Colin Tudge argues that we need to bring far wider dimensions – ecological, evolutionary, and indeed cosmic – into discussions on human population. Not to do so is “a dereliction of duty”
As I argued in my blog on human population on November 10:
“… because the issues are so emotive, the subject has become taboo: verboten… Those who write about population are likely to be “cancelled”, or as the Amish say, “shunned”, only worse”
In particular:
“… anyone who suggests that we should consciously set out to reduce numbers is liable to be labelled sexist, racist, classist, chauvinist, imperialist, “neo-colonial”, fascist, or just plain misanthropic.”
But I want nonetheless to argue just that. Indeed, in ultra-radical but nonetheless humanitarian vein I want to argue that we — humanity – should seek as a matter of global policy to reduce the population from its present level of 8.2 billion and the projected maximum of 10 billion to around 1 billion: roughly the estimated global population at around AD 1800. We should not, of course, aim to do this all at once, or within a single lifetime, or by means that people at large are unhappy with. The great serendipity is that we can achieve what’s needed simply by doing what most people really do want, or so the evidence suggests. The whole programme should play itself out over several centuries – and it should be a global exercise in democracy. But the long-term aim should be to achieve a tenfold reduction in the numbers predicted by the UN.
Absolutely not do I accept the charge of misanthrope, or sexist, or neo-colonial, or any of the other off-the-shelf imputations. Rather I suggest as many others have done that human beings are one of nature’s outstanding wonders, among the apotheoses of the cosmos. I also agree absolutely with Anne Frank who wrote in her diary circa 1941 as she and her family hid in a Dutch attic from the Gestapo:
“ … in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
I also like Abraham Lincoln’s appeal after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 to
“ … the better angels of our nature”
Indeed I wrote a book in 2012 called Why Genes Are Not Selfish and People Are Nice (Floris, Edinburgh) and continued the theme on this website with “The biology of compassion: work in progress” (June 13 2024); “Life is a master class in cooperativeness” (June 17 2024); and “The battle for Darwin’s soul” (July 22 2024), and others.
In short, I reckon that what George Orwell was content to call an “ordinary person” is a very good thing to be — something to strive for rather than to surpass. I also maintain as many others do that most of the problems of the world stem from governance that is desperately inadequate or downright evil, and from over-reliance on economic theorising, whether neoliberal or Marxist (as in “Why are governments so bad?” (December 14 2023) and “Idiots and Gangsters” (January 12 2023)).
In particular I also accept absolutely the point that Ian Rappel raised in response to my blog of November 10 — that the famines we have seen in recent years, and are still witnessing right now, have not been caused by lack of agricultural technique, or by the shortcomings of the natural world, or by the backwardness and “ignorance” of the starving and malnourished, and still less by “overpopulation”. The argument that people in the modern world starve because there are too many of us has served as an excuse for inadequacy and turpitude in high places for the past several centuries and still does (vide among many others the Irish Potato Famine, aka the Great Hunger, of the 1840s; or the insouciant acceptance in high places that the recurring famines in Africa are just a fact of life). Indeed I have written many a tract in support of that general thesis, including The Famine Business (1979); Future Cook (1980); So Shall We Reap: the concept of Enlightened Agriculture (2004); Feeding People is Easy (2007); Good Food for Everyone Forever: a people’s takeover of the world’s food supply (2011); Six Steps Back to the Land (2016); and indeed the latest, The Great Re-Think (2021).
For as many a sage has argued, including the Cambridge and Harvard economist, philosopher, and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the real cause of famine and malnutrition at least in the modern world always lies primarily and sometimes exclusively with politics – which means in the end with political will. In the end, we, humanity, do not look after our fellow human beings well and still less do we take care of other creatures – what Robert Burns called our “fellow mortals” – because we don’t care enough. Or at least we elect people who don’t care enough to high office.
However, I absolutely do not agree with all those critics (apparently including Ian) who argue, or seem to argue, that the issue of human numbers can or should be treated purely as an exercise in politics and economics. Still less do I accept that any existing political or economic system could achieve what’s needed, even if applied with the vigour demanded by its more evangelical advocates. Neither “Marxism” (centred on the idea that the workers should own the means of production) nor neoliberalism (“leave it to the market”) nor the newly-emerging self-centred economic “zones” (as in the present zeal for “free ports” or in Trump’s isolationist policy of MAGA) — will of can do the things that really needs doing.
Instead, we (humanity) need first to agree on what it is we are actually trying to achieve, and why; and I have albeit presumptuously suggested many a time and oft that our Goal should be to create
“Convivial Societies with Personal Fulfilment within a Flourishing Biosphere.”
We also need as always to root all policy and economic theory in
The “Bedrock Principles” of Morality (Compassion, Humility, and the sense of Oneness) and Ecology (hard science applied to James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia).
But no political or economic theory that I know about has declared such a Goal, or been so rooted, at least not explicitly.
