Reprinted from Wisconsin Engineer Magazine, Volume 74, Number 1, October 1969
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The undeveloped countries of the world, most of them already overcrowded and horribly underfed, are presently working toward a future infinitely more terrifying than their present unbearable conditions. Every year there are more people and less food to keep them alive. The logical end is mass starvation. Dr. Paul Ehrlich, in his book “The Population Bomb”, predicts that this massive famine will overtake us “probably in the early 70’s, certainly in the early 80’s.” This year alone, a minimum of three and one-half million will starve to death, mostly children. Dr. Ehrlich assures us that “this is a mere handful compared to the numbers that will be starving in a decade or so. And it is now too late to take action to save many of those people.”
The facts of overpopulation are surprising, unpleasant, and dangerously underrated. However, they are becoming the matter of more and more concern for biologists and ecologists. In an interview with Dr. Warren Porter of the Zoology Department, I asked him if he agreed with Dr. Ehrlich’s prediction. His answer: “It’s the prediction of almost any ecologist you talk to anywhere in the world. Primarily this whole business of the population explosion is a numbers game. There are equations which describe the increase in numbers of the population. We know what the population is now, we have a pretty good idea of how fast it is increasing, and from that we can predict quite accurately in many cases, how the population is going to increase.” An interesting but fatal fact of the numbers game is the phenomenon of “doubling time.” As the number of people inhabiting this planet increases, the number of years that it takes that population to double decreases. It took the population of 6000 B.C. (5 million people) eight thousand years to reach 500 million people—a doubling time of roughly 1,000 years. From 1,000 years, the doubling time reduced to 200 years, then 80 years, and the current estimate for our world population is a doubling time of 37 years. However, the doubling times vary in individual countries. While they may be as high as 63 years for the United States or 140 years for the United Kingdom, most of the doubling times for undeveloped countries are below the average of 37 years. Examples are 24 years for Kenya, 20 years for Costa Rica, and 19 for El Salvador.
The living conditions in the undeveloped countries are, of course, far from adequate. Yet to simply maintain the same impoverished level, the food supply, transportation facilities, industrial output, imports, doctors, teachers, and everything else that is necessary for maintaining life must also double at the same rate. Improving the conditions of a country is not simply a matter of importing more food than a country consumed in one previous year. The surplus will quickly be consumed by the new surplus of people. To effectively raise the standard of living, the new supply of food and products must not only keep up with the increasing numbers of people, but must surpass it. It is not likely that this will happen in most undeveloped countries or even that increase in food and products will keep up with population growth, and the undeveloped countries will sink deeper and deeper in poverty. Obviously what is called for is not the impossible dream of pouring more and more food supplies in to these countries, but an effective means of population control.
One factor of the overpopulation issue that is little known is that roughly 40% of the population of the undeveloped countries is under 15 years of age. In one decade this tremendous number of people will reach their reproductive years and there will be a baby boom that is unparalleled in the history of this planet. And all these people must be fed. The optimists among us will say that more people will provide more manpower for growing and distributing food, but the facts give support to a gloomier position. In 1966, while the population of the world increased by some 70 million people, there was no compensatory increase in food production. The result of these impersonal facts and figures is, for instance, that 100 infants die per day in Colombia from malnutrition.
Providing food for these countries, in the case that anyone cared to or was able to undertake such a project, could only postpone the inevitable, not solve the problem. What is needed is a stable population. A population that remains the same in numbers over a period of time is one ill which the birth rate and the death rate are approximately equal. With increasing sanitation and medical advances in many undeveloped countries, disease is claiming fewer victims and the infant mortality rate has often been substantially reduced. While the birth rate continues to soar, medical advances keep more and more people alive, increasing even more the active and dependent members of a population. The implication is not that we need to let more people die, but that we need a means of effectively reducing the birth rate to balance it with our increasingly sophisticated knowledge in reducing the death rate.
This emphasis on the undeveloped countries should not leave the impression that the situation is under control in the industrially developed countries such as the United States. There is no longer any doubt that a great many people are literally starving to death in this country and a walk through the slums of any one of our major cities will give ample evidence of the effects of overpopulation.
The whole issue of population control boils down to a choice that we must make. Either the people of this world must exert a control over nature in the form of maintaining a population that is balanced with our limited resources of food and materials, or nature will exert her logical influence over a crowded planet in the form of war, pestilence, and famine. Studies with animal populations have proved repeatedly that in the face of limited resources, nature puts her brakes on an increasing population, and fewer young survive through one device or another. Man can control nature only to a certain point, 2nd if the human race does not attempt to control its numbers, nature will do it for us.
The effects of overpopulation are not always dramatically evident in the form of starving and crowded populations, but are more subtley shown in the pollution of our lakes, rivers, soil, and even air. More and more people dump more and more trash and pollutant materials into our waters and atmosphere. Dr. Porter cites Lake Mendot a as a classic example. Despite warnings, the lake has become clogged with plant growth in the last ten years. It is also an example of the damage done by thoughtlessness that is almost beyond repair by the time we get around to giving some thought to it. Just as the predicted famine of the next decade cannot be prevented even if the most rigorous population control measures are instituted immediately , merely stopping the flow of fertilizer into the lake every year will not automatically solve the problem. “Every year that you add more fertilizer”, says Dr. Porter, “you add more to the total fertilizer of the lake and you don’t ever lose any. This is the problem. And until we come up with a way of processing water to rid it of the phosphates and nitrates that provide the nutrition of the plants, we will continue to have more and more pollution; because the more people you get, the more waste you are going to get. And unless you go to a fantastic expense, you’re inevitably going to have organic material entering the water, and organisms will die.”
Ecologists are also concerned with pollution of the atmosphere and its effects on animal and human populations. Dr. Porter, in particular, is currently working with the application of heat transfer engineering to biological systems. He has been interested in the transfer of energy between the physical environment and the animal; in other words, how radiation, air temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity interacting simultaneously at the surface of the animal effect that surface temperature — the heat load or the cold stress on an animal. Starting wit h a simple engineering model, he is trying to define the multidimensional space that we call the environment and trying to define the limits for individual animals within that multidimensional space. Over and above the scientific questions about animal distribution and survival, one of the practical implications for the future is the problem of thermal pollution. Dr. Porter gives evidence that man is in danger of changing the climate of this whole planet, “in part by the dumping of materials into the atmosphere and changing the absorption properties of the atmosphere — the absorption to both solar and thermal wavelengths. Also the tremendous jet traffic and the contrails they produce, and the projected SST (supersonic transport) and the contrails it will produce at seventy or eighty thousand feet result in the formation of clouds. Now it’s conceivable and the danger is present that if enough clouds are produced by these planes flying their patterns over the surface of the earth that this increased cloud cover will reflect more energy away from the earth, and the earth as a result will begin to cool — and it could very well induce something like an ice age…… The glaciers are already advancing at rates which they have never advanced before in our history.”
The idea of a new ice age bearing down upon us is not likely to incite anyone to action. Obviously it will not come tomorrow, or if it comes, at least we will not see it in our lifetimes. On the other hand, the famine that is predicted is only one decade away. But human nature tells us to think about tomorrow, not ten years from now. The facts of mass starvation and intolerable living conditions are extremely unpleasant. Consequently, it is easier for us to simply disbelieve them. Man seems to have a built-in defense mechanism that tells him not to believe or dwell upon those things that do not present immediate danger: those overwhelming facts of death and disaster in the unreal future of a lifetime, or those problems that will no longer concern him after he is gone. In the face of overwhelming evidence, people will say, a little uncomfortably, “It’s not really true,” to a well-supported theory that is painful to think about, just as the Darwinian theory of natural selection, unpleasant but documented by science, met with reactions of disbelief and repression.
However, even those who are aware of the scope and importance of the overpopulation problem may take it lightly in the face of an unrealistic but determined faith in the indomitable will and technological capabilities of man. How often have you heard, “By the time we reach a population-food crisis, we will have perfected farming from the sea,” or, “Surely by the time the human race has filled this planet to overflowing, we will be shipping people off to colonize the moon and the other plants”? Either of these propositions can be reduced to the status of a myth. Dr. Porter feels that farming from the sea is “not a very realistic possibility for several reasons. For one thing, most of the types of farming which could be done require shallow coastal waters, and the amount of our coastal waters and the coastal waters of other countries which are shallow is very limited. Also, if you’re going to farm the sea, it requires a tremendous amount of energy, just to move around and harvest the products. If you look at Lake Mendota, for an example of the problem on a very simple scale, we’ve been trying to harvest weeds from the lake for many years. There have been all sorts of contraptions out there trying to cut down weeds and process them. It requires a lot of energy to move water and anything that’s in that water; and it’s very difficult to do it economically. That’s the point. And unless there are some massive sources of energy available to move about and to harvest the crops in the open seas, it does not seem to be a very feasible thing — at least not for many decades to come.”
The idea of shipping people to other planets seems like a suitable alternative to a generation steeped in sciencefiction movies. However Dr. Ehrlich’s book contains some interesting calculations about the possibility. Assuming that we call find planets that are habitable, which is unlikely, it would take only about 50 years to populate Venus, Mercury, Mars, the moon, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to the same population density as the Earth. It would take another 200 years to fill the other planets of the solar system. After 250 years, we would be forced to push on to the stars. The estimates are here that Americans, by cutting their standard of living down to 18% of its present level, could in one year set aside enough to finance the exportation to the stars of one day’s increase in the population of the world.
Again, this issue tends to drift off into cold, impersonal facts, its subject being hundreds of years, billions of people, and the limitlessness of the universe. It is almost impossible to bring it down to a personal level. Those who read this article are mostly the lucky ones who live in an industrialized nation and because of a decent education will enjoy a comfortable income. The consequences of the population-food crisis may not touch us; our children will not starve. But unfortunately we do not live in ignorant bliss of what is going on in the outside world. News of death in Vietnam and political unrest literally flashes around the world and enters our homes through all the mass media, touching our lives every hour of the day. It does not seem unlikely that we will hear the statistics of mass starvation and see the evidence in the form of the bodies of dead and dying children on the six o’clock news before we have our evening meal. The question for us is not, “Will I live in fear of death by starvation?” but “Can I live with any kind of peace of mind in that kind of a world?”
Even assuming that we find some miraculous way to feed the growing mass of people and prevent starvation on a grand scale, the outlook for the future remains extremely bleak. If growth continues at the current rate, in 900 years we will have some sixty million billion people, or about 100 persons for each square yard. Perhaps we could house all these people in continuous, multilayered, concrete apartments. Of course, parks and trees could not be allowed to take up critical space. It seems possible that we have not been able to fully estimate the psychological effects of a life in which seeing or touching a growing thing is an impossibility. Perhaps we do not yet fully comprehend the importance of natural surroundings and a few precious moments of solitude to the mental health of a human being. Dr. Porter, aside from his technical knowledge of the subject, is concerned with the argument of many people that the solution to the problem is simply producing more food to feed the people we are bringing into the world: “These people that make arguments like this seem to consistently ignore the fact that civilized man is not just one who has a full stomach. He is a man who has had the opportunity to experience many different sorts of things. He has to have a good education, he has to be able to go out and appreciate nature. How are you ever going to appreciate nature if all you’ve seen are concrete streets and buildings? Civilized man must have an environment in which he can develop, in which he can think, in which he can have some peace. And if all you have around him are honking cars and dirty, smoggy air, then the development of individuals anywhere in the world is certainly not going to be the kind of development we want or that we have had in the past.”
The problem of overpopulation, as real and dangerous as it is, seems to be a forgotten thing in our day, perhaps because it is so abstract. It is everywhere and nowhere in particular — too immense and formless to lay hands on and grapple with. However, it is impossible to ignore once the individual has become aware of the dangers. The hope for a solution may lie in this simple fact.
Probably nowhere in the United States today does one find as much proselytizing about political matters as on a college campus. The concern about international tensions, the war in Vietnam, crime, starvation, poverty, and even reduced sensitivity to natural surroundings is overwhelming.
When one feels strongly and sincerely that a problem needs immediate attention, he feels the need to awaken others to the dangers that exist. However, instead of attributing the ills of our world to man’s inherently brutal nature or punching at the scarecrow of ineffectual political organizations, some of this immense energy could be redirected to the source from which many of the confounding problems of today spring — too many people fighting a losing battle against nature and themselves.