August 26, 2015 — When the topic of human population comes up, the reaction is often a knee-jerk one that reduces a complex conversation to a choice between fertility rates and overconsumption — as if they are mutually exclusive, when in fact they are part of the same problem. And while we debate this non-debate — Would we argue over whether clean air or clean water is more important? — the effects of population, consumption and production continue to ravage the planet.
The plain truth is they all need to be addressed, and soon.
The attempt to simply isolate the number of people on the planet from how we produce and consume, both for basic needs and excessive wants, defies logic and mathematical principles. Wealthier nations may have lower fertility rates, but they have higher levels of consumption. And production systems created with the tunnel vision of a single bottom line — focusing only on profits without considering social and environmental impacts — are responsible for immense amounts of damage to people, communities, wildlife and the planet.
These are global problems. People migrate, seeking better circumstances while enriching the world’s diversity of cultures. Wildlife and climate know no borders. Neither do extreme weather and drought, or poverty and inequality. Developed countries have exported consumer culture and industrial pollution, but have also exported advances in health care and aid to expand educational and economic opportunities for women and girls. Globalism, like technology, isn’t inherently good or bad. But by separating our globalized society into buckets of population or consumption, we oversimplify societal and environmental problems at a time when we need comprehensive and compassionate solutions.
For many environmentalists, these false dichotomies are dead on arrival. Yet they’ve been continually resurrected since the 1950s, primarily by pundits looking to provoke and simplify rather than inform and find solutions.
We need to increase equality through education for women and girls, and we need to make sure everyone has the tools to decide if, when and how many children they want to have.
Often, any attempt to talk about population comes with the accusation that the world’s poor are to blame for environmental problems. Although the accusers often lack the community-based and rights-focused context of contemporary population advocacy, the history of human rights violations executed in the name of population control — including the ongoing attacks on women and immigrants in the U.S. — should never be minimized or ignored. But those injustices are all the more reason to end the debate so we can focus on policies and cultural shifts that lessen our impact on the environment and expand human rights and equity, particularly in the world’s most vulnerable communities, where the effects of population pressure, climate change and pollution are felt the deepest.
It’s important to note, too, that the world’s growing population isn’t only a problem in the developing world. While it’s true that fertility rates in the U.S. are just below replacement rate, half of all U.S. pregnancies are unplanned and, in the past five years, there’s been an unprecedented attack on reproductive rights and comprehensive sex education that makes it even harder for women to make a conscious choice to have children if and when it’s best for them and their families. At the same time, we can’t ignore the lack of health care and freedom in other parts of the world that leads to high fertility rates. Instead, we need to increase equality through education for women and girls, and we need to make sure everyone has the tools to decide if, when and how many children they want to have. That choice shouldn’t be a privilege but a basic human right.
How Will We Feed Everyone?
As our population continues to grow, the most pressing question for humanitarians, environmentalists and economists is, “How will we feed everyone?” There are a number of complex sociopolitical factors tied into the response, but one thing is clear: We can’t sustain the world on the average American diet. This is a key scenario where population, consumption and production converge.
Americans eat more meat per capita than almost anyone else in the world. The greenhouse gas emissions, land use, habitat destruction and pollution from our industrial agriculture system reach far beyond individual farms. But it’s not just the by-products of our meat addiction extending beyond our borders: Our taste for meat has also spread, leading to rising demand for animal products in other countries. In some areas, meat is moving from being an additional source of protein where better nutrition is desperately needed to the unhealthy, unsustainable territory of American-style overconsumption. To meet the new demand, damaging industrial production systems are expanding into new areas — it’s estimated that 75 percent of global meat production from now until 2030 will come from factory farms in developing nations.
Rather than exporting meat products and the factory farm industry for shortsighted financial gain, we need to look at how we can foster healthier, more sustainable diets on a global scale.
There’s been a long-standing hope that we’ll have another Green Revolution to feed our growing population — in other words, that technology will save us all. But technology alone can’t solve the global crises we face today. Unless such technology is guided by the long-term, best interests of people and the environment, we wind up with “advances” like intensive animal agriculture and genetically engineered monocrops that decimate wildlife populations to grow food for livestock.
The solution to this surge of meat-dependent diets — like the solution to high fertility rates — isn’t to place blame on one population or another. It needs to start in our own backyard, reducing our own meat consumption and reforming our food system. Rather than exporting meat products and the factory farm industry for shortsighted financial gain, we need to look at how we can foster healthier, more sustainable diets on a global scale. Beyond this, we need to increase global resource equity by reducing consumption in wealthier nations so the planet can sustain the increased consumption developing nations need to improve health and opportunity.
It’s not just our food systems tangled in the web of population, consumption, production and equity, though. As population grows in developing nations, there’s a desperate need for more reliable energy systems to meet basic needs — including the necessary sanitation, refrigeration and transportation to provide the voluntary reproductive health care services that would help lower fertility rates. This energy equity must be achieved by leapfrogging the polluting technology of the Industrial Revolution with cleaner, more efficient sources; at the same time, wealthier nations need to reduce consumption while shifting to less damaging renewable energy systems as quickly as possible. As population grows, so will consumption and production of many things that are already devastating the environment, from energy to electronics to pesticides to plastics. It’s not a question of who does and doesn’t get to consume, but how we can continue to improve the quality of life worldwide while respecting the planet, the species we share it with and each other.
But before any of that real work can start, we first need to erase the false lines dividing population, consumption and production that should have been dismissed decades ago. With climate change snapping at our heels — drastically changing the shape of coastal communities, agriculture and ecosystems — we can’t afford to waste any more time on scapegoats. 
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The internationalist ethic is that sovereign nation-states are to be respected, that they will work together but in their own self-interests, and that self-interests should include assisting the success of other nations. The globalist ethic favors the elimination of the sovereign nation-state as a locus of community, loyalty, economy, laws, culture and language and large transfers of national power and responsibilities to international bodies, such as the World Court, European Union, United Nations, and so on. If you want to see how effective globalism is for dealing with population issues just turn on your TV and watch how the feckless leaders of the European Union are faring in their dithering over what they know will be millions more economic immigrants trying to storm the borders of the EU. What is now playing out in Europe is closely following the script of French novelist Jean-Paul Raspail’s 1973 novel, “The Camp of the Saints.” Read it, and you will be stunned by its prescience. For a good recent review of it, see Hultberg’s “Camp of the Apocalypse.”
Raspail’s novel falls into the same eerie category as Tom Clancy’s 1991 novel, “Debt of Honor.” At the end of that novel a JAL pilot, still pissed off over how WWII ended, flies a 747, with fuel tanks loaded, into the Capitol Building in DC during the president’s state of the union address …. Ten year’s later Osama Bin Laden sends FOUR planes similarly loaded at the US government, missing only one of his targets, ironically the Capitol Building or White House.
Back on topic, to the first big false premise. Feldstein states that migration is “enriching [to] the world’s diversity of cultures.” That is a curiously ahistorical statement, given that mass immigrations have often been highly destructive to the cultures of receiving peoples, often greatly repressing them, and sometimes completely eradicating them. Mass immigrations, like armed revolutions, are almost always damaging to the receiving nations or regions, though not, of course, in the eyes of the winning side. Was world cultural diversity really increased by the arrival of European culture in the Americas? Last I heard native Americans felt this was a kind of “richness” they would have been happy to pass up.
Feldstein’s primary defense of globalism and subtle attack on internationalism are found in these words: “Globalism, like technology, isn’t inherently good or bad. But by separating our globalized society into buckets of population or consumption, we oversimplify societal and environmental problems at a time when we need comprehensive and compassionate solutions. For many environmentalists, these false dichotomies are dead on arrival. Yet they’ve been continually resurrected since the 1950s, primarily by pundits looking to provoke and simplify rather than inform and find solutions.”
By “buckets” she means “nations.” She opposes individual nations developing their own population policies. That would not be “globalism,” or “comprehensive” or “compassionate” - it would be engaging in “false dichotomies.” For shame, Feldstein implies. Insultingly dismissed as “pundits” are the thousands of serious internationalist scientists, environmentalists, and other scholars, and even some politicians, who have been arguing for sane, pragmatic, U.S. immigration and population policies for years.
If CBD does not want to engage in debates over US population policy legislation, it can continue to do other things it can do well, and should stay out of the fray.
The US will always have population policies whether scientists and environmentalists choose to give input on those or not. By advocating globalism, Feldstein and CBD favor the status quo, i.e. they are de facto allies of the chambers of commerce, building industry, Wall Street Journal, neoclassical economists, etc. who think we can keep the Ponzi scheme going forever, the US environment be damned. Over the long term CBD’s reputation will be influenced by the tacit support it lends these power elites: that support has no logical rationale.
Beck, R., and L. Kolankiewicz. 2000. The environmental movement’s retreat from advocating
U.S. population stabilization (1970-1998): A first draft of history. Journal of Policy History 12:123 156.
Hardin, G. 1989. There is no global population problem. The Humanist 49(4):11-13, 32.
Hurlbert, S.H. 2000. The globalist copout. The Social Contract 10:193-194.
Hurlbert, S.H. 2011. Immigration control and biodiversity in North America. The Social Contract 21(3): 21-22.
Yes, we in the industrialised world do need to reduce consumption, travel less, live in smaller houses, use less energy etc, but we still need to lift two billion out of poverty and that entails some lifting of consumption and energy use for them. Hopefully, the poor will leapfrog the fossil fuel-based economy to one based on renewables so that we don't exacerbate climate change in the process of lifting them out of poverty.
In the end, however, I feel Feldstein's article is a bit out of date. We should have agreed long ago that population and consumption (for the currently well off) are two sides of the same coin and it's not either/or. The debate has moved on. We're now in a situation where we must contain global warming to 2 degrees Centigrade (or better, 1.5) if we are to avoid social, environmental and economic collapse. John Schellnhuber, who advised the Pope on his recent encyclical on climate change, said in Australia about five years ago that a 4 degrees C. warmer world is a world of one billion, not seven billion, people. When asked what the difference was between 2 and 4 degrees, he replied "Civilization".
Thus we have to keep the majority of fossil fuels in the ground and, with the ones we do extract, use them to develop a renewable energy economy as quickly as possible so that we can maintain some semblance of life as we know it. With luck, we might just avoid civilization collapse, but it's not looking good when you consider the flood of people moving into Europe at the moment. Many are from Syria where a combination of drought and overpopulation had led to food shortages and driven people to the cities where civil unrest followed.
Syria must be a lesson for us all.
It's not so simple. In fact, it is clear there are no sources of "cleaner, more efficient sources" of energy that can come close to replacing fossil fuels, especially petroleum. There is a great deal of literature on this "peak energy" problem, but this article assumes that "shifting to less damaging renewable energy systems" without a drastic reduction in per capita consumption is technically possible. This conclusion is almost certainly not accurate. Got fusion? (And even if we did, what environmental destruction would we wreak if we had a relatively unlimited source of high EROEI energy?)
Feldstein then writes, "As population grows, so will consumption and production..." This article is not a valid exploration of consumption v population or I=P*A*T, because it assumes growth will continue. This assumption ignores the solid science established by Meadows et al. in The Limits to Growth (1972) and confirmed repeatedly since.
I recommend http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf (2013) for a good mid level analysis.
Thank you Stuart Hurlbert for your post and references.