The Big Problem

The biggest crisis facing the planet today is so big and so surrounded by delicate issues that most people will not face it. Simply put there are at least 200,000 more people alive today than yesterday. Tomorrow there will be at least another 200,000 more.
These are net figures, I am not talking about births I am talking about the average daily surplus of births over deaths. To put it into perspective there are more extra people alive each new day than died in both atomic bomb attacks on Japan.

Our finite world
If everybody you know, everybody you could identify by name or face died today the world population would still go up. Nobody knows 200,000 people.
Imagine the world‘s population decides to walk past your window, a column of people marching three abreast, for ever, you would never see the end of the columns, the queue waiting to pass you would never get shorter. Hitler couldn‘t feed the gas chambers fast enough, the world population is currently growing at around 79,000,000 per year, the equivilent of a country the size of Germany, EXTRA, each year. That is the problem. If your head and stomach are not reeling at the thoughts then you do not understand the problem.
20,000 people died in an earthquake in India, the losses were made up before the West heard the news. People lose their faith in God over much smaller numbers of deaths. 98 die in a football stadium and a city mourns for years, 0.03% of the daily increase. There can be more than 98 extra people born while you butter your toast. It would not have even caused a blip in the hourly trend. A jumbo jet load every three minutes, a jumbo jet load EXTRA. Remember, I am not alking about births happening more than one per second, I am talking about the average surplus of births over deaths.
Every hour, on the hour, the message should go out;
“The top news story yet again today is that, despite all the calamities I am about to describe to you, the population has gone up again...”
Update May 2005: 26th December 2004 was a very rare exception, the Indian Ocean Tsunami probably did cause the planet‘s population to go down briefly, for perhaps as much as 30 hours.
The population problem was first brought to western attention by Thomas Malthus. He clouded the issue with talk of food supplies and arithmetical ratios. It allowed some people to “prove him wrong”. The fundamental issue is obvious, population can and does grow geometrically if allowed. It was the critical insight that helped Darwin crystallize his thoughts on evolution.
People can argue, as they do, that the world could cope with a population of 25 or even 50 billion. Perhaps they are right. What happens when we reach saturation at 50 billion (or 7 billion, or whatever saturation turns out to be) what will make the population stop growing then? The bigger the numbers the faster the growth. Eventually we need birth control or the population will be limited by natural means; starvation, pandemic disease or warfare to secure the means of survival. Imagine a world that has reached saturation, imagine trying to put the brakes on then, when the population is still growing at 5 or 10 every second. A new Calcutta, Cairo or Mexico City every week. It is too frightening to contemplate for long. To stop the growth we need to apply the brakes now, while there is still a chance that we can keep in control.
If we do not want to face mass starvation on a scale never before seen or have a war that will be in every sense the third world war, we have to stop the population from growing the way it is. Madly. Uncontrolled and in all the wrong places. The only fair way is two‘s your lot. A universal limit of two children per woman, or two children per person if you prefer. It must be universal, no exceptions, especially on religious grounds. It is the Muslim and Catholic communities who are the most dangerous because they believe they have a duty to breed. Let one woman be an exception and she breeds more exceptions.
To make things fair universality is necessary but not sufficient. We must also address why the third world people think they need more children when they are surrounded by underfed and dying children. We must recognize that their decisions are rational, we must change the reality. Children are social security and pensions. We must replace that with real social security. To say the least this will be expensive, compared to the alternative though it is the bargain of all time.
Universal pensions for all mankind in exchange for a united approach to the future. No more efforts to out breed your enemies. A universal limit of two children per person. It is not going to be easy, there will be people claiming the right to be an exception and I do sympathize. Children bring a couple together in a special way, they can cement a second marriage and large families of children are delightful. But no exceptions can be allowed or the whole policy will break down.
In the western world we can afford to pay for our children but then a western child uses 30 times as much of the world‘s natural resources as a third world child. A single Mormon or Catholic family in the USA may use as much oil as a small town in Africa or India.
Ideally I would like to see many people not allowed to breed at all. The poor who live in squalor, ignorance, poverty and disease will breed more of their kind. It does not matter if you believe that genes, environment or conditioning in infancy are the key factors. Dysfunctional families breed dysfunctional people. The argument about causes is not relevant, the single solution works effectively whatever the causes are. Liberal opponents to eugenics schemes in the USA in the twenties and thirties made a lot about the fact that it was the environment that lead families to breed more idiots (a word that is politically incorrect only when used correctly, like I am doing). It did not matter, as nobody was making any serious suggestions to change that bad environment simply stopping the idiots breeding would cure the problem, whatever the cause. I am inclined to believe the liberals were right about the major contribution of the environment but wrong to deny that genetics had a significant contribution too.
I do not believe that people have a right to breed, they certainly do not have a right to knowingly breed cripples, misfits, criminals and a whole new underclass. Even if you think they do have that right do you think the rest of us have to keep quiet about it? If you do I can only disagree with you, and I say so now while I still can.
To say the least these ideas are not liberal, politically correct or likely to win votes. I do not care. However, I recognize that there is never likely to be a route from where we are now to a world in which a popular and legitimate government has the power to say who can breed and who cannot. I will make a gesture to political reality here and choose to pursue a blind policy that no people may have more than two children and that restrictions on who is allowed to have children are likely never to be practical politics.
Birth control is always controversial. A formal limit on family size is a profoundly illiberal policy. No democratic politician is likely to see it as a vote winner. However it is very much the better alternative to ecological meltdown, starvation and violence on a scale that can barely be imagined. In contrast reducing the death rate is seen as universally good. That discrepancy is likely to make solving the problem even harder. Western charity is aimed at reducing deaths in poor countries, very little money is spent on birth control. When charities mention birth control they receive less money. So they go on with death control only, making the underlying problem worse.
Sometimes in life the right thing to do is the opposite of your instinctive reaction, like pulling down the houses in your street to save the city from fire. Your feelings that motivate you to care can blind you to the best way to express that care.
Saving a starving child today means having more children in thirty years time trying to live off the same or eroded resources. Saying that makes me seem like a heartless bastard. In many public meetings if I said that from the platform I would be shouted down, and maybe beaten up too. But I am not wrong, call me whatever you want, I am telling it like it is. There is a classic charity tag line that goes something like give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you help feed him for a lifetime. This is incredibly patronizing, as if starving people are surrounded by food they are too stupid to catch. The reality is that if you teach that man how to fish in two generations time there will be a lot more starving people in that same village and no fish. That is human nature. Man will breed and eat all the food available.
Now on top of the natural tendency to breed whatever the circumstances and to struggle to feed every mouth there is a new trend that is making the problem much worse, the irresistible lure of the city. The natural fertility of the human population is high, when people move into city slums and away from the land where there is a chance of food their fertility paradoxically increases further as the gap between pregnancies reduces. City mothers breed faster than their country cousins.
The main focus of many charity organizations now is the provision of safe, clean drinking water. An excellent piece of death control. Setting up wells means more children survive infancy leading to more population pressures in a few years time. Wells also lower the watertable and change the landscape for miles around, the hinterland empties and everybody crowds around the new well. Solving the immediate crisis and saving deaths in the short-term leads to further ecological damage to an area that now has to support a higher population than ever before.
Our children will be facing charity appeals for starving African children and Bangladeshi flood victims on a scale we can only have nightmares about. Those are problems I want to solve, permanently.
The current charity model is doomed to both fail and make the problem worse. In the twentieth century there was a massive decline in death rates and only a modest fall in birth rates. That is THE PROBLEM. The biggest problem in the world today and it is an aggravating factor in almost every other problem mankind faces. Environmental decline, global warming, habitat loss, the loss of all easily mined metallic ores, the phenomenal rise in fossil fuel consumption; all these are made worse by the fact that in twenty five years time there will be another three thousand million more people alive than there are today.
“If present trends continue” is a phrase that often makes me smile, present trends never continue, except this one. One of the first life changing books I read was by Aldous Huxley,The Human Situation, based on lectures given in 1959. I read it when I was 17. He wrote about population growth and the problems it would cause. I quote a paragraph below.
“By the time the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in this country, it is estimated that the population of the world was about twice what it had been on that first Christmas Day - that is to say, it had doubled in sixteen hundred years, an extremely slow rate of increase. But from that time on, from the middle of the seventeenth century, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the first importation of food from the newly developed lands of the New World, population began rising more rapidly than it had ever risen before. By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, the figure for the human population of the world was probably around seven hundred million; it must have passed the billion mark fairly early in the nineteenth century and stood at about fourteen hundred million around the time I was born in the 1890s. The striking fact is that since that time the population of the planet has doubled again. It has gone from fourteen hundred million, which is already twice what it was at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to twenty-eight hundred million. And the rate of increase now is such that it will probably double again in rather less than fifty years.”

