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Elephant in the greenhouse part I

By Michael Kile - posted Friday, 27 November 2015


Many folk in the 1950s and 1960s were fearful, but not about global warming. It was of a French-fry fate by other means. As Bertrand Russell suggested, humankind could ‘put an end to itself by a too lavish use of H-bombs’. There was another risk too.

In his 1963 essay, Population Pressure and War, the 91-year old Russell concluded that of all the long-run problems facing the world, ‘this problem of population is the most important and fundamental, for, until it is solved, other measures of amelioration are futile.’

Elephant in greenhouse: An obvious problem or environmental risk that is either suppressed or ignored because it might disrupt a preferred political action, narrative or paradigm.

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So how, when and why did population become the elephant in today’s global greenhouse? And how do we resolve the paradox of ‘troublesome’ growth - confirmed by the latest UN projections released in late July - and deafening silence on an issue that once was, and for some still is, a source of concern?

Six decades ago the mood was driven less by data than the lack of it.  Reliable demographic statistics were so incomplete when the United Nations Population Commission (UNPC) – now the UN Population Division (UNPD) - first met in 1947 it was unable to reach confident conclusions about future trends.

In December 1951, UNPC released its first provisional estimates. The global population was estimated to be 2.40 billion people and growing at 25 million annually - revised later to 37 million, or 1.46%. Mathematically, a population with an annual growth rate of 1%, 1.5% and 2.0% doubles, respectively, every 70, 46.6 and 35 years.

Despite uncertainties in key regions, it seemed humankind had grown at least fourfold during the past three centuries. Projections suggested there would be 3.50 billion by 1980 (actually 4.45 billion) 4.00 billion by 2000 (actually 6.09 billion) and 7.00 billion by 2050. (UNPD’s most recent projection for 2050 is 9.70 billion).

By the end of the 1950s, the rapid growth rate was undeniable. With new evidence in the early 1960s came increasing public concern. Governments and international agencies were forced to address it. Earlier debate over the existence of a ‘population problem’ was replaced by a new challenge – how to solve it.

On 24 April 1961, Eugene Black, president (1949-1962) of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development - now the World Bank and a vocal climate-alarmist - stressed the importance of reducing population growth in his annual report to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

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 “There are,” he warned, issues in the less developed countries (LDCs) “which vitiate all efforts to raise world living standards. One of these obstacles is the tremendous rise in the populations of already crowded countries…Medicine has yet to make available a cheap and easy method of regulating births. And not everyone wants fewer children.”

Could LDCs deal with prevailing growth rates of 2% or more? Could nations that were expected to double in size in less than 35 years attract sufficient investment to break the poverty-population nexus?

By 1963, there were at least 3.21 billion people on the planet. Humankind was growing at an annual rate of 2.2%, or an additional 71 million a year. The annual average increase reached a historic high of 84 million during the 1980s. By 2000, the global population was 6.09 billion and still growing at 1.26%, or 77 million a year.

Concern over humankind’s rate of growth is not a recent phenomenon. Pessimists and optimists have been wrestling with it for centuries. Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) re-ignited debate in 1798 with his controversial first book:  An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects The Future Improvement of Society.   

Malthus argued the rate of human population growth would stall progress towards a more “perfectible” society:

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the Earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, if unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

For him, this Principle was a law of Nature, divinely imposed to ensure virtuous behaviour. The greatest obstacle to social progress and ‘human happiness’ was humankind’s awesome procreative power, its tendency to grow faster than the means of subsistence – or what  today could be called a country’s rate of socio-economic development or ‘improvement’.

Such heresy attracted a firestorm of abuse from many of his contemporaries - especially Enlightenment revolutionaries – and continues to this day. The French epithet ‘malthusien’ became one of the worst insults of the time. Karl Marx and his followers were unhappy with him too.

Many still see him at best as an apologist for global social inequality and injustice. Others claim his disciples support coercive state control of population growth and reject UN Resolution XVIII that:

[...] couples have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and a right to adequate education and information in this respect. (1968 Tehran Conference on Human Rights)

With two centuries of hindsight, it is clear there were flaws in his Principle. Malthus did not expect science to have such a dramatic impact on agricultural productivity, health and society, or modern birth control. Yet in one important sense he was right. He drew attention to some factors that influence it humakind’s rate of growth. With the prospect of a global population of at least 11 billion by 2100 – about 11 times what it was when he wrote his firstEssay – perhaps it is time for a revaluation.

Since the UN’s creation in 1945, there have been only three meetings devoted solely to population issues: Bucharest (1974), Mexico City (1984) and Cairo (1994).

At Bucharest, a group of LDCs attacked the Draft Plan of Action. They insisted it stress socio-economic development – not family planning or population control – arguing that only a ‘new international economic order’ would solve the population problem.