To get finally to the point, I suggest that if we do agree at least broadly that our Goal should be as outlined here, and do apply the Bedrock Principles, then we are led to conclude that we really do need to reduce human numbers drastically. Indeed we need to aim for a steady-state world population of around 1 billion. This is ten times fewer than the UN predicts we are likely to reach by the end of this century. Yet before anyone reaches for their shotguns or descends mob-handed and with flaming torches upon our modest dwelling, let me again emphasise that I am suggesting all this from a position of philanthropy – not because I don’t like people but because I do, and want the best for us all, including all humanity and our fellow creatures; and because I feel that to come near to meeting the Goal we need to cultivate a sense of oneness with, and reverence, for the natural world. And the point here is not that the lucky minority who remain on this Earth might live a life of greater ease. It is that:
If we reduce our numbers and spread ourselves through time rather than through space then at least a thousand times more people could inhabit and enjoy Planet Earth before it becomes uninhabitable than will be possible if we simply seek to maximise numbers at any one time, as seems to be the largely unspoken ambition right now.
In other words, my radical suggestion is driven not by misanthropy or by some form of elitism (racism, sexism, “classism”) but by the complete opposite: a love and admiration of humanity as I believe we really are, deep down, despite present appearances, and the prominence and influence of people in high places who are so obviously nasty; and a desire to ensure that as many people as possible can enjoy this Earth while it still capable of sustaining life (which should give us several billion years to play with).
Thus it seems that simple arithmetic, as well as the all-important Bedrock Principles of Morality and Ecology, supports the idea, as modern architects are wont to put the matter, that “Less is More”.
So here’s the argument:
Can we really sustain 10 billion?
Many have argued – including me – that the answer is surely “Yes”. As the President of the Millennium Institute in Washington , Hans Herren, pointed out some years ago we already produce enough food worldwide to feed twice the current population, which certainly seems to give us quite a lot of leeway (or “headroom” as Rachel Reeves might prefer to say). This at first glance may seem most unlikely yet it can be confirmed with a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation. Thus the FAO tells us that in 2025 the global output of cereals is likely to exceed three billion tonnes, which alone would provide more than enough macronutrient – energy and protein – to sustain the present world population of 8.2 billion. (One tonne of cereal provides enough macronutrient to sustain three adults for a year).
But although cereals are by far the most important of the world’s crops, they provide only about half our macronutrient. The rest comes from non-cereal grains, pulses, other oilseeds, nuts, tubers (both root and stem), vegetables including roots, stems, and leaves, and meat, fish, marine invertebrates, eggs, and milk, all supplemented by herbs and spices. “The rest” also supplies the essential fats, vitamins, cryptonutrients, and minerals that may be deficient in cereals alone, plus of course flavour and texture. Thus, present yields of cereals and non-cereals between them provide twice what we really need. The frantic efforts to raise further outputs with GMOs etc which are so alluring to governments like ours and attract such huge investment seem largely to be diversionary (see “Seven obvious questions in search of straightforward answers (December 28 2012).
In addition, Amartya Sen has pointed out that there has never been a famine in a modern democracy, which again suggests that a humane and sensible democratic government that gives a damn and is reasonably on top of things can always feed its people. Again it seems that the shortfalls are due to inhumane and unjust policy, rather than to absolute shortage. There is a confounding variable in here however. After all, the modern countries that can reasonably claim to be democracies, or at least come as close to democracy as large societies have ever achieved, are also rich. Rich countries can always buy in what they need, provided others with better weather and more land and labour are willing to sell, or can be coerced into selling. Some countries that are happy to export agricultural produce are rich themselves – notably the US. But poor countries too for various reasons may use their land to grow commodity crops to export to the rich countries even if, by so doing, they fail to feed their own people. Thus Britain, which may claim as well as any T20 country to be a democracy, grows only about 60% of the food it consumes. If the wheatfields of East Anglia fail we can always buy more from North America or Ukraine – provided their crops don’t fail at the same time.
In general, too, the governments of rich countries these past few centuries have argued that it is better “in the long run” to protect the (market) economy than it is to spend (squander?) money on people who happen to be starving. That argument is reinforced by the argument that the suffering people brought it on themselves, through backwardness and stubbornness and fecklessness (including having too many children) and so are undeserving. It was by such arguments that the British government abandoned the Irish people during the famine of the 1840s, allowing them to starve even though Ireland’s granaries were stuffed with barley and oats. For the barley and oats were intended in large part for English horses, and were already spoken for, and duly guarded.
In similar vein, the world’s first ever World Food Conference was held in Rome in November 1974 in the wake of a series of famines in Africa and Asia. I attended the conference as a journalist and was shocked to find that most of the national delegates including Britain’s were more anxious to demonstrate that the famines were not their fault, than they were to propose serious long-term solutions. It was proposed however that the rich countries should dedicate two per cent of their GDP to the poor countries. At that time, and still, the rich were still enjoying the fruits of their decades and centuries of empire even though the empires themselves were officially, to a large extent, broken up, and although the rich handed out aid, there was still a huge net flow of wealth from the South to the North. Much of Africa was dirt poor even though in the previous centuries it had exported and to a large extent was still exporting enough gold, diamonds, copper, oil, ivory, coffee, tea, cocoa, and indeed slaves to buy all of Europe.
