“Except for giant meteorite strikes or other such catastrophes, Earth has never experienced anything like the contemporary human juggernaut. We are in a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful consumption that could push half of Earth’s species to extinction in this century.”
— E. O. Wilson
It’s painfully straightforward. We have come on like a swarm of locusts, and now at over 7 billion and counting, there are too many of us for Earth to harbor. But it is much worse for the other Earthlings – that is, all other living things we share the Earth with – tamed and untamed. A key insight of Charles Darwin’s is that all lifekinds can track their beginnings back to a shared forebear. Biologists today call this forebear the Last Common Ancestor or LCA. We – plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms – are kin. We all share the name, “Earthling.”
Photo by Vivi Portela
For many years it has been the booming and spreading overflow of Man that has been the greatest threat to the life of other Earthlings. By Man I mean our species – Homo sapiens. (I use the word Man as a way to describe our kind that is not gender specific.)
Among we Earthlings are “wild things” – or all forms of untamed living things, from plants to wild animals. Aldo Leopold, a top conservation thinker of the twentieth century, wrote in the beginning of his wonderful book, A Sand County Almanac, “here are those who can live without wild things, and there are those who cannot.” Maybe you are like me; I’m one of those “cannots.” I don’t want to live in a world without wild things.
But unless we can freeze and then make Man’s footprint on Earth smaller, we will have an Earth with fewer and fewer wild things. I hope to show you that more of our kind means fewer wild things, that a stabilized human population means hope for wild things, and that a shrinking human population means a better world for wild things. As well as for men, women and children.
Here are some ideas I’d like you to understand:
1) The population explosion is ongoing both worldwide and in the United States;
2) The overpopulation of Man is the main driver of the extinction of many kinds of wildlife, the wrecking and taming of wildlands and wild waters, and the creation of pollution, including carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases;
3) Those who do not see a population threat need to be challenged;
4) We will grow to as many as 12 billion in the next 100 years unless we do something – or unless something awful happens to us, which is likely unless we wake up;
5) There are many things we all can do to freeze and then lower population;
6) Overpopulation is solvable!
In its article “Owning Up to Overpopulation,” the Center for Biological Diversity says flatly: “Today, overpopulation is at the root of virtually all threats to species around the globe.” There are five stacks of woe that our Man swarm brings: (1) Landscalping, (2) Resource depletion, (3) Starvation, (4) Social, political upheaval, and (5) Ecological/Evolutionary wounds.
By landscalping, I literally mean the “scalping” of land. The scythe of civilization wipes out the homes of wildlife, wrecks watersheds, and thereby fouls streams, rivers, silts in lakes and ocean estuaries. It withers and shrivels ecosystems.
Depleting resources, or draining raw goods until there is little left, leads to scrambling to get whatever is left in still-wild places and then to ripping it out in hasty, careless ways. When gasoline prices shot up in the United States in 2008, polls showed growing backing for drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Chants of “drill, baby, drill” in the 2008 presidential campaign were hotheaded marks of feared resource scantiness. Wild things then pay with the blowout of BP’s deep-ocean well in the Gulf of Mexico.
Food shortages are the worst dearth for Man. Hungry women, children, and men become refugees crowding into wherever they think they might find food and thereby trampling and ransacking healthier lands. In a world of tabloid-television news, heartbreaking tales of starving mothers and children lead to calls to jump up food production elsewhere, which then leads to the stripping and withering of wildlands not good for long-time cropping. More irrigation dams throughout the world will be another upshot of starvation brought on, not by too little food, but by too many mouths.
Author and environmental analyst Lester Brown sees water shortages as one of the worst things over the hill. Some 70 percent of the world’s freshwater now goes into irrigating crops. Groundwater is being sucked out by irrigation wells and is dropping ever lower, so wells have to be drilled deeper. When this happens, springs dry up. Rivers and streams run to cracked mud and blowing dust. Without trusty old watering holes, wildlife of all kinds is shoved to the edge, has to leave, or dies. The freshwater upheaval rooted in the Man swarm is not only a threat to Man, it is even more of a threat to thousands of kinds of other Earthlings.
