Population Bombed: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Changeby Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak (Global Warming Policy Foundation, $15.99 pb, $7.75 Kindle, 259 pages)
Worries about over-population are a seeming constant in debates of world issues, returning regularly to stoke fear about the rising number of people inhabiting the planet. Earlier this year, Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, told The Guardian that despite the fact that all his apocalyptic predictions failing to materialize, he was nonetheless correct in most of his details except the timing. Never mind that this is untrue – most of his underlying argument has also proved false – he remains a popular doomsayer. In recent years, fatalistic predictions of a growing population’s impact on so-called climate change have been added to worries about over-population’s role in resource depletion, famine, or whatever fashionable concerns exist at any given time.
There have been plenty of books undermining or disproving Ehrlich’s thesis that over-population will lead to mass starvation because the planet cannot possibly provide for the growing number of mouths to feed. We reviewed several of them earlier this year: Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better than It Looks, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (“Paul Erhlich is still wrong,” May).
Add to the library of optimism, Population Bombed: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak. Many of Ehrlich’s critics think he was among the first population pessimists. Those with a longer view of history go back to Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century.
Desrochers and Szurmak summarize the long history of population pessimism. In the chapter “Conflicting perspectives on population growth, resources, and the environment,” the authors note “there have long been two main perspectives on the relationship between humans and nature” with one side arguing “that we can and should reshape the natural world for our own benefit,” while the other believes “humanity should live within natural limits and that failing to do so will result in considerable harm.” This is as succinct a summation of the debate between those who believe human beings are exceptional and those who believe the Earth’s well-being should be prioritized over people’s. Or as the authors summarize pro-fossil fuel author Alex Epstein’s question for readers: “whether our goal should be to maximize human flourishing or to minimize human impacts.”
The chapter on the conflicting perspectives is thorough without getting bogged down in details. The authors point out that regardless of the labels (which are important because they “distil key truths about the key ideas” of their movements), the conflict between the pessimists, survivalists, doomsayers on the one side, and optimists, cornucopians, Prometheans, or doomslayers on the other, is as old as civilization.
The Babylonian Atrahasis epic depicted plagues and famines as a solution to the supposed overcrowded earth four millennia ago. In the 5th century B.C., Confucius argued that population growth would lead to lower living standards. In ancient Greece, both Plato and Aristotle raised concerns about the ability to sustain the consumption desires of a growing population. In the second century A.D., Carthaginian Christian philosopher Tertullian worried about the “teeming population” that was becoming unsustainably “burdensome to the world.” St. Jerome wrote in the fourth century that “the population is too large for the soil.”
Despite this rich history of pessimism about the number of people, Desrochers and Szurmak report “the first true population catastrophist theorist is generally acknowledged to be the Italian Giovanni Botero,” in the 16th century, followed by Giammaria Ortes in the 1700s, and then Malthus. Population catastrophism became fairly mainstream after the publication of “An Essay on the Principle of Population, or A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions,” the second edition of Thomas Malthus’s famous essay in 1803.
Essays and books warning of impending catastrophe were published regularly from the mid-19th century to the after World War II. Then came a new breed of official worriers in the 1960s, including the Club of Rome’s report, The Limits to Growth, the genius of which “was not its outcome, articulated over the centuries, but its novel method of conferring the trappings of objectivity and infallibility to the time-honoured belief in humanity’s inevitable suicide,” using sophisticated-looking models generated by supercomputers. “This process,” write Desrochers and Szurmak, was viewed “as independent from human passions and subjective judgements,” when, in fact, the coding and programming incorporated the biases of the doomsayers writing the computer algorithms.
Over a 15 year period, the Club of Rome’s report, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, and the first of Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World reports were published, influencing governments and international organizations. The influence was pernicious, advocating population control programs that often rested on government coercion or aggressive nudges tied to receiving World Bank or other organizations’ financial assistance. Desrochers and Szurmak say that the effect of the pessimists tying environmental concerns to population “made the idea of the ecological crisis personal by translating hitherto private acts of human consumption, choice, and even procreation into ethical decisions affecting the entire earth, and the future of the human race.” But such views were nothing new, with the authors noting that John Stuart Mill, an early classical liberal and staunch defender of liberty, wrote in 1859 that concerns about population driving down wages – “reducing the reward of labour by their competition” – justified state intervention “in a country either over-peopled, or threatened with being so.” He advocated “a very small number” of children should be allowed to be “produced.”
From Aristotle through to Malthus to numerous 20th century population catastrophists, coercive anti-reproduction policies were justified (Aristotle supported not only abortion but exposing children to the elements). Others have gone further, opposing charity and humanitarian aid as unnecessarily keeping people alive. In his 1948 book Road to Survival, ornithologist William Vogt wrote that there was “no kindness in keeping people alive from dying of malaria so that they could die more slowly of starvation.” Interestingly, Vogt later became national director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Malthus, I’ve written in these pages previously, could be forgiven (to a point) for his worries about population growing geometrically while resources increase arithmetically because he wrote at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and therefore did not observe the improvements in agricultural production that accompanied technological advances. Likewise, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bombwas published at precisely the moment agronomist Norman Borlaug’s developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat so more food could be grown on less land.
The problem is Ehrlich maintains that despite being proved incorrect, he was merely wrong about the timespan and catastrophe is just around the corner. Desrochers and Szurmak note that the persistence of pessimism about population outstripping resources is nothing new and always ignores the ability of mankind to adapt and thrive.
Pessimism, they say, is based on five key arguments: that economic growth in a finite world is unsustainable; that larger populations generally lead to lower standards of living (because the size of the pie does not change, but there are more mouths to feed); decreasing returns on investment in natural resources will lead to lower standards of living; technological innovation is not a sustainable substitute for natural resources; past successes in overcoming past limits are irrelevant to current (real or imagined) crises.
The optimists counter with their own arguments which center mostly on the creativity and intelligence of human beings to solve problems. The economist Henry George wrote in 1879 that it was public policy choices (“the injustice of society”) rather than the limits of resources (“the niggardliness of nature”) that was the cause of human want. Paradoxically, it is the policy to limit population growth that is another direct injustice (dictating reproductive choices) and indirect injustice (limiting opportunities for improvement by limiting the number of people who can create them).
The authors quite correctly note the elitism of many population pessimists who want to control society, including the private decision of citizens about how many children to have, and the distribution of resources. According to these elite, the future of humanity depends on experts planning society, down to how many children are needed.
The “need” for such policies are debunked – or at least may be viewed with extreme skepticism – however, if one understands either economics or history. The authors points out both economic theory and history that are causes for optimism rather than pessimism about the number of people inhabiting the planet. They debunk the notion of carrying capacity – the flawed idea that there is a fixed amount of goods for a population – because mankind is the only species that innovates and trades.
Many pessimists about population are not demographers, but biologists with an expertise in bacteria, birds, or insects. But human beings are not insect or birds or bacteria, which may evolve over time but lack people’s rational capabilities to solve problems and invent products or services to overcome resource challenges.
The authors are fond of economist Henry George’s line: “the jay-hawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jay-hawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens.” Jay-hawks do not farm. People do. And given the opportunity, people learn to farm more productively over time. That is because only man systemically and consistently improves the stock of knowledge. The more people there are, the greater the stock of knowledge because there are more people, more ideas, more specialization, and, mostly importantly, the interaction of these people, ideas, and specialization.
In the rest of the book, the authors look at the climate science and the biases that lead people to continue to believe in and even promulgate discredited theories. Desrochers and Szurmak say that with every worry about resource depletion and environmental catastrophe being debunked or overcome, the pessimists have latched on to concerns about carbon from fossil fuels causing climate change that will lead to impending doom for the planet. Again, this is deeply rooted in the millennia-old pessimist view that there are too many people consuming too many resources. The chapters on climate change are a useful primer on the issue.
In modern times, much of this population catastrophism is based on ideological opposition to capitalism, never mind that many early Marxists opposed the anti-natalists because they considered anti-population policies tools of capitalism. If there is anything missing in this brief (175 pages before endnotes and bibliography) but intellectually sprawling and exhaustive exploration of population pessimism, it is the 1975 national security study memorandum (NSSM 200) by American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in which he warned that developing world overpopulation was a threat to the U.S. economy because civil unrest from restive crowds posed a risk to economic development in those countries. But otherwise, Population Bombedshould be the definitive book to counter not only Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, but the policies pushed by the anointed elite (domestically and internationally) who want a combination of often coercive anti-population programs and anti-carbon measures that are unnecessary, even counter-productive.
Paul Tuns is the editor of The Interim.
