It was 1968. A Stanford University professor by the name of Paul Ralph Ehrlich had been requested by the Sierra Club, an environmental group in the United States, to write about the problem of overpopulation. The Sierra Club was founded by Scottish-American John Muir who, incidentally, is also known as the ‘Father of National Parks’ (and Fortress Conservation?).
Ehrlich and his wife Anne published their work, called The Population Bomb, that year. It began on an ominous note:
In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
The book created a flutter and painted what critics have described as ‘an alamist picture’. And of course, it proved to be wrong in its predictions. Fortunately.
The Earth is now officially home to eight billion human beings, the United Nations declared November 15, 2022. A baby named Vinice born in Manila on the intervening night of November 14 and 15 symbolised the eighth billionth person.
Ehrlich was not the first to claim that the planet would die because of the burgeoning human population. Thomas Malthus, the famous English demographer, had postualted that population growth would always tend to outstrip food supply and that only population control could improve humanity’s lot.
“So far, it has proven to be a myth. (Thomas) Malthus was wrong. So was Paul Ralph Ehrlich. Their successors have been wrong too. Our population hasn’t outstripped the ability of the Earth to provide for us,” Darrell Bricker, the author of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline told Down To Earth over email.
Of course Ehrlich has stuck to his stand even after all these years. He told DTE:
The situation is even more desperate today than in 1968 with climate disruption helping wreck food production systems, global toxification, the biodiversity we depend on disappearing, a large land war and other factors making a terminal nuclear catastrophe even more likely.
The Stanford professor emeritus has a point about the human impact on the planet.
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Earth Overshoot Day has happened July 28 and July 29 this year and the past year respectively. In other words, humanity used all biological resources that the Earth regenerates during the entire year in just the first seven months.
But the debate is much more complex than it appears to be.
A new book released this year challenges the notion of the Earth being a finite planet. Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Marian L Tupy and Gale L Pooley shows that that resources become more abundant as populations grew:
More people produce more ideas, which lead to more inventions. People then test those inventions in the marketplace to separate the useful from the useless. At the end of that process of discovery, people are left with innovations that overcome shortages, spur economic growth, and raise standards of living.
“More than numbers in the abstract, we need to consider how resources are produced and distributed, what is consumed, by whom, and how much. It is the interaction of all these factors, and others that shapes the relationship between humanity and the planet,” Mytheli Sreenivas, professor of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University in the United States, said.
According to demographers like Srinivas Goli, associate professor in demography at the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, a more concerning question for humanity should be ‘what is harming to the planet more?’
Is it growing uneven and undesired consumption patterns, which also often results in greater wastage, or is it the population numbers?
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For instance, an average Indian consumes 16 times lesser resources than an average American.
Consumption is also connected to redistribution. The lifestyles of elite classes in wealthy countries has been built on environmentally unsustainable consumption practices. “We need to re-think these consumption practices as part of a more equitable redistribution of resources globally,” Sreenivas said.
Greater damage to the planet is being caused by unsustainable consumption and inequalities than population numbers.
“With rising education, urbanisation, family planning, and child survival chances, the population in India and the global are in the process of stabilisation. A greater focus on reducing inequalities will yield better results,” Goli added.