So a two per cent pay-back didn’t seem too excessive. But I don’t think any rich country ever achieved it. Of course the above is a rapid and superficial analysis but it is certainly what I and many other observers felt to be the case: and sometimes such impressions get closer to the essence than the official reports. (All this became the theme of my first proper book, The Famine Business, Faber & Faber 1977, and Penguin 1979.)
In short, although the famines recorded in the deep past, not least in the Bible, were surely real and unavoidable, there doesn’t seem to be much excuse for famine and widespread malnutrition in modern times. All famines and shortfalls in our own time and within living memory can be explained or explained away in political, economic, and moral terms. It seems that people at large, or at least the people in high places who make the rules, pursue the wrong policies, rely on inappropriate economic models, and don’t care enough, and even in democracies where we ostensibly have choice, we tend to choose leaders who seem to make a virtue of not caring. Trump, already firmly ensconced, is the obvious example. And in Britain, Farage is waiting in the wings.
But although all this is surely true, and famines and nutritional shortfalls in modern times can always be explained or explained away in political, economic, and moral terms, this does not mean that there is no underlying physical – ecological — problem as well. And, I suggest, it is at least irresponsible to ignore the ecological reality, and to refuse properly to confront it is even worse. Thus:
We could, perhaps, in theory, sustain 10 billion – but is this the best option?
Various people in high places including some mountebank politicians, actual or would-be tycoons, and technophilic geeks, but also including some serious writers and scientists who really ought to know better, have come up with various wild and generally crackpot wheezes ostensibly to help to feed the pending 10 billion.
Their proposals include super-productive crops based on variations on the theme of GM; artificial food produced in factories by domesticated microbes; and the idea that we need to escape this wondrous but all-too-finite planet and colonise moons and planets throughout the Universe. I call this last the Mad Hatter approach (or, more accurately the March Hare solution). Thus, in Alice in Wonderland, Alice joins the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse for tea – at a tea-table that stretches far into the distance. The March Hare explains that he and his chums have no facilities for washing up, or no inclination for it, so when they have messed up their plates and cutlery and spilt tea on the cloth they simply move on to the next place.
In similar vein, for the indefinite future, some in high places including some otherwise serious thinkers have argued that we should work our way through the habitable bits of the Universe, if indeed there are any (signs of deep-frozen water on some distant moon cause no end of excitement). This in truth is imperialism on the cosmic scale; a very old-fashioned and discredited idea dressed in the weeds of high tech (or of sci-fi). But money is already being spent on it. Like the many Earthly peoples who have in the past been colonised, I am sure the rest of the Universe will be very pleased to see us and will benefit no end from our presence. Mercifully, however, this wild scheme will never in reality come about. In reality we won’t get further than two-week holidays to the Moon, for billionaires, laid on at huge cost by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or possibly Richard Branson. (For my part, I can’t think of anything worse. Eastbourne is far nicer.)
In more serious vein, I and many others have argued that if we seriously hope to support humanity in the long term without destroying the vast majority of our fellow creatures (in which case we surely would perish too) then we must in particular adopt some form of Agroecology. In truth we need to combine Agroecology with the principles of Food Sovereignty to create what I have been calling “Enlightened Agriculture”, a term shortened for PR purposes to “Real Farming”. (See in particular our video interview with Chris Smaje from January 20 2024: “Small Farm Future”.) We also need to develop and stir in what might be called “Enlightened Cookery”, geared to the produce of Enlightened Agriculture. Indeed Enlightened Agriculture and Enlightened Cookery should be encouraged to evolve in tandem; in synergy. To co-evolve, indeed. But – a huge serendipity – the essentials are in place already. (As I argued not least in Future Cook (1980), the world’s finest cuisines and enlightened farming have already co-evolved, and match each other almost perfectly. See also Suzanne Wynn’s many and excellent contributions to this website.)
By such means (and, realistically, only by such means) could we seriously hope to sustain 10 billion people in an acceptable state, and take proper care of the natural world, as I suggest should be our Goal. As outlined above, I have argued in many a book and article, most full-on in Feeding People Is Easy, that we really should be able to sustain 10 billion in a reasonable state if we really put our minds to it. But we cannot be sure that that is true – or for how long — until we try. What does seem perfectly clear and undeniable is that if we continue to pursue the high-dreams of Industrial Agriculture then humanity will suffer hugely (as many people already are) and mass extinction will gallop away.
So if we are serious about the long-term future of humanity and our fellow mortals and the fabric of the Earth then Enlightened Agriculture in its many forms is a sine qua non.
But if Enlightened Agriculture (and Enlightened Cookery) did become the global norm (a very big “if”!), would even this be enough? And even if the Earth could accommodate 10 billion adequately at least for the foreseeable future we still should ask ourselves, “Is this really the best option?”
