Published in the January 6 – 19, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Consider this column a kind of therapy because I need to get something off my mind. For the past year or so, just like the Bill Murray character in “Groundhog Day,” I keep waking up every morning with my subconscious mind presenting me with the same question: “How many people are on the planet?”
About 7.4 billion people make their home on Earth. I tell my subconscious that number. But every morning, like Murray waking up to the radio alarm-clock playing “I Got You, Babe,” I get the same question on planetary population repeated inside my early-morning wake-up head. And that is why I suspect that my mind, for whatever reason, wants me to write something in this column about the rising numbers of humans inhabiting our planet.
About 10,000 years ago, there were only 5 million people alive across the world. In comparison, the nine Bay Area counties is now home to 7.5 million people. On the day I was born 49 years ago, I joined about 3.3 billion people, less than half of the number now alive on the planet today. Thirty years ago, Morgan Hill’s population was a little less than 20,000. Today, it’s more than 40,000.What we human beings are really good at is making more of ourselves. We’re fanatics at being fruitful and multiplying as the command goes in the book of Genesis.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the human population hit, in the year 1804, the 1 billion mark at the same time that the Industrial Revolution was really starting to rev up its engines. During the past 300 years, the increased use of fossil fuels helped to mechanize the world. These energy-dense fuels also helped to produce more food crops, better health care, and improved living conditions, which in turn raised the average life expectancy for humans. In 1900, the average number of years a human would live on the planet was about 30 years. Now it is more than 70 years, more than doubling in 115 years.
Our planet’s population explosion was made possible thanks to the productivity explosion we’ve seen as technology improved thanks to the scientific revolution of the past three centuries. We use the planet’s resources to produce more food and improve medical care. As infant mortality rates have plummeted and life expectancy has soared during the past 100 years, we’ve also seen every decade or so another milestone in the number of people living on the planet. We passed the 2 billion mark in 1927, the 3 billion mark in 1960, the 4 billion mark in 1974, the 5 billion mark in 1987, the 6 billion mark in 1999, the 7 billion mark in 2011, and we’re expected to hit 8 billion in 2024.
There have been predictions that the human species would hit a “peak population” rate where the increase in our numbers would no longer be able to keep up with the resources that the planet can provide. We would reach a point where population growth would be unsustainable and we would hit a ceiling in the number of people on the planet. When we got to that point, some people predicted that perhaps we might even see a dramatic decline as starvation, disease and wars ravaged across countries competing for food, water and other resources.
Among the earliest authors to make this case was the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 who calculated that humans were reproducing at an exponential rate while food production was increasing only incrementally. His calculations in his “An Essay on the Principle of Population” gave a forecast that the planet would run out of food by the year 1980.
In 1968, Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich adopted Malthus’s idea of overpopulation and wrote a best-selling book titled “The Population Bomb.” Ehrlich warned that mass starvation of humanity would devastate the planet in the 1970s and 1980s because of the overpopulation problem. The alarmist tone of the book at the time prompted a debate on how many people can live on the planet at a decent quality-of-life level. The 1973 science fiction film “Soylent Green” helped to fuel the public’s imagination of a dystopian world where humanity had overwhelmed the planet’s resources need to survive where they resorted to cannibalism. But Ehrlich’s population bomb was defused, at least for the present time, thanks to technological innovations in terms of how we grow food.
Although the predictions made by Malthus and Ehrlich were inaccurate, that doesn’t mean the challenges of human overpopulation are over.
We as a species have been very clever in using technology to generate more food, better medical care and other life-giving resources to push back the day when overpopulation does have a dreadful impact on our planet. There must be a real limit in terms of a finite amount of resources to the vast number of people we can produce and sustain with a good quality of life.
At some point in this century, the “proved reserves” reservoirs of coal, oil and natural gas deposits will reach a low level where the economics of energy expenditure do not allow for their profitable extraction from the ground. And that point in time could be a crisis for the human population. If we do not prepare for that day, we will no longer be able to keep up our high numbers of people across the planet. Our population numbers will start a dramatic and painful crash.
The issue of overpopulation and humanity’s impact on the planet needs to also be seen with two other factors — the consumption patterns we have as a species and also the methods we use to produce what we consume.
Thanks to the “green revolution” of agriculture which have produced high-yielding crop varieties, American farmers produce enough food to potentially provide for the nutrition needs for every individual on the planet. Every year, the wealthy nations waste more than 220 million tons of food. The nearly 1 billion hungry people around the world might be fed and lifted out of undernourishment if we can provide them with a quarter of the food wasted in America and the European Union. The solutions are there to fix this sad situation of mass hunger.
Technology is key to understanding the population problems we’ll be facing as a species as our number climb to an unsustainable point. Technological advances have enabled us to use the resources on the planet to increase our number to a potential threshold of 9 billion or 10 billion people by the end of this century. But we now need to look at how we can use technology to innovate new ways to more efficiently use our planet’s resources including energy, water, minerals and land. The future of our species is now in our hands.
Overpopulation doesn’t have to lead to a “Soylent Green” nightmare. The future of the Earth is in our hands. We as a species have the brain power to give every human on the planet a good quality of life. We just have to wake up and answer a new question: “How are we going to build a better world for everyone?”
