Comment by Peter Boyle
[This is a reply to the article "Population and the environment" in our October 28 issue by Jenny Goldie, president of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP).]
Jenny Goldie doesn't have to persuade Green Left Weekly readers that 2 billion people are malnourished or that, even with its present population, a wealthy, highly educated and technologically advanced society like Australia is wreaking havoc on the environment. To get rid of the straw arguments, let's also agree that immigration won't solve global social or environmental problems. Goldie also doesn't have to convince most readers that effective contraception should be available to all women who want it.
In short, there is no argument about whether the world is in serious crisis. The disagreement is about causes and solutions.
AESP's primary "solution" is to stop or severely restrict immigration, while increasing foreign aid and encouraging population control in underdeveloped countries. This is not a solution to global problems; it would not even make a serious impact on environmental destruction in Australia.
Obviously, any given ecological space can be overfilled by an indefinite increase in human (or any other) population. But what constitutes "too many" people for the environment is not a simple matter of mathematics, nor of natural laws, which is the way AESP portrays it. Crucial is a complex interaction of social relations, technology and nature.
More than a third of the world's population is not fed adequately. A major ecological crisis is already upon us. But both of those statements were true a century ago, when the world's population was much smaller than it is today.
A dramatic increase in global population has coincided with a dramatic increase in environmental destruction over the last 200 years. Put two startling facts together and it is easy — but a logical error — to infer that one caused the other. Both may be products of other, less obvious, causes.
Greenhouse gas build-up was already under way at the turn of the century. If the world population of 1900 had remained constant since then, global warming would still be a real problem. AESP may argue that a constant population would have slowed global warming; they may even be right, depending on what other assumptions are made. But it is at least equally true that greenhouse gas accumulation could have been slowed (or even reversed) by a timely switch to non-fossil-fuel energy production. By what logic is population deemed to be a more warming than socioeconomic and technological factors?
Goldie's article displays a tendency to blame everything — not just environmental destruction — on population. Thus she describes recent violent attacks on refugees in Germany by neo-Nazi thugs as the "outcome of local inhabitants being pushed out of jobs by immigrants". In fact, most workers in east Germany, including immigrants, were pushed out of jobs by the west German takeover and destruction of their industry.
Reducing all evils to a single cause has a name: scapegoating.
IPAT-omania
Some environmentalists — mostly from the wealthy North — seem to suffer from "IPAT-omania", wrote Anuradha Vittachi in the September New Internationalist. The populationists' favourite equation, (environmental) Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology, is a misleading simplification which hides the main culprits.
The problem with the formula, explained Vittachi, is that it leaves out the biggest contributor to environmental destruction — the grossly inequitable power and socio-economic relations between people and between North and South. This missing ingredient links and determines trends in population, affluence and environmentally destructive technologies.
The I=PAT formula distracts us from a statistic as astounding as the growth of the world's population from two billion to five and a half billion in this century: the billion who live in the industrialised countries consume five-sixths of the world's resources (70% of energy, 75% of metals, 85% of wood, 60% of food). The North also produces 70% of all carbon emissions and most of the world's toxic waste.
If the present inequitable world order continues, the South's population would have to quadruple before it consumes as many resources as the North. Should we conclude that the best solution is to drastically reduce the population in the North, perhaps by running a lottery to select 75% of the population to be immediately banished to sub-Saharan Africa or to India?
This sort of drastic measure would make more "sense" than the ecologically destructive North closing its doors to immigration and preaching population control to the South.
Cause or effect?
Paradoxically, those who blame population for most of the world's ills show little serious interest in what causes high rates of population growth. They usually assert or imply that it is due to ignorance, religious beliefs or similarly tenuous "causes". In fact, underdevelopment and poverty are the main causes of high population growth in the South, as Frances Moore Lappe and Rachel Schurmann demonstrated in Taking Population Seriously (Earthscan, 1988). They explained the connection in this way:
1. Without adequate land or secure tenure, and with no old-age support from the government or any other source outside the family, many poor people view children as critical to their own survival.
2. If the threat of death is ever present, parents naturally want to have more children so that some survive.
3. Educating and empowering women lowers birth rates — not so much because women learn how to limit birth but more because women are empowered. On the other hand, patriarchal values are reinforced by poverty and underdevelopment.
This social perspective on population explains why, as Goldie admits, coercive population campaigns (in the absence of economic and social development) have failed. It also reveals why education campaigns and the provision of contraceptives, while important in themselves, are not enough.
If it is known that underdevelopment means high population growth, why has there not been a rush to enhance development? Why was the modest beginning at development in the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s reversed in the 1980s? The answer is that the majority of the world's population is kept in conditions of underdevelopment in order to guarantee the profits of the giant monopolies which control world trade and the earth's resources.
Strategies
Differing views of the global social and environmental crises imply different strategies for dealing with them. One possibility would be for the billion in the wealthy North to continue their disproportionate use of resources while trying to keep their borders closed to increasing refugee pressure from the South.
An alternative strategy would be to address the inequitable distribution of resources, to promote ecologically sustainable development in the South and a move to sustainable practices in the North.
The second strategy, of course, requires serious social changes in the North. That is why a version of the first strategy is being implemented, driven by the interests of a powerful elite. Campaigns against population as such buttress this strategy ideologically, hiding its real nature in a barrage of preaching to the victims about contraception and individual responsibility. This causes the stubborn odour of racism which lingers around populationism, regardless of its proponents' intentions.
There is also a detectable note of pessimism in the AESP arguments. That much misused slogan "think globally, act little more than despair when Goldie concludes by urging that each country batten down the hatches, cope as best it can and forget the rest of the world.
But if it's really too late to act globally, closing the doors won't even buy the majority of people in the North a single lifetime of ignorant bliss. The greenhouse effect, the ozone hole and wars will not respect Australia's national boundaries.
Is it too late? Highlighting population statistics can give the impression that global population will continue to rise exponentially. However, studies by the United Nations indicate that global population will not continue to rise indefinitely, but will stabilise at between 11 and 14 billion people. With social justice and development, this plateau point can be lowered and much suffering can be avoided.
According to the UN Population Fund, there is even enough farmland to grow food for 14 billion people with technology available today. Experiments in organic farming also show that productivity need not be lowered if we move away from the anti-environmental farming methods dictated by the chemical industry.
This is not to say that we should be complacent about the prospect of 14 billion people or about the ecological and social crises. It is to say that the real reasons for these crises are political. They have to do with anti-environmental production for profit, with grossly distorted land ownership and with transnational corporations dictating that starving nations grow luxury crops for Northern consumption to pay unjust national debts.