The Malthusian Problem

There is much concern over population growth at present. I cannot say with any certainty but the impression I get is that this concern is mainly coming from the more developed areas of the world where quality of life is better. This somewhat stands to reason as the quality of life attained in the more developed areas of the world is not sustainable. Not only is the world population growing but it is also becoming more developed as well, both of which put more strain on finite natural resources such as oil and space. As such those living least sustainably will find themselves under most pressure to change. This might just be an economic pressure but it could escalate to conflicts. Although lowering populations is only a short term solution to having an unsustainable lifestyle it is often still the favoured option of those living comfortable lives. The only real solution is living a sustainable lifestyle which would be a much bigger sacrifice to them than it is for the rest of the world hence our relative aversion to it.

People seem to forget the advantages a vast population bring when presented with the problem of unsustainable living. A huge part of our ability to live luxuriously is the efficiency brought about through division of labour. The less people we have the lower our potential efficiency in this regard. More people also means more geniuses to bring us wonderful things and advance humanity further. Scientific progress is the other major factor contributing to our present luxury. On top of this a large population helps to provide for minorities. Imagine a population so small that there was only one blind person and only one in a wheel chair, how much support would be in place and available for these people? Certainly no companies would exist making products to aid them as they would not be economically viable. More people comes out significantly ahead in pros and cons compared to less people, which can only really argue lack of space and other resources in its favour.

Simply put, any time there is a debate about the problems of population levels and growth it should always be made abundantly clear that it is part of the bigger problem of sustainability and that there is only