MAKING MORAL CONNECTIONS:
Population, Environment, And Consumption

by Rev. Dr. James A. Nash

Population, consumption, and the environment--what a formidable and frightful combination! Yet the systemic linkages among these and other concerns are so abundant, intricate and dynamic that they are impossible to interpret or resolve in isolation. The contemporary context forces relational thought and action.

The problems of population, consumption, and the environment are inseparable, and also of comparable moral significance. On the one hand, problems of consumption, understood as both underconsumption and overconsumption, are major contributing factors in the excessive exploitation and toxication of the rest of nature. On the other hand, overpopulation, which I will interpret as excessive consumption in relation to environmental capacity, jeopardizes both ecological integrity and the prospects of sufficient consumption for human development.

In reality, "consumption" is a distorted designation of the material excesses associated with affluence. These excesses are more a consequence of the needs of profitable production than the inherent wants of consumers. The production dynamic arouses our wants by marketeering in order to realize profits by supplying goods and services to satisfy demands it has created. To confront the inequities and prodigalities inherent in excessive consumption, we must first grasp that the problem is not only consumerism but productionism.

My purposes in this essay are first, to interpret the connections between ecological degradation and the problems of population and consumption, both overconsumption and underconsumption, and second, to identify some of the ethical issues that nations must face. I intend to highlight some of the virtues or moral norms that we need to cultivate as part of a global ethic in facing the demographic-ecological crisis.

From the perspective of ecological studies, population and consumption (which includes pollution as a resource use) are the two interactive sides of a species' impact on its environment. Overpopulation is not determined by numbers alone, but rather by numbers times the per capita consumption of natural resources. Thus a numerically large human population might be sustainable with modest or light consumption of environmental resources. But the tragedy of our emerging situation is our potential for reaching a saturation point in numbers when even light consumption, justly distributed, will be in excess of available resources, so that human development for all will be biophysically impossible. Conversely, a numerically smaller population of high producers/consumers is overpopulated when it exceeds key limits of its environment. Ecologically, consumption rates are as relevant as fertility rates. The reason is that the average additional person in affluent nations consumes far more and places far greater stress on the biosphere than the average person in poor nations. Interpreted this way, the reduction of population growth is an urgent moral demand on all nations, and it is accompanied by an equally urgent moral demand on affluent nations for reduced production/consumption and equitable distribution.

The concept of carrying capacity is simply a reminder that the planet is finite. Look first at nonrenewable resources, which include fossil fuels and minerals, now being used in massive amounts under the prods of population and consumption growth. By definition, nonrenewables will run out. The implicit question in much of the public debate has been whether practical exhaustion will be in the short or long run. But does that question make an ethical difference if we have long-term responsibilities to future generations? On nonrenewable resources, there really is no moral substitute for careful conservation, comprehensive recycling, ultra-efficiency, constrained consumption, and product durability and reparability.

So-called renewable resources--like fisheries, forests, and soils--are periodically regenerated through natural cycles. But they can become functionally nonrenewable when used excessively or abusively. Some signs appear ominous. Croplands in many places are declining or disappearing; desertification is proceeding dangerously. These losses represent millions of tons of foodstuffs not being available to feed hungry people. Potable water--the indispensable resource--is becoming scarce in many places. Water insufficiencies will not only constrain agricultural productivity and economic development but also create political and economic tensions. Fisheries, a prime source of animal protein in many developing countries, show danger signals of unsustainable and unjust use. All the world's major fishing areas apparently have reached or exceeded the limits of sustainability.

A major concern is: will food supplies--the very foundation of health, education, and vocation--be adequate for the impending future, or will they be overwhelmed by human numbers? To meet anticipated demands from population growth, the nations will need at least a doubling of food production by the middle of the next century. One must ask: Is this doubling of food production biophysically possible? If so, will it entail the massive destruction of natural ecosystems? What changes in this scenario can be created through reductions in fertility and consumption rates?

Though pollution is not a peculiar effect of overpopulation and overproduction, these greatly aggravate pollution. Pesticides and fertilizers used abundantly and indiscriminately in agriculture, human-induced climate change resulting from the production of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases," diverse industrial emissions, nuclear wastes, municipal wastes, the overburden from mining, oil spills--all these problems are intensified by increases in reproduction and production. They reduce the planetary carrying capacity.

These factors also threaten major reductions in the Earth's rich biodiversity. By the end of the next century, with the continuation of rapid destruction of diverse habitats, 20% to 50% of current species could be extinguished, some biologists estimate. These losses are morally serious, not only because of the instrumental values that other species are for human needs, but also because they are intrinsic values for themselves, which humans ought to honor.

No doubt, some biophysical limits can be extended through human ingenuity, but there are limits even on technological powers to transcend biophysical limits. Technology is not alchemy. The context of human existence is not the inexhaustibility of the products and capacities of nature, but ecological scarcity. This is the context in which the human community must decide questions of population and consumption.

The depth and breadth of global underconsumption are startling. Radical disparities in economic capacities within and among nations are a prominent feature of the modern world. Less than a fifth of the world's human population, concentrated in the "industrialized" nations including the U.S., live in relative comfort or luxury, some in gluttony. These nations receive more than 80% of global income. More than another fifth of humanity, however, lives in desperate poverty-- on an average equivalent income of $1 or less per day per person. Their numbers are generally estimated at 1.1 billion people; in fact however, the numbers of serious underconsumers are considerably higher, given that the statistical line for measuring global poverty is set ridiculously low. And income disparities are growing: the ratio of the richest fifth's share to the poorest grew from 30 to 1 in 1969 to 59 to 1 in 1989. The Human Development Report 1993, moreover, says that the ratio now is really 150 to l.

Chronic poverty--underconsumption--has not only severe social effects but also comparable ecological effects. Indeed, the problem infects every dimension of the ecological crisis. In the absence of economic sufficiency, poor people and nations are often forced to exploit their natural resources--croplands, grasslands, forests, fisheries, etc.--beyond the thresholds of sustainability simply to survive in the present. The process is accentuated by the continuation of population growth (bred partly by underconsumption) which contributed to the pressures of overexploitation in the first place. Thus, underconsumption spurred by overpopulation is a driving force behind ecological deterioration. Then, in a vicious cycle, this deterioration further reduces the availability of resources and further propels poverty.

In an interdependent global market, the economic activities of the overdeveloped nations of the North often seem to be significant factors in depriving some poor nations of the South of sufficient resources for their essential needs. Transnational corporations have contributed to this process by unsustainably destroying tropical forests to provide exotic woods for the affluent, severely polluting rivers and lands, withdrawing minerals with excessive destruction, uprooting indigenous peoples, exploiting lax labor and environmental laws, promoting cash crops for export and reducing thereby the availability of food for domestic consumption, and using poor nations as sites of hazardous industries and technologies. On the moral assumption that we are an interdependent community of moral equals sharing responsibility for one another's welfare, the deprivation of necessities for any is an issue of justice and a demand for frugality by the prosperous, whether or not a causal connection exists between poverty and prosperity. In all cases, the wealthy must reduce their consumption in order to share essentials with the poor.

Yet, despite the fact that the nations even now seem to be approaching or surpassing some ecological limits in using the rest of nature as source and sink, the dominant response in international circles to the dynamic of over- and underconsumption is not an emphasis on frugality and sharing but rather the advocacy of intensive economic growth enhanced by technical efficiency. The World Commission on Environment and Development, for example, argues that the "quality" or "content" of growth must be changed, to be "less material- and energy-intensive and more equitable in its impact." Nevertheless, it insists that a five- to tenfold increase in manufacturing output will be necessary, given the current rates of population growth, to raise the "developing" world's production and consumption to the level of the industrialized world in the next century.

But is this economic vision ecologically possible? Even if it is, is it ecologically desirable or morally responsible? Should our global economic goal simply be to elevate all peoples to "the American way of life?" Or is there an alternative that lifts the poor and preserves the biosphere? This economic growth model seems to be a utopian illusion. It optimistically circumvents the problem of limits, and it operates on the assumption that the rest of nature is nothing more than instrumental values for human wealth and welfare. In reality, the globalization of North American standards of living probably would be ecologically disastrous--and also therefore, economically ruinous. Yet it would be seriously discriminatory to advocate a double track in which the nations of the South restrict their production while the nations of the North continue their wanton ways. Justice in traditional Jewish and Christian understandings would seem to require not only floors but ceilings on economic production and consumption. The process of redistribution contributes indirectly to both ecological integrity and population stability, since these goals depend in part on distributive justice.

Assessments of overpopulation and overconsumption are not simply empirical calculations, but also moral judgments. They involve questions of morally desirable ends or living conditions, just distribution, and benevolent sharing. Ethically, the essential questions are: What is a good quality of life for humans, and what material and demographic conditions are necessary to ensure that good quality for all on a finite planet? What are our moral responsibilities to the rest of humanity, other species, and future generations? What is the appropriate size of the human population and the amount of material consumption to enable us to fulfill these responsibilities? What are the moral limits to human production and reproduction? The final question for this essay is then: What are the moral norms that we ought to be cultivating and promoting as responses to the ecological degradation resulting from productionism and reproductionism? These norm might be called ecological/demographic virtues or productive/reproductive virtues, so long as it is understood that they apply to both individuals and societies, as moral standards for both character formation and social transformation. They are critically important to policy-making because they are the moral guidelines for policy. They are also the conditions for a hopeful future. These six seem especially relevant to our focus here:

1. Equity is here simply a synonym for justice in the distribution of the world's goods and services, so that all humans have the essential material conditions for human dignity and social participation. This concern is a fundamental theme in Jewish and Christian concepts of covenant fidelity to God, the "Lover of Justice" (Psalm 99.4). Since economic deprivation is a major cause and effect of ecological degradation in a vicious cycle, economic justice is not only an essential good in itself but also a necessary condition of ecological integrity. Thus, economic equity is a matter of both social and ecological ethics. Similarly, population stabilization is a matter of both social and ecological justice. Indeed, population stabilization needs to be part of strategies for socioeconomic justice, since socioeconomic conditions seem to be prime factors affecting fertility rates, with improvements in the quality of life associated with reductions in the rates and numbers of births.

2. Sustainability is living within the bounds of the regenerative, assimilative, and carrying capacities of the planet indefinitely, as an expression of a covenant of solidarity with future generations. The present pattern of using the planet's resources is characterized by un sustainability. Future generations will be major victims of our generation's excessive production, consumption, toxication, and reproduction. Sustainability forces us to think of our moral responsibilities in terms of the truly long run--even millennia when relevant-- rather than the decades characteristic of most advocacy of sustainable development. It is particularly important that we highlight the generally neglected principles of sustainability for production and reproduction. Thus sustainability depletes renewable resources no more, and preferably far less, than their rate of regeneration. Sustainability pollutes no more, and preferably far less, than can be naturally assimilated and justified as necessary for compelling purposes. Sustainability depletes nonrenewable resources only conservatively, efficiently, frugally, and only to the extent that it can clearly provide substitutions, preferably better and renewable ones, like solar energy for the overuse of fossil fuels, as reparations to future generations. Sustainability reproduces progeny no more, and preferably far less, than is compatible with preserving the ecological conditions necessary for the continuous thriving of humans and other species in our connectional system. Sustainability reminds us that our moral responsibilities extend into the future as far as our influences are relevant and plausibly foreseeable.

3. Bioresponsibility. Against the dominant economic reductionism which treats nonhuman life as utility values for human wealth and welfare, bioresponsibility is an effort to redefine responsible human relationships with the rest of the planet's biota and to ground these responsible relationships not only (weakly) in utility or even generosity, but also (strongly) in the just dues and demands imposed on us by the vital interests of otherkind. Whatever instrumental values other species have for humans, they are also intrinsically valuable for themselves. These intrinsic values are a sufficient condition for our moral respect.

   The moral issues surrounding this extension of justice to the rest of the biota are mind-numbing in their novelty and complexity. Nevertheless, one conclusion seems clear: biotic justice imposes obligations on the human community to limit our economic production and our sexual reproduction to prevent the excessive destruction of wildlife and wildlands. If other species are ends or goods for themselves, then our economic and population policies need to pursue what Herman Daly calls the "biocentric optimum," in contrast to the "anthropocentric optimum" which presently prevails as the norm. Both humans and nonhumans are wronged when human problems of excessive population and production are "resolved" by the further sacrifice of nonhuman species and their habitats. We humans have already used far more than any reasonably defined fair share of this world's goods. These human dilemmas are best resolved not by the tacky tactic of pitting the poor against endangered species and habitats, but rather by confronting directly the prime sources of both poverty and ecological degradation: overconsumption by an economic elect, human overpopulation, and economic maldistribution.

4. Frugality is the most neglected norm in modern morality. Yet, solutions to social and ecological problems depend on the revival of this norm and its reformation from a strictly personal virtue to a social norm. It is a revolt against the ethos of the Sumptuous Society. As a norm for the economic activity of individuals and societies, denoting moderation and material sufficiency, frugality entails morally disciplined production and consumption for higher ends, especially the social and ecological common good. Thus, appropriate production and consumption should be measured not merely individualistically, in reference to our personal, spiritual, and moral well-being, but relationally, because we exist as relational beings--social, political, and ecological animals--and our well-being depends on sharing.

   Frugality is an earth-affirming and enriching norm that delights in the less consumptive joys of the mind and flesh. It is "sparing" in production and consumption, literally sparing of the scarce resources for human communities and sparing of the members of other species. It minimizes harm and thereby enables a greater thriving of all life. Frugality is a necessary condition of justice (including biotic justice) and sustainability in situations of relative scarcity, where "enough" can be available for all--human and nonhumankind, present and future--only if essential resources are shared justly and generously.

   A moral affirmation of frugality tends to induce guilt in some of the economically privileged, according to more than one indignant critic of the concept. If so, fine; that is a good guilt, from which we ought not to seek any therapeutic relief in denial or rationalization of our complicity in unjust consumption. That guilt is a moral elixir, stimulating a conversion that integrates our norms and our practices, prompting us to seek justice and sustainability by living frugally.

5. Reproductive Responsibility. It is essential that we defend a variety of reproductive rights--such as universal accessibility to diverse, safe, effective, simple, and reversible contraception for both women and men; equality for women in all dimensions of life, from economic and political participation to adequate nutrition; and a full range of reproductive health services. Indeed, I want to defend a universal right not to procreate, which includes a woman's right to choose abortion. Moreover, it seems indefensible to claim that anyone has an unrestricted right to procreate under current and emerging circumstances. Along with reproductive rights, it is important for our integrity and credibility to emphasize responsibilities. This includes the moral presumption that no one should reproduce beyond the replacement rate, unless one can provide a compelling moral justification to the contrary. The moral mandate for reproductive responsibility applies to both rich and poor families, Southern and Northern nations, men and women. Procreative decisions cannot be made simply on the basis of what is desired by individuals (perhaps to display their virility or satisfy customary expectations) or what is geopolitically or economically desirable for a nation or ethnic group. In light of the dangers of overpopulation, these decisions also must be made on the basis of what is good for the human community and the biosphere as wholes--and that includes no more (indeed, less if population reduction is a necessary goal) than procreative replacement, assuming that we are an international community of moral equals, functioning fairly in the distribution of procreation. Clearly, this emphasis on reproductive responsibilities demands certain rights--for example, accessible contraception, reproductive health care, gender equality, and adequate education--as means to the exercise of these responsibilities. The realization of these reproductive responsibilities and rights, moreover, will not happen spontaneously; it will entail national or even regional population planning and policies, coordinated internationally for the sake of effectiveness and fairness.

6. Magnanimity is a willing responsiveness to our duties in justice and/or benevolence that is characterized by generous sharing. Magnanimity is an essential virtue to cultivate in our citizenry because we are becoming seriously deficient in its practice. Shamefully, as a corporate entity, the United States is becoming a nation of skinflints--a nation of vast but vastly maldistributed wealth in which the wealthiest are constantly complaining that they are overtaxed and can no longer afford a variety of public services. The most furiously bashed services are welfare, immigrant services, and, of course, foreign aid.

The U.S. gave an average of $10.1 billion in overseas development assistance (ODA) in 1989-91. This amount is significant, of course, but it was 0.2% of gross national product (GNP)--less than given by all other industrialized nations. In fact, much of that aid was determined by U.S. military, geopolitical, and commercial interests, rather than by authentic development needs like reproductive services and the eradication of hunger. Yet, while global poverty is expanding, population growing, and environmental problems increasing, even this insufficient economic aid is now seriously shrinking as an ideology of self-indulgent greed and gluttony infects our nation's economic and political life.

Never has there been a greater need for magnanimity by the American people! We can begin--but not end--by increasing U.S. foreign assistance to the modest UN target of 0.7% of GDP.

Despite the diatribes against foreign aid, as well as its deficiencies which demand correction, the fact remains that aid has contributed significantly to reducing infant and maternal mortality, improving public sanitation, increasing food production, increasing literacy and various skills, promoting primary health care, expanding employment, etc. More and better aid can greatly enhance human well-being in the future.

The advancement of full human development and ecological integrity is unrealistic--nay, illusory--apart from the prevention of overpopulation and the conclusion of both under- and overconsumption. Equally, overcoming these problems is unrealistic--nay, a fantasy of the privileged--apart from the embodiment of the above moral norms in our personal lives and public policies. Contrary to the prayers and pretenses of too many of the prosperous, there is no cheap and easy way to global social and ecological well-being. Real sacrifices will be required of the haves, and the typical arguments from enlightened self-interest will not make these sacrifices appear psychologically or politically palatable. Yet, people can find real satisfactions in seeing the enhanced lives in human and biotic communities that only constrained production and reproduction on a finite planet can make possible. If privileged people must have some self-benefiting reason for moral conversion, then maybe the major motivation that advocates ought to cultivate in themselves and their societies is one that is deeply rooted in our moral traditions: Genuine joy is gained by being just and generous.

The Rev Dr James Nash was the Executive Director of the Churches' Center for Theology and Public Policy, a national ecumenical research center in Washington, DC. From Pop!ulation Press Vol 3, # 3, March/April 1997.