Caveats and questions
Although we surely could ensure that everyone born in the immediate future could be well fed, if we addressed the real issues realistically and put our minds to it, there are still some serious reservations. Thus:
To begin with, and crucially, there is always a huge gap between what is possible and what in fact comes about. So although we could easily feed the present 8 billion well as outlined above, in practice we do not. At least a billion people are chronically undernourished and for many millions famine is always lurking; and it certainly will not be easier to sustain 10 billion that it is to cater for 8 billion. In practice our present attempts to feed ourselves (or to make money from the appearance of doing so) are falling well short of what’s needed and are doing huge and largely irreparable damage along the way. And, of course, the world’s most powerful people and governments are not even addressing the issue of how we could provide good food for everybody. Instead they are pursuing policies with all possible vigour that lead in the totally opposite direction. Putin, Netanyahu, and of course Trump, come to mind. Keeping the world as a whole in good heart is not on their agenda, or indeed on their radar. To Trump, anyone who suggests that we ought to things for the benefit of humanity as a whole is a “commie”, which he takes to be synonymous with “bad”; and anyone who cares about the natural world is a bunny-hugger and a waste of space. We should be aiming single-mindedly instead to make the rich richer.
In truth, as I argued in The Great Re-Think, and is the theme of this whole website, we will not and cannot cater for everybody well, and still less take proper care of the natural world, unless we re-think everything we do and take for granted, from the details of small-scale horticulture to the grandest flights of science (with the emphasis on ecology) and metaphysics (which includes morality) — all maintained by an appropriate infrastructure (governance, the economy, and the law). But we are a million miles from achieving this, and as the strife grows deeper and the Earth continues to decay, we are moving further away. In particular, the prevailing economy – an all-out, ruthless competition to maximise and concentrate material wealth – seems designed to maximise the damage. Among much else, modern super-productive agriculture gobbles up 80 per cent of the world’s fresh water and as climate change takes hold it becomes less and less certain that the lakes and rivers and aquifers can ever be restored. To be sure, on the plus side, many very good people worldwide in all branches of academe and in all walks of life are on the case but the world’s most influential people are not. Just to complicate matters further, corruption in high places seems to have become the norm.
Then again, food is not all that matters. People need places to live and even in the richest and most settled societies – among which, despite appearances, Britain still ranks high – accommodation is already a huge problem. Our once treasured and sacrosanct green belts are fast being built over. Worldwide, economic inequality and climate change are making a bad situation worse. Some predict that by 2050 more than a billion people worldwide will be, or will have been, climate refugees.
All in all, then, although we could in theory keep 10 billion people in reasonably good heart (probably), and might do this without destroying what is left of the natural world, we certainly are not on course to do so. Of course the world needs a change of leadership yet this alone, difficult though that would be, will not be enough. We need, far more broadly, to shift the Zeitgeist: nothing less than a Renaissance, indeed.
And yet, it seems, even that will not be enough. With the best will in the world, and with appropriate governance and an economy geared to general wellbeing, and appropriate technologies including or especially agroecological agriculture, our fellow creatures and the fabric of the Earth itself would seem bound to deteriorate, and to continue to do so until – who knows? Certainly we could now feed and probably house 10 billion people in reasonable comfort if we (the world) seriously set out to do so. But for how long? How long could the Earth and our fellow creatures withstand our meddling and our acquisitiveness?
A radical proposal
Right now it seems, in all contexts, the Zeitgeist is geared to the maximum. Governments the world over seek to maximise economic growth – increase in material wealth, which is conventionally if inappropriately measured as GDP. Growth indeed is seen as the sine qua non, or even in effect, as the panacea. Liz Truss advocated “Growth, growth, growth!” and Keir Starmer has said exactly the same. Among much else, neither spares a serious thought for the natural world. If only we had more money, the argument seems to be, we could do all the good things that we can’t do now. Of course that is nonsense – it’s political and moral will that are lacking, not wealth. But it’s the idea that governments the world over, including ours, act upon.
By the same token, farmers and fisherfolk (and what are left of the world’s whalers) are urged to achieve “Maximum Sustainable Yield”, aka MSY. Among much else, we might observe that MSY is extremely hard to calculate, and in truth we can never know for sure what the MSY is or would have been until we overstep the mark, and drive the creatures we seek to exploit to extinction. As with our attempts to ride horses or motorbikes can never know what we or they can do until we fall off a few times and see what we can’t do. If we survive the falls we can try again. But if we drive our fellow creatures to extinction there is no second chance. By striving always to extract the maximum we stray too close to the edge, with little or no margin for error, which in the absence of perfect knowledge in an increasingly unpredictable world is a very dangerous position to be in. Yet research laboratories the world over are set up specifically to increase yields by cultivation or by mining and other forms of extraction, and Nobel Prizes are on offer to whoever can nudge the output up a notch.
But why? What’s the virtue in this? Why is the maximum perceived to be the best, or to be necessary? Why not accept that “enough’s enough”? Even more to the point: it surely would be better to define the kind of world we really want – which I suggest should be one that promotes convivial societies and personal fulfilment and keeps the natural world in good heart – and then ask what we would need, and how we need to organise our affairs, in order to achieve this. Even at first glance it seems obvious that an all-out all-against-all struggle for material gain and ascendancy is not what’s needed — yet that is the current norm, the drum to which all big governments and commercial companies march. (Cornish farmer Chris Jones addressed this issue on this website in “How might we live in the future?”, on April 15 this year.)
