisters associated with the mass media refuse to discuss the peer-reviewed evidence, perhaps you could take a look at it, make your comments, and encourage by your example others to do the same. You can find the article, Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply, by Hopfenberg and Pimentel on the worldwide web or at the following link, http://www.panearth.org/ . Other articles and a slideshow presentation on human population dynamics and human overpopulation can also be found at this link.
No amount of rationalization or excuse will pass muster when the issue is the conscious denial of science. The abject failure of every major legitimate scientific group to respond to the exceptionally strong evidence of human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth from Hopfenberg and Pimentel is simply inexcusable. Many too many experts have been effectively ignoring research from these two outstanding scientists, who have devoted their lives to actually observing data and providing critiques/interpretations in an intellectually honest manner.
The willful avoidance of the open discussion of science, especially the scientific research of human population dynamics, is as unconscionable as it is destructive. Experts who have remained silent need to be stood up to and directed to assume their responsibilities to science and their duties to humanity. Is there a reasonable justification for elective mutism in response to carefully collected, honestly analyzed and heretofore unchallenged evidence?
The tasks at hand for scientists are to freely acknowledge, critique and interpret evidence, I suppose, and to encourage that evidence to be examined from different viewpoints. It is irresponsible and pernicious for scientists to remain silent because they are slowing the development of momentum for necessary change in population policy and programming, I believe.
Sincerely,
Steve
September 10th, 2010 at 11:03 am
we need a revolution in the world of economic theories .present concepts of growth will sink our little planet and generate misery and premature death for hundreds of millions.please contact me as i am an educator with close links to the quality enhancement cell here in pakistan as well as being an active environmentalist.
September 11th, 2010 at 9:48 am
Until awareness of the human community is effectively raised regarding human-driven aspects of the global predicament looming before humanity, all of us now here in space-time are hurdling recklessly and unsustainably down a road to perdition, I suppose.
Perhaps the time is coming when it is permissible for human beings with feet of clay to speak truth to the powerful masters of the universe among us. That moment needs to come sooner rather than later, and may yet come in the nick of time to save a good enough future for children everywhere, but only if human beings in powerful positions choose to communicate openly and stop standing shoulder to shoulder with the rich and powerful in willful silence.