While the more developed countries (MDCs) recognised a relationship between fertility and wealth, they favoured trying to limit growth with social welfare policies. Wealth redistribution was too controversial an issue for a demographic conference. The US, one of the initiators of the 1974 World Population Year, dismissed the attack as ‘polemics and ideological statements’.  LDC economies, it argued, must be improved by new wealth creation – not by redistributed wealth from MDCs.

According to the UN archives:

Negotiations tended to make aspects of population policies weaker and aspects of social and economic development stronger. The Conference became polarized between the 'incrementalist' position of a group of Western States (including US, UK, Germany) that believed that rapid population growth was a serious impediment to development, and the 'redistribution' position, followed by a group of developing countries led by Argentina and Algeria that believed that the population problem was a consequence and not a cause of underdevelopment and that it could be solved by a new international economic order focusing on the redistribution of resources.

The significance of Bucharest, according to observers Jason Finkle and Barbara Crane, was in “a new politicization of population – not within terms of the classic debate between Marx and Malthus, but in the context of the contemporary struggle over distribution of resources and power between the industrial nations and the developing nations of the Third World.”

Why the unexpected LDC militancy? Lack of substantial international aid during the previous decade, combined with stagnant economic growth, had created a mood of increasing despondency. Many countries felt their predicament was not due to population growth, but something more sinister –western exploitation. Like those seeking ‘climate justice’ today, they sought greater global economic ‘equality’.

Whether population growth is a consequence or cause of underdevelopment – and a phenomenon that could be slowed only by a new ‘redistributive’ economic order – is a debate that persists today. But it has been recast – some might say airbrushed away – in the sustainable development framework of Agenda 21 and by growing demands for ‘climate reparations’ since the 1992 Earth Summit.

So a key aspect of the controversy four decades ago was disagreement over the causes of demographic transition – the historical shift of birth and death rates from high to low levels, with declines in mortality usually preceding fertility declines.

Was Europe’s experience during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inevitable in all countries? Was demographic transition a law of Nature? For the dramatic LDC mortality declines since 1950 had not been accompanied by gradual economic development as it had been in Europe. When it occurred fertility had remained high due to other factors - access to improved health care, modern vaccines, medical technology and so on.

Despite such unresolved issues, several key UN member states changed their positions during the next decade. The US now considered population a ‘neutral phenomenon for development’. While many LDCs - - including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan - expressed firm support for family planning and population programmes.

In a television debate during President Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign he described the so-called population explosion as ‘vastly exaggerated – over-exaggerated ‘. A growing number of influential commentators shared his perspective, including Julian Simon and futurist Herman Kahn.

Demographer Paul Demeny reflected on the new mood in his 1986 presidential address to the Population of Association of America. Since the early 1980s, he said, ‘a substantial shift had occurred in the balance of views by knowledgeable observers’ on global population growth and policy responses. Not only were current perspectives significantly different from the ‘earlier dominant orthodoxy’, but they also converged into a ‘newly optimistic assessment of the population problem….In extreme formulations, the problem is disposed of entirely.’  It was a change that he personally found ‘wanting’.

Another turning point in the demographic drama came two decades later at the Cairo Conference. Clause 1.3 of the Preamble acknowledged the world population was currently about 5.6 billion. While the rate of growth was declining, absolute increments exceeded 86 million new persons a year and were expected to remain near this level until 2015.

It was at Cairo that steps were taken to try and hasten LDC demographic transition:

Objective 6.3: Recognizing that the ultimate goal is the improvement of the quality of life of present and future generations, the objective is to facilitate the demographic transition as soon as possible in countries where there is an imbalance between demographic rates and social, economic and environmental goals, while fully respecting human rights. This process will contribute to the stabilization of the world population, and, together with changes in unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, to sustainable development and economic growth.

Empowerment of women was adopted as critical factor in stabilising the global population. But could it be achieved sufficiently quickly in different cultures to deliver the desired fertility reductions, assuming women wanted less children?

And how would ‘sustainable development’ – “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” – the other much-promoted ‘solution’ to the population problem - be effective given prevailing high growth rates, and without specifying a global optimum population and levels of per capita consumption?

Despite the optimistic mood, concern remained that some LDCs might be caught in a demographic trap - where birth rates remain high as infant mortality declines - with population growth so rapid that development could not keep pace and slow it. In such a scenario there would be failed states, intensifying environmental damage, famine, forced migration - and ultimately higher mortality.

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About the Author

Michael Kile is author of No Room at Nature's Mighty Feast: Reflections on the Growth of Humankind. He has an MSc degree from Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London and a Diploma from the College. He also has a BSc (Hons) degree in geology and geophysics from the University of Tasmania and a BA from the University of Western Australia. He is co-author of a recent paper on ancient Mesoamerica, Re-interpreting Codex Cihuacoatl: New Evidence for Climate Change Mitigation by Human Sacrifice, and author of The Aztec solution to climate change.

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