Human numbers are very obviously part of the equation. Per capita consumption matters of course and an economy designed in effect to maximise consumption is obviously not sensible; and the problem of over-consumption is clearly exacerbated by the enormous economic inequality, with a few obscenely rich and a great many poor; and, worse, the glorification and exaltation of the super-rich. But numbers matter too. A hundred moderate consumers obviously consume a lot more than one moderate consumer.
So if we are serious about the plight and future of the human species and of our fellow creatures, we should not simply be asking “How can we accommodate 10 billion people?” — or indeed asking whether this is even possible. We should be asking:
“How many people would it be possible – realistically – to keep in good heart, not simply for the next few years or decades, but in effect forever – or at least for as long as this Earth is able to sustain life?”
I don’t know if anyone has ever addressed this issue this directly (I’d be grateful for guidance on this) but the evidence that I have seen suggests that one billion would be a reasonable number. I do not suggest, not for one instant, that this would be any kind of panacea; that we would solve all the world’s problems simply by reducing our numbers. When the global population was around one billion, which estimates suggest it was at the start of the 19th century, the world was still seriously nasty, with conflict and inequality and injustice and poverty and environmental pollution on the grand scale, as vividly described and portrayed by many a political and religious reformer and a whole swathe of painters and writers. Indeed the political, social, and environmental horrors of the 18th and early 19th centuries did much to inspire the Romantic movement, as reflected not least in the poems of Shelley and the young Wordsworth. Clearly, human beings can do vile things to each other and to the natural world no matter how many or few of us there are.
Right now, however, with 8.2 billion people on board, we seem as never before to be staring Armageddon on the face. There is no longer anywhere to hide (if we rule out those distant, putatively icy moons). So although it surely is the case that the world’s huge and horrible deficiencies have more to do with politics and the Zeitgeist than with human numbers per se, it still isn’t clear that we could keep 8 billion plus in a tolerable state, and still less sustain the pending 10 billion, for more than a few more decades even with the best will in the world.
Yet — barring a giant meteor strike or a mega-volcanic eruption — we can be reasonably sure that we could at least in theory keep one billion in good heart for aeons to come. We can be very sure too that the present mindset, the Zeitgeist, which is geared to maximisation – of people and of material wealth – is about as inappropriate as can be conceived; and so too of course is the ultra-competitive economy and much or most of the world’s most favoured technologies that are intended to achieve the maximum.
This though leaves us with two huge questions:
First, isn’t it intrinsically misanthropic to want to reduce human numbers so drastically? Surely if we claim to like humanity, we should want more people rather than fewer?
Secondly: is it really possible to reduce human numbers drastically by acceptable means – without cruelty or coercion? Has this ever been achieved? Wouldn’t the cure for what is perceived to be “overpopulation” be at least as bad as the perceived problem?
In both cases the answers are serendipitous. Thus:
How many people should there be? And who, really, are the misanthropes?
The Earth, and indeed the whole cosmos, has a finite life — or this, at least, is what most physicists these days take to be the case, although some disagree. Whatever is the truth of the matter, all cosmologists agree that we still have billions of years in front of us. All agree too though that some time in the future our own solar system including mother Earth must perish; and long before the Earth itself is swallowed up or is incinerated or whatever its fate will be, it will become uninhabitable. Ultra-resilient thermophilic microbes will doubtless hang on for far longer than we do but they too must end.
It seems to me, then, that in philanthropic vein we might reasonably seek to ensure that as many people as possible can enjoy the fruits of this Earth for as long as it remains habitable. To this end I suggest we might introduce a new unit (or at least one that is not widely recognised) — the “Person-year”: the number of people on the Earth at any one time, multiplied by the length of time that each of them is able to remain. Mere survival is not enough, though, of course. Quality of life matters too – summarised as “Personal Fulfilment”. And our fellow creatures matter too – we really do need to cultivate the sense of Oneness.
So, I suggest, in arithmetical mode, we should ask:
“How many people should there be at any one time if we made it our goal to maximise the number of people-years before the Earth becomes uninhabitable?”
To be sure, I argued above that we should not seek always to maximise. But it does seem reasonable to seek to maximise the human presence in the cosmos if we believe, as I do, that human beings are good thing, or would certainly prefer to be, if circumstances did not so often drive us to be otherwise. But to maximise the presence of our entire species we need to exercise restraint along the way. John of Gaunt put the matter rather well in Richard II (Act II Scene 1). His comment on the young and incautious King Richard applies to the whole human race:
“His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,For violent fires soon burn out themselves;Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder”
The signs are that if we did try simply to sustain a global population of 10 billion, and certainly if we continued to gear the economy to ever-increasing material “growth”, then we will be lucky to survive in a tolerable form for more than another 100 years or so. Indeed we already fall far short of what’s needed right now, and we are doing enormous and potentially terminal damage as governments strive to keep afloat, yet for many millions if not billions of people life is already intolerable, not to say impossible, and the natural world is declining hand over fist.