Spot on. 1959 population 2,800,000,000; the official UN figures say we passed the 6 billion mark on 12 October 1999 and we are now much closer to 7 billion than 6. The trend has followed precisely the course predicted, if not even a little faster than Aldous Huxley was prepared to project, in case he was seen as a doom-monger. If nothing fundamental changes soon that trend will continue, the population will double again in even less time than the last doubling. That means that by the time my children are in middle age there will be ten billion people. When I first read Huxley‘s words there were four billion. Huxley died the year I was born.
1 billion in 1804
2 billion in 1927 (123 years later)
3 billion in 1960 ( 33 years later)
4 billion in 1974 ( 14 years later)
5 billion in 1987 ( 13 years later)
6 billion in 1999 ( 12 years later)
Since I wrote the first version of this page the world population has increased by more than the entire population of the continent of North America.
See the latest world population figures here
The world will pass the seven billion total some time between 2011 and 2015 CE. The idea that AIDS will check this growth is fanciful, there are around seven month‘s worth of people with HIV infection at present.
The population problem is the biggest problem in the world today.
It is the biggest problem because it makes every other problem worse and harder to solve. It will not be solved by ignoring it. There can be no technological fix that can provide ever growing resources for a population to grow at geometric rates. It cannot be solved by conventional democratic politics. Something radical must be done to get the world to wake up and face reality.
If you get a chance to speak to any politicians ask them what are they doing to get birth rates into line with death rates. Don‘t let them evade the issue. We have been significantly reducing death rates for a couple of hundred years. Until we do the same to birth rates across the planet we remain doomed to experience increasing problems of overcrowding and resource depletion.
In a unified world that is getting to grips with the population explosion there is the possibility of politics actually working.
Until we address this fundamental problem
everything else we do,
in the long run, is futile.