The Population Taboo

Last night on the BBC radio outlet, a discussion concerning world food supplies was broadcast. At no point in the discussion was overpopulation mentioned as key to the problem of providing enough food for the human population of the planet. As almost everyone is now aware, estimates are that within just a few more years our planet's population will spike once again, to something on the order of nine billion people. If there is a sense of crisis in the present scheme, it is merely the crisis of finding ways to feed that many people. The phrase "there are just too many people" has been rendered verboten, a taboo, just as the whole subject of population control has. Paul Erlich, who once warned of a population time bomb, has been ridiculed, even forced to recant for having gotten it all wrong. The use of nitrates, genetically altered foods, the greater ease of transporting food has allowed us to create enough people chow to feed millions more people. The environmental costs of applying such techniques is fretted over and filed away at the back of our collective minds. The wisdom of allowing a population of nine billion or more on our planet is rarely challenged. For, what, after all, could we do about it? Once they're here all these people need to be fed, don't they? What are you suggesting? That we allow millions to starve to death or die of disease or genocidal wars?

Examples of how we are destroying life on the planet through overpopulation and people sprawl range from the mundane (lawns and golf courses in Tucson, bears in suburban back yards, alligators in Florida swimming pools, etc.) to the far more alarming (global warming, deforestation, melting ice caps, over fishing the seas, etc.) There was a time when even the "left" ridiculed the notion that there could be too many people. Erlich was seen as a latter day Malthus, the man who infamously argued that population grows geometrically while resources grow arithmetically. Create a rational society, use the latest scientific methods, and mankind could feed everyone. Skeptics pointed to the tendency of advanced societies to have lower birth rates. As societies prospered and health care improved, it was no longer necessary or desirable for women to have multiple pregnancies. In other words, socialists and capitalists shared the notion that their way, their path to the future would render the ancient problem of balancing resources to population a thing of the past.

It should now be clear that both camps were wrong. Whether capitalist or communist, the man of the future simply will not be able to stuff his face with as much sashimi as he desires--not, at least, if he is joined at the table by nine or ten billion of his contemporaries. Of course, you could "farm" various fishes and therefore provide zillions more of the preferred species of the moment, but we now know that "farming" sea creatures has frightening hidden costs, as frightening in their way as the costs we currently pay for saturating the earth with nitrates and other chemicals to feed the various masses.

Why has the cry--once routinely heard--for population control died out? Why, particularly now, when the evidence of the environmental devastation that surging populations have caused is clearer than ever?