In sharpest contrast, a population of one billion should be well within the carrying capacity of the Earth. So if we reduced our numbers to one billion and adopted an economy and policies that took proper account of ecological reality, politics, then our descendants and their descendants could continue to occupy this Earth, with a high quality of life, for aeons to come. Throughout the Pleistocene many species survived in recognisable form (before going extinct or evolving into something else) for at least a couple of million years. The fossil record shows that in the long history of the Earth some groups (including mosses and some clams and indeed sharks) survived more or less unchanged for 10s or even hundreds of millions of years. Indeed
If we acknowledged ecological reality, and adopted an economy rooted in cooperation rather than in all-out to-the-death competition, then Homo sapiens should easily be able to thrive on this Earth for another million years – for starters.
So now a little arithmetic. As things are the human species might reasonably look forward to
10 billion x 100 = 1000 billion person-years
— though many and probably ever-increasing numbers of the people will be living in a seriously sub-optimal condition.
But if we reduced our population to one billion we could very reasonably hope to enjoy —
I billion x 1 million = 1 million billion person -years
In other words:
By reducing our population to one billion we could expect to enjoy 1000 times more person-years before the Earth becomes uninhabitable than we could if continue leave the matter of human population to hazard, or to the short-term ambitions of governments and corporates and the whims of the super-rich.
Even if these calculations are out by an order of magnitude, or even by two orders of magnitude, the contrast would still be striking, and the conclusion would still be obvious. John of Gaunt was far wiser than the March Hare.
Several large questions remain of course – including:
But how can numbers be reduced by acceptable means?
Well, logic tells us there are two ways to reduce numbers: by increasing the death rate; and by reducing the birthrate. Both have been essayed from time to time throughout human history – in both cases, often, by cruel and draconian means which of course are not what’s needed. Most people would surely agree it must in general far better to contain numbers by reducing the birthrate than by increasing the death rate. Indeed it is very difficult to think of circumstances in which it is acceptable to accelerate death. Even the bill to allow assisted dying for the terminally ill and suffering, which at the time is writing is running the gauntlet of the House of Lords, is highly controversial; and although I have no wish to drag out my own existence if life becomes too ghastly for me and my loved ones, I can certainly see why people object. Reducing birthrate is unacceptable if people are forcibly coerced or even sterilized but family planning is now eminently possible by benign means and is widely welcomed the world over.
Yet again there are serendipities. First, very small increments have very big results. So it was that in the 1960s, leading up to the World Food Conference of 1974, the global population was increasing by 2 percent each year. It doesn’t sound much, but a two percent increase per year means the population doubles every 40 years (not 50 years as you might expect because of compound interest). And as Sir David Attenborough likes to remind us, the global population has increased fourfold since he was born 99 years ago. It doubled between 1926 and 1974 and since then has doubled again.
Conversely, a very small decrease in birthrate soon has dramatic results too. Thus in this still-turbulent world we need to produce 2.1 offspring per woman to maintain keep the population at a constant level (not just two per woman because some children die before they reach reproductive age, and some adults are sub-fertile, and some are unlucky, and some just don’t want to have children). Right now in some countries the birthrate is below replacement, as in Japan and Italy (even though Italy ostensibly is a Catholic country, and Catholics tend to be pronatalist). Apparently the UK population would be going down right now if it weren’t for immigration. The birthrate in Russia right now is well below replacement and Putin is urging women and even teenage girls to have big or very big families and offering cash and other incentives to women who have 10 babies or more.
To be sure, in the short term, falling populations bring problems of their own. Notably, a dwindling population is an ageing population so there are fewer people of working age and more and more of retirement age who want looking after. In the short term this can be solved by encouraging immigration but governments or would-be governments in matters of population tend to be hopelessly at sea and, for example, while Kemi Badenoch is encouraging native-born Brits to have more children she (and Farage) are hoping to win the next election largely on an anti-immigration ticket (and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party seems keen above all to “Ban the boats!”). In an economy geared to growth, too, it is very hard to go into reverse (just as it is hard to stop an oil-tanker, or indeed a speedy motor-bike). In Britain we could find ourselves with a surplus of housing which, logically, should bring the prices down. But while the millions who want somewhere tolerable to live would surely welcome this, for the Daily Mail and its avid followers this would be a disaster comparable with the worst that can be conceived. Chauvinism and the perceived need to field large armies encourage pronatalism too. Both apply in spades to Putin.
High tech including robots and AI could largely solve the short-term labour problem, provided they were judiciously deployed. Which of course on the whole they are not. But they could be.
Overall indeed: if governments made it their policy to reduce human numbers, steadily and over time, then this could surely be done without too much trauma, and with very significant benefit for the many who want somewhere better to live and/or care about the natural world.
Then again, we may from a western perspective conclude that the birthrate has gone down severely in Russia because the people are understandably pessimistic, and do not want to bring babies into such a precarious world. The same may well be true in Japan or Italy. But a great deal of evidence and some common observation suggests that when women are given a real choice in life – including or especially the freedom to make fulfilling lives outside the home, as plumbers or surgeons or professors of jurisprudence, then they commonly prefer to have few children, just one or two, rather than many. Sometimes well-off people choose to have big families for religious reasons (the Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg, with six children, comes to mind). Sometimes big families become fashionable (as in the US when the Catholic Kennedy family was in the ascendant). Some just like big families, taking for example the four sisters in Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women as a role model.