Brown brings up a spooky statistic: “175 million Indians consume grain produced with water from irrigation wells that will soon be exhausted.” What will those 175 million (or, perhaps, 275 million, given India’s ongoing growth) do when the water and the grain run out? What will they do to the land and to wildlife living nearby? Where will they go? How much weight will there be on the Indian government to “open” land now in national parks and other tiger havens?
Let’s look at how overpopulation is behind ecological and evolutionary woes.
There are seven ways overpopulation harms the wild world. I call them the Seven Ecological Wounds.
Photo by Aidenvironment
When I was young I learned how the “harvesting” of the seas would feed more and more people. We’ve done that, but what has happened? The crashing of fisheries throughout the world, the die-off of coral reefs, and the functional extinction of keystone species such as cod, sharks, and tuna.
As hungry little settlements swell and spread out, they gobble up the bigger wildlife from rainforests and other wildlands. Even a little knot of huts with near-Stone-Age tools can clean out the bigger wildlife in a nearby protected area. As more babies grow up and become parents, hunters have to go ever farther afield. Historically, hunting has caused the global extinction, local extirpation, or near-extinction of wildlife, including once-highly abundant bison, passenger pigeons, shorebirds, whales, cod, elephants, sea turtles, and many more. Such hunting has been driven by the “need” for meat and new settlements and cropland by ever-growing populations of people worldwide and locally.
Although direct killing is still fulsome in much of the world, it has become less of a threat in the United States. Here, ransacking and taming wildlands may do even more harm than the other wounds. The growing Man swarm in the United States is the leading driver for scalping neighborhoods lived in by wild things and remaking them into new neighborhoods for men, women, and children. Philip Cafaro and Winthrop Staples write: “Between 1982 and 2001, the United States converted 34 million acres of forest, cropland, and pasture to developed uses, an area the size of Illinois.” The acreage cleared, paved, built on, and otherwise remade for Man has also been going up since 1982, from 1.4 million acres to 2.2 million acres every year. And bulldozers continue to eat more acres every year.
Crop fields and heavily grazed pastures are no better and sometimes even worse for wildlife than towns are. But when farms and ranches are pimpled with homes, streets, and strip malls, their food-growing acreage has to be made up for it elsewhere by plowing wildland or by more irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides on less forgiving land. Some of the richest cropland in California and elsewhere in the US has been lost to sprawl.
The building of bigger homes and the shift from the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt speed the cancerous sprawl of suburban and exurban bedroom neighborhoods in the US. But the growing population in the US is an even bigger driver of sprawl. More mouths lead to more acres of wildland scalped for cropland, too. Recall that University of Wisconsin researchers say “the amount of cultivated land on the planet has increased from 7 to 40 percent” since 1700. In about 300 years, the acres needed to feed Man have gone from less than 10 percent to nearly half of Earth’s land acres – more than a fivefold rise.
Spin a globe. One-third of what you see that is not water or ice has gone from neighborhoods for wildlife to food lands for Man in just 300 years – which is only 3 percent of the time since full-on agriculture began and less than 1 percent of the time since Homo sapiens crossed the Red Sea out of Africa. This mind-numbing, heartbreaking wreckage of the wild is the main driver for the extinction of heaps of beings worldwide and the nosedive of others, like butterflies, elephants, and tigers.
Norman Myers, the British biologist who may have been the first to warn that we were in a mass extinction, has looked at overpopulation and biodiversity “hotspots.” Hotspots, as described by some international conservation groups, are 25 areas covering only 1.4 percent of the world’s land but home to a whopping 40 percent of all known species. Many millions of dollars are going into hotspot conservation. But in 2002 Myers warned, “Most of the hotspots are in developing countries, where they are subject to population pressures among other problems. Within the 840,000 square miles of all the hotspots (one-quarter as big again as Alaska), plus their hinterlands totaling another 10 percent of Earth’s land surface, there are more than 1.2 billion people. That is approximately one-fifth of humankind with an average population density almost twice that of the world and an average annual growth rate almost two-fifths higher than that of the world.” It’s worse today. Yet Myers stands pretty much alone in warning about overpopulation in hotspots.
