Population, Consumption and the Path to Sustainability
by Robert Engelman
There is something about population that seems to stop the conversation—any
conversation—or to send it to the kinds of places about which people say: “Don’t
go there.” Yet there is something about population as well that refuses
to lie dormant for long when conversations turn to environmental sustainability
and the changes it will require in consumption and other individual behaviors.
Intellectual honesty compels us to acknowledge that the size of human populations—here,
there and everywhere—has much to do with the environmental challenges we
face in the 21st century. To reduce this statement to essentials, consider the
long view. Suppose human population had somehow stabilized at its estimated level
of 2,000 years ago: 300 million. Then let’s suppose that all other aspects
of history—technological development, social and behavioral change, political
evolution—had unfolded essentially as actually happened, but in the context
of this stationary. (In truth, population dynamics are too closely linked to
these other aspects of history for this to have been possible, but ignore that
for now.) Would 300 million people need to puzzle about the impact of their consumption
on the atmosphere, on freshwater resources, on the web of plant and animal species
around them? Sure, in some places, but not globally. It’s pretty plain
that environmental problems would scarcely wallop us with the magnitude or urgency
they’ve taken on in today's world of 6.5 billion human beings.
Why is our consumption behavior, especially American consumption behavior,
so environmentally destructive in the opening decade of the new century? In the
1940s automobile gasoline mileage was abysmal, pollution control was non-existent,
and the typical toilet polluted six gallons of drinking water to evacuate the
smallest amounts of human waste. For certain resources and waste streams, the
average American’s consumption is less today than it was then. But even
with lower consumption (and for other resources and waste streams, of course
per-capita consumption has risen) there are enough of us to matter. We matter
not so much individually but collectively when we waste natural resources, when
we shop till we drop, and when we vaporize petroleum cheaper than water to fuel
our cars and burn 100-million-year-old coal drive our air conditioners. And if
the rest of the world follows our behavioral example—and how could we argue
they should not?—we will need at least another planet or two to avoid climatological,
ecological and natural-resource collapse. We don’t have those planets,
just this one.
Each environmental issue that calls our attention to consumption-related behavior
raises key questions as well about our own numbers, their past and their future.
When land use changes from forest to farms, or from farms to suburban sprawl,
is not the growing numbers of people anxious to feed themselves and to find a
place to live part of such change? As the global atmosphere shifts and the climate
warms, as species blink out for all time, as wells run dry from India to the
suburbs of Washington, D.C., can we find long-term solutions solely through changes
in behavior, technology, social organization, or attitudes about nature while
populations grow indefinitely? Over the long term, honest answers to these questions
make clear, environmental sustainability demands an end point at which the flow
of natural resources reaches an essentially steady state, or a sustainable ecological
cycle of waste returning to resource in a balanced way. Such a condition is all
but impossible to visualize as a lasting state without another key component:
an essentially stabilized or modestly shrinking human population.
Stated this simply, these statements probably would elicit at most only brief
argument among those who accept today's rapid pace of environmental change as
an urgent and immediate challenge. The debate begins at the next logical point
in the discussion: implications. What would we, could we, should we actually
do about human population growth? Can population trends be altered? If so, can
they be altered without violating core human values about the worth of all human
beings and the freedom of all to make decisions about their own childbearing?
Does the idea of altering population trends lead inevitably to “population
control,” to walls erected to keep out immigrants, and to coercive policies
on childbearing that punish poor women for environmental problems often the fault
of wealthy people living far away?
And for those thinking about sustainability from a wide perspective, how do
population and consumption fit together? Must we choose, and work on one without
working on the other? Does population growth really matter in a world where consumption
is so staggeringly inequitable, where more people could live decently if only
some the rest of us learned to live well enough, with less waste and less stuff?
Mahatma Gandhi argued that “the world has enough for everyone's need,
but not for everyone's greed.” When he said this, however, the world had
fewer than 2.5 billion people. Today’s 6.5 billion could easily grow to
8 billion, 9 billion or more as we struggle to turn around our wasteful and destructive
consumption patterns. In some watersheds, for example, even minimal per-capita
water withdrawals today dry up wells and drain rivers. Population continues to
grow in the wealthy and high-consuming United States, faster than in almost all
other industrialized countries. Population grows most rapidly in poor countries
where per-capita consumption rates are (with some notable exceptions) quite low.
Many of these same nations—the two biggest, China and India, are prime
examples—are surging economically as their populations continue to grow.
Many people in these populations aspire to American-scale lifestyles. At the
same time, present or imminent population decline is keeping some Europeans,
Japanese and South Koreans awake at night. Yet some consumption patterns even
on these modestly consuming countries are fundamentally unsustainable. Clearly
the intersection of population and consumption is a wide and diverse one that
resists oversimplification.
Is consumption in industrialized countries the villain, or is it population
growth in developing countries? Or is it possible that the dynamics of population
and consumption interact over time in both North and South, in developed and
developing countries, in ways that are complicated but that nonetheless can be
brought into the light for reasoned and courteous discussion?
There’s good news and bad news on the demographic front. Population
dynamics worldwide offer one of the few hopeful trends related to the challenge
of sustainability. Over the last few decades, population growth has been—the
word construction is awkward but accurate—slowing fast. On average, women
the world over have about half as many children as they did when the international
family planning movement coalesced in the 1950s and ‘60s. Girls attend
school in higher proportions and into later grades, and women have better access
to privileges that once were reserved for men. Women marry later, and the average
age of reproduction has edged up over the last few decades. All of this contributes
to reductions in rates of population growth for the right reasons—because
more births are intended, and hence more children wanted and loved. Already more
than 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries in which women
are having fewer children than needed over the long term to sustain a stationary
population.
The trend toward population stability or gradual decline, however, is uneven
and at risk. In sub-Saharan Africa and in many parts of Asia, both fertility
rates and unmet need for the contraception that could bring them down remain
stubbornly high. Governments—especially our own in the United States—are
doing much less than is needed to provide the comprehensive reproductive health
services that could improve individual lives as well as facilitating later pregnancies
and smaller families. The hope brought to this arena by international agreements
in the 1990s is in danger of fading as more governments bristle at discussing,
much less providing for, reproductive health and the empowerment of women. The
terms family planning and population barely survive in international governmental
discussion.
Perhaps most frightening of all is the real prospect in some places of population
declines driven more by increases in death rates than by decreases in birth rates.
This has long been the worst fear of those who take population concerns seriously.
Even the much-reviled population essayist Thomas Robert Malthus was warm-blooded
enough to clarify that the last thing he or any society would want would be reductions
in life expectancy and increases in death rates. In defiance of the ongoing rise
in global life expectancy for the past two centuries, however, the HIV/AIDS pandemic
in some countries, and heart disease and alcoholism in a few others, have been
boosting mortality alarmingly. Already one small nation, Swaziland, is in the
unprecedented position of ending population growth while its total fertility
rate is above the world average, at three children per woman. The tragic reason
for this anomaly is that in Swaziland, due to sky-high prevalence of HIV/AIDS
among young females, the average woman must have at least three children just
to guarantee her survival by a single daughter.
No one who works for environmental sustainability can find this any solace
in this kind of population “stability.” The prospect of death-driven
demographic decline makes public health advocates of all thinking environmentalists.
And as we scan the landscape of looming water shortage, global warming and emerging
epidemics, it also makes environmental advocates of thinking public health specialists.
In today’s world, there are no magic bullets, just a range of interlinked
strategies for bringing about real environmental sustainability, economic sufficiency,
and universal health. Addressing human population growth remains one of these
strategies, most importantly by assuring that everyone on the planet who seeks
to plan pregnancy and childbearing can do so, on her own terms, in good health.
Robert Engelman is at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C. His book,
Uncrowding Eden: Population, the Lives of Women, and the Return of Nature, will
be published by Island Press in 2007
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