But in many societies it is fair to judge that women may have very big families basically because there is no alternative. In very deprived societies with no proper health care and with no pension schemes people want lots of children because they fear or indeed know that some of them will die. That of course is immensely said but also, in the absence of proper pensions, they need surviving offspring to support them in old age. It remains very regrettably the case too that in many societies women gain kudos and indeed respect only by being mothers –illustrated not least by the Taliban’s curtailment of girls’ education. Many people too, worldwide, still, have no access to effective and affordable contraception. Yet (surely?) all human beings crave the freedom to choose. And present evidence suggests that when women do have a choice, most prefer to have just one or two children and few actively seek to give birth to four or more.
In practice, indeed, as history shows —
The only policies that can reduce human numbers effectively, and keep the population in a steady state, are all benign. Each and all of the necessary components of effective policy are desirable in their own right.
In particular, an irreducibly small rate of infant mortality, freedom and opportunity for women, and safe and effective contraception, will together reduce total numbers remarkably. The effect is noticeable within a few decades (vide Russia and Japan) and we could reduce numbers to a steady state of around one billion (if that is what we choose) within a few centuries. And we could achieve this, so the evidence suggests, simply by doing what most people, and particularly women, really want.
In short: policies designed to reduce population over time can and should be exercises in democracy. But as noted elsewhere on this website, democracy is difficult. In a true democracy, taken literally, all decisions should reflect the thoughts and feelings of everybody who is affected them. In theory, if people really are “good at heart”, deep down, then true democracies ought to be very agreeable. But in practice it is impossible to take everyone’s views into account on every issue. Indeed it is difficult to find out what everyone really does think and feel, “deep down”. Neither are our feelings constant: we are swayed this way and that by passing events, including events both global and personal. Most of all, perhaps, true democracy is demanding. It cannot work satisfactorily unless people are well informed and prepared to take a serious interest in what’s going on. This is where democracy differs absolutely from populism which merely requires people who are not required to take any serious interest at all (better if they don’t) to follow some “charismatic” leader who may simply be and often is a mountebank and con artist. True democracy is not mob rule – emphatically not. But populism very definitely is. I suggest, then, that people in a truly democratic society would far prefer to see a smaller number of people enjoy this Earth for aeons to come, than to see a vast and troubled population wreck the entire planet in a lifetime. At least most people would prefer this if the case was properly put and the options were available.
Given that the prize for reducing our numbers by tolerable means is so great (a chance for humanity to live in harmony with each other and with our fellow creatures for millions of years to come) and the price of failure is so severe (Armageddon in the not-to-distant future) it does seem rather perverse not to treat the issue of human numbers with the seriousness it warrants. But we don’t. In modern politics, or indeed in the modern Zeitgeist, we just don’t seem to take really serious matters seriously. The Great Re-Think really is necessary.
A few reflections
1: The biology behind family planning
Human beings, along with elephants, orang-utans, and eagles, are known in zoological circles as K-strategists. We generally have but few offspring in a lifetime but – ideally at least – we take good care of them, and expect them to live. This is in sharp contrast to r-strategists like mice and bluebottles who produce dozens or many thousands of children in the expectation and indeed sure knowledge that very few of them will live to have offspring of their own.
- Anthropological studies, not least among the San people aka the Bushmen of the Kalahari in the 1970s, suggest that women in hunter-gatherer societies typically expect to have a maximum of five children in the course of their fertile lives. Because the girls are on a low plane of nutrition, they do not become fertile until they are well their teens; and for the same reason, menopause comes early. Hunting and gathering is a perfectly good way to live even in the Kalahari but the meat intake is low and spasmodic and the fat content of wild game is low, and the wild plants that make up most of the diet are high in fibre so it’s hard to eat enough to provide a lot of energy. Furthermore – most importantly! – women in wild environments typically suckle each baby for at least two years and the physiological burden is enormous – much greater than that of pregnancy. Marginal nutrition and the huge physiological burden between them lead to “lactational amenorrhoea”. Typically, therefore, women in what might be called a state of nature cannot conceive again for many months after giving birth and the typical birth interval accordingly is around four years. Hence, with late menarche and early menopause women in hunter-gatherer societies are simply unable to produce more than five babies in a reproductive lifetime. Even with the best of care, K-strategists or not, in the harsh and dangerous conditions it is unlikely that many more than two of the (maximum) five will live to have babies of their own, and so the population can remain fairly constant for millennium after millennium.
The picture changed when agriculture became the norm and the food supply was steadier; particularly among the richer members of society who could afford wet-nurses. Thus in 13th century England, Queen Eleanor of Castile (wife of Edward I) had 16 children and in the 18C Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III, had 15. (Poor Queen Anne had 17 pregnancies between 1683 and 1700 but only five babies were born alive. But only one, nominally the Duke of Gloucester, survived beyond infancy. And he died at the age of 11.) The position changed again in the 20th century when infant formulas, based primarily on cow’s milk (which is far richer in fat and protein than human milk) became commonplace, or indeed the norm. There is no shortage of calories in modern societies for mothers or for bottle-fed infants and girls may become pregnant at 11 years old or even younger and from time to time large families become fashionable and/or governments for various reasons go through bouts of pronatalism. So it was that earlier this year Elon Musk invited us all to celebrate the birth of his 14th child.
In effect, the shift in circumstance and modern technologies tend to convert natural K strategists into virtual r-strategists. Is this really to our benefit?
2: A sense of time
One reason that people in positions of influence seem to give the matter of population so little serious thought is that, for the most part, they have no appropriate sense of time. And one reason for that is that few in high places have ever been seriously exposed to science, and in particular to Earth science and the science of evolution. To the Earth scientist and to the evolutionary biologist a million years is a perfectly comprehensible unit of time. The long term means tens or hundreds of millions of years. But most people in high places are educated in what are called the “humanities” (or sometimes “the arts”) and they think on a quite different timescale. Classicists like Boris Johnson and the late Enoch Powell can and do get their heads around a few thousand years or so. Conventionally educated historians as Rees-Mogg apparently is may have some conception of centuries. And to those “trained” (educated hardly seems the right word) in conventional economics like David Cameron or Liz Truss 30 years is the long term.
But if we are seriously to contemplate the fate of the human species as a whole, including our impact on planet Earth, and to anticipate the worst before it happens, we need to think on the cosmic time-scale. And it simply never occurs to the world’s leaders that this is necessary, or even reasonable. In effect they plan if at all from moment to moment. And so the matter of human numbers, which for this planet at least is of momentous importance, is left to hazard; to the whims of despots and the bickering of ideologues. Critics of population policy argue that the issue is not urgent. The immediate problems of production and the threat of economic depression and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and the dozen other places that Donald Trump apparently thinks he has put a stop to, are far more urgent and need all our attention. This is true up to a point. But we should not fool ourselves. The problem of population burns with a slow fuse. A week is a long time in politics as Harold Wilson famously observed. But, barring serious disruption, the issue of population creeps up on us over decades and centuries. Yet it is urgent all the same. After two or three centuries of agricultural and industrial revolution and high tech and economies designed to maximise and concentrate material wealth, we are at crisis point.
3: One (very) long argument
The matter of human numbers was first brought seriously to the world’s attention in 1798 by the English cleric and economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) in An Essay on the Principle of Population. He pointed out that whereas the human population grows geometrically as the generations pass (a small percentage increase year on year) agricultural output could increase, at best, only arithmetically (by a fixed amount each year). Sooner or later, the geometric increase was bound to outstrip the arithmetic increase, so the population must outstrip the supply, and disaster must ensue.
As the industrial revolution and the resultant urbanisation got under way so poverty and privation increased too and his doleful prophecy seemed to be coming true, as described in many an early 19th century novel (as in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, 1855) and political tract (as in Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto, published in the year of revolution, 1848). In general, in high places, the misery of the poor was seen to be inevitable – a matter of biology, as Malthus described. If people starved, it was because there were too many of them. As Ebenezer Scrooge remarked in Charles’ Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1843, death by starvation
“ … will only lower the surplus population.”
Malthus had a gloomy message and a lugubrious expression and has often been written off as one of Christianity’s hellfire misanthropes and an apologist for the injustices of the status quo. In truth, though, by all accounts, he was an affable soul. He didn’t seem to like the name “Thomas” and was duly known to his younger relatives as “Uncle Bob” and to his students as “Pop” (short for “population”), and his wife was known for her eminently agreeable tea-parties. He just told it like it was, or at least how it seemed to him to be.
But although his thesis was taken very seriously and his book was a best-seller and went through several editions over several decades, constantly revised along the way, Malthus didn’t have it all his own way. In particular the writer and political (anarchist) theorist William Godwin (1756-1836), the husband of the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, was highly critical. For Malthus seemed to suggest on biological grounds that the human population was in effect bound to rise to unsupportable numbers and must then collapse. But Godwin, the political activist, argued that human beings are perfectly capable of taking their own affairs in hand and could contain numbers and forestall disaster if and when they chose to do so, or the powers-that-be adopted appropriate policies.
In effect, 200 years later, the same discussion continues: on the one hand there are those who say that our own biology and psychology are leading us inevitably to disaster, and those who claim that all our ills can be ascribed to inhumane and inappropriate politics and economics.
It seems to me that both points of view are right up to a point. In practice the world is run by politicians and economists — and both of them need seriously to take biology into account, which as far as I can see most of them do not and never have. The message of this entire website is that to solve the world’s problems we really do need a complete re-think, a Renaissance indeed; and the required Renaissance must be rooted in the “Bedrock Principles” of morality and ecology; and politics should and must be an exercise in morality (compassion, humility, and the sense of Oneness) and not, as now, a crude and perpetual struggle for dominance. It all seems very obvious really.
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