Whether it is starter-castle “estates” strung along wide freeways farther away from cities and workplaces in the United States or new slash-and-burn crop patches (milpas) and logging roads in poor countries, we throw up barriers and fracture zones that box wild animals into smaller and smaller lots. This cleaves migration north (south below the equator) or to higher elevations as home ranges shift because of climate breakdown. Population growth spreads us into once empty (of Man) lands where wild animals had been free to roam widely before our takeover. The shape or siting of the new settlement web is often more deadly than how many acres are cleared. A few settlers or “estates” with a handful of roads can stomp down a footprint that breaks up a big wildland.
Nonetheless, the sprawl first comes from more men, women, and children. More off-road vehicles tearing up wildlife pathways between summer and winter range come from more people. More people here and there means more blacktop roads in between with curves straightened out for faster driving and thereby more deadly for the lynx or elk that are used to wandering over a once-slow dirt road.
Our crowding on the land and further spreading into lands once empty of Man affects ecological and evolutionary processes such as wildfire, river flooding and drying, predation, and pollination. More and more of us squeeze into lush, rank river bottoms and thereby make a “need” for upstream flood-control dams, which then stop healthy hydrological processes. More of us need more water for irrigating crops and making more electricity, both of which call for colossal dams on rivers. In the United States and Canada, the spread of homes into forests leads to putting down natural wildfires. Stopping such lightning-sparked fires harms forest health and sets up the woods for bigger, unhealthy, unquenchable blazes later.
Man, whether Denver suburbanites or Kenyan herders, are unfriendly to big cats, wolves or wild dogs, and other wild hunters. And so as they spread afield, they kill these wild things and the ecosystem loses top-down regulation of prey species. Likewise, people in new settlements of whatever kind don’t want beavers or elephants upsetting their high-dollar landscaping or their slash-and-burn cornfields.
When we take over wildlands, we often also make the land unfriendly to native pollinators. Biologists who study pollination – whether by native kinds of bees or moths, hummingbirds, or bats – have warned that many such pollinators are fewer and fewer every year.
More people everywhere means more ships hauling more species back and forth, which means the spread of non-native species. Pumped-up trade between growing (in population and wealth) countries also spreads invasive species. Freighters bring hitchhiking harmful exotics, such as zebra and quagga mussels, green crabs, and the spiny water-flea.
When folks go into new lands, they hack out welcome ground for invasive, exotic, weedy life that pushes out native species. Plant diseases, such as Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight, are among the most deadly things spread by trade and shifting settlements. Such ills lead to upheavals in native-plant communities.
Photo by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Back in 1971, biologist Daniel McKinley warned, “All animals create waste, but only man makes products that nature cannot reclaim, and at such a rate that he can spoil the world before it purifies itself.” This Man-waste not only sickens and kills children, women, and men, but also (and even more so) harms and kills other Earthlings. People spray and spill biocides and befoul Earth with all kinds of banes. Worldwide, it may seem that people in wealthy lands pollute more than do those of the poor countries. But down on the ground or in the water, peasants can spread and spill toxic dangers just as Europeans and Americans do. The spread of Homo sapiens, whether as suburbanites, city dwellers, or peasants onto new lands, brings spilling of pesticides, motor oil, antifreeze, and other nasty crud.
Wherever pollution exists, growing numbers of us means more spreading of it. Much as we would like to get rid of these problems, we must acknowledge that more of us brings more pollutants and poisons. It’s hard to clean up a mess when the number of those making the mess grows every year, sometimes twice as many every score of years.
As early as 1969 Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren saw one of the upshots of overpopulation as a rise in “the atmospheric percentage of CO2,” leading to a greenhouse effect (though they didn’t use that exact yet). Unlike other species, Man lives worldwide. The whole Earth is our home – and our dump. The needed resource that has run out first is not food, water, oil, or rare minerals, but the wherewithal of the atmosphere, seas, and woods to soak up our industrial, transportation, and agricultural belches of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. The wealthy pump out more greenhouse gases per capita, but the poor also contribute by setting fires in forests, grasslands, and shrublands.
With climate change, a key formula is at work. In 1974, physicist John Holdren and biologist Paul Ehrlich, then both at Stanford University, set down in Science the scientific formula I=PAT. Paul and Anne Ehrlich spelled out what it means: “The impact of any human group on the environment can be usefully viewed as the product of three different factors. The first is the number of people. The second is some measure of the average person’s consumption of resources…Finally, the product of those two factors…is multiplied by an index of the environmental disruptiveness of the technologies that provide the goods consumed…In short, (I) Impact = (P) Population x (A) Affluence (resource consumption) x (T) Technology, or I=PAT.” While many see Impact more as harm to the life support system Earth gives Man, I see Impact as the ecological wounds.
When it comes to Wound 7, Affluence (A) and Technology (T) are big players in how much Impact (I) one may have. However, enough small players can outweigh a few big players. What drives the logging and burning of the Amazon rainforest to make new cattle paddocks and soybean fields? Too many people having children in Brazil, plus the swelling numbers of hungry mouths in the rest of the world who crave the food many believe the “last agricultural frontier” can grow. This is leading to more of a jump in Brazil’s greenhouse gas load and to the loss of tropical forests that if kept, would go on taking carbon from the atmosphere – and be the dearest pool of manifold life left on Earth.
China has now shot past the United States as the worst greenhouse gas emitter in the world, thanks to its whopping population racing after greater wealth. But if China had only half a billion mouths instead of nearly a billion and a half, it would not have done so. If China’s growth had not been slowed by the much-cursed one-child policy, it would be blowing out much more greenhouse pollution than it already is. Without the one-child rule, the Chinese themselves have acknowledged that there would be about 400 million more Chinese today. However, this did not stop them from easing one-child policies beginning in 2014.
Family planning experts, weighing the threat of greenhouse gas pollution, write in The Lancet: “In a world of 12 billion inhabitants, much more severe measures would be needed to stabilize the planet’s environment than in a world of 8 billion people. Prevention of unwanted births today by family planning might be one of the most cost-effective ways to preserve the planet’s environment for the future.”
In 2006, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged that it was “now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth from a world population that has increased six-fold in two hundred years, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.” Alas, Blair is one of the few leaders to acknowledge how the population explosion is behind global warming. The United Kingdom’s Optimum Population Trust says, “Policies to tackle climate change, by contrast, almost universally ignore population: it is seen as too sensitive and controversial.” The upshot is that the solutions for greenhouse gas pollution are all technical and economic. What is all too often overlooked when it comes to greenhouse gas pollution and all of the Seven Ecological Wounds, for that matter? Population growth and overpopulation are the main drivers of these problems, and lowering the population is the main solution.
The Trust cuts through the fog of climate change with this statement: “The most effective personal climate change strategy is limiting the number of children one has. The most effective national and global climate change strategy is limiting the size of the population.”
So, as dreadfully hard as it will be to cut our greenhouse gas emissions, it will be pissin’ in the wind without reducing population. Like it or hate it, this is reality.
I’m not trying to let the US off the hook here. What we’ve done or haven’t done on greenhouse gas pollution has been worse than shameful. Overall, each one of us in the US burps more CO2 and other greenhouse gases than do folks in any other country in the world, and we are each burping more every day. In the years 1990 to 2003 our “per capita CO2 emissions increased 3.2 percent,” write Philip Cafaro and Winthrop Staples. That doesn’t tell the whole tale, though. Over that same time, overall US emissions went up much more – by 20.2 percent. How so? Well, our population rose 16.1 percent. In other words, the growing Man swarm of the United States was about five times more to blame for our greater greenhouse pollution than was the rise from each of us.
As we mull over what leads to each of these seven wounds in the US and worldwide, we must acknowledge that Affluence and Technology play a large part. Nonetheless, we cannot let that overshadow the way overpopulation and high growth drive ecological wounds, whether straightforward killing of threatened Earthlings or cranking out carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases.
Since the end of World War II, there has been a mind-numbing onslaught against wilderness and wildlife around the world. It has also been a time of head-spinning population growth. This is not happenstance. Population growth has been the main axe hacking at the tree of life. The more population grows, the more Man eats Earth, and the deeper the ecological wounds go.
This article is excerpted from Man Swarm: How Overpopulation is Killing the Wild World, by Dave Foreman, with Laura Carroll.
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