Population, Resources, and Human Idealism

by Richard Heinberg

Al Bartlett, retired professor of physics at the University of Colorado, developed a lecture in the early 1970s that he has since delivered over 2000 times. Titled Arithmetic, Population, and Energy, the talk takes his audience along on an exploration of the meaning of steady growth (so many percent per year)—which is of course the sacred basis of all modern economies. As Bartlett makes clear, no steady rate of growth in population or resource consumption is sustainable.

During the course of the lecture, he asks, “Well, what can we do about this? What makes the population problem worse, and what reduces it?” On the screen he projects a slide with two columns of words. In the left-hand column are the principal factors leading to population growth; in the right, factors leading to a decrease of population.

Ignorance of the Problem

Bartlett notes that population growth will cease at some point: the mathematics assures us of that (otherwise, in just a few centuries, the entire surface of the planet would be covered with humans). Moreover, we need not do anything to solve the population problem; nature will take care of that for us. Sooner or later, from the right-hand column nature will choose some method or methods of limiting human numbers. But the options chosen may not be to our liking. The only way we can avoid having to live with (or die by) nature’s choices is to proactively choose for ourselves which options from the right-hand column we would prefer voluntarily to implement. Hesitating in our choice, or failing to implement it, merely forces nature’s hand.

Toward the end of his lecture, Bartlett quotes Isaac Asimov, from an interview with Bill Moyers recorded in 1989. Moyers asked Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?” Asimov replied:
“It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: if two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to stay as long as you want for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom; it should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, Aren’t you through yet? and so on. In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive [overpopulation]. Convenience and decency cannot survive [overpopulation]. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one person matters.”

All of this is dreary and distressing, and that’s why most people prefer simply to avoid the topic. None of us wants to have to choose anything from Bartlett’s second column. Even the most agreeable items (abstention, abortion, contraception, and small families) are controversial, especially if proposed as anything other than individual, voluntary options. Stopping immigration is enormously controversial, as immigrants already often face discrimination in many forms. In each case, one or another group would object that human rights are being sacrificed. Yet nature does not negotiate: the Earth is a bounded sphere, and human population growth and consumption growth will be reined in. So it appears we must give up at least some human rights if we are to avoid nature’s choices—which have traditionally consisted of famine, disease, and war.

Should we then throw human rights to the wind? Capital punishment, corporal punishment, compulsory infanticide or abortion—wouldn’t adopting these as policy be equivalent to rolling back two or more centuries of gains in humanitarian thinking and social practice? And could such policies ever gain hold in a truly democratic society, or does the avoidance of demographic collapse thus also imply authoritarian governance?

I don’t think it has to. And I’m not about to give up on humanitarianism. But there is an essential lesson here. If we want peace, democracy, and human rights, we must work to create the ecological condition essential for these things to exist: i.e., a stable human population at—or slightly less than—the environment’s long-term carrying capacity.
This is a lesson that ancient humans internalized, to one degree or another. But during the first half of the fossil-fuel era we could afford to forget it: we were creating new temporary carrying capacity left and right. We could dream of “freedom of the bathroom”—human rights to food, education, health care, housing, and so on—no matter how many of us there were. Now, as that phantom carrying capacity is set to disappear, and as the human population is overshooting the natural limits of topsoil, water, fish, and fuels, the ideals we have come to hold are being threatened.

I do not advocate an absolute ecological determinism: even given population pressure and resource depletion, some societies do better than others (at least temporarily) at maintaining a humane social environment. Peak Oil won’t necessarily lead to Soylent Green—unless we ignore the lesson.

To do so—to think that we can advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis—is both intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating.

The longer we put off choosing the nicer methods of achieving demographic stability, the more likely the nasty ones become, whether imposed by nature or by some fascistic regime.

The proponents of fascistic “solutions” are likely to justify their calls for war and ethnic cleansing with an appeal to human nature: we must abandon our recently acquired squeamishness and sentimentality and do what any self-respecting cave-man would have done when faced with a resource crisis—make sure that it is they who starve or are exterminated, and that it is our genes that are passed along.

Human nature does indeed contain the potential for demographic competition, even to the point of genocide. But it is important to remember that the real “cave men”—our hunter-gatherer ancestors—lived by sharing and enjoyed a gift economy. Our modern “sentimentality,” in the form of concerns for equity and the welfare of those who would otherwise be left behind, is rooted in ancient sensibilities.

Yet while hunter-gatherers embodied the egalitarian ideal, we must remember that their ethic also included the imperative to hew to ecological limits. Infanticide was the last resort when contraception and the suppression of fertility through extended lactation and maintenance of low levels of body fat failed.

An ethic of human rights, of sharing, and of equity without a practically expressed awareness of ecological limits is a setup for disaster. But demographic competition by way of fascism, as a response to population-resource crises, is an admission of failure; and it is less an expression of human nature than of the ugly habits formed through the past few thousand civilized years of extreme inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism.
The longer we wait, the fewer our options. Social liberals and progressives who fail to talk about population and resource issues and propose workable solutions are merely helping to create their own worst nightmare.

Richard Heinberg is the best-selling author of three books on Peak Oil, including The Party's Over, and PowerDown. A Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, he is the recipient of the M. King Hubbert Award for Excellence in Energy Education. This excerpt from his recent book, Peak Everything, is reprinted with permission of the author.