By Michael F. Duggan
The growing concern over global climate change, the shocking loss of habitat and biodiversity in recent years, and other issues of the environment (deforestation, the dying off of the world’s reefs, the overharvesting of fisheries, the plastics crisis, pollution generally, various water issues, refugee issues, etc.) is a good thing. The enabler of these crises, the great overarching crisis of our time and of all times is human overpopulation. All of these other issues would be manageable or nonexistent if the population was one-tenth of what it is today. By some estimates, a global population no larger than .5 billion to one billion people would be sustainable (or about the world population between 1600 and 1820, when there were no modern plastics).1 By other estimates, we surpassed the Earth’s carrying capacity around 1978. 2
Overpopulation is the basis or enabler of the existential threats now facing us. And yet when was the last time you heard a politician mention the issue? How much attention did overpopulation and related issues of economic growth get at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26)? Are the solutions (such as they are) too difficult, too draconian, too unpopular to even mention? How would the world reduce its current 7.9 billion people to a billion or fewer in a century or less? Could it be done by liberal democratic means? Is the problem of overpopulation too far advanced to be the basis for political discourse? Are we already doomed and nobody in public office has the guts to tell us? How come this is never story on the evening news?
It may or may not be too late to solve the problems that face us. But if there are solutions, we will have to first discuss the problems.
Notes
- John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) 11.
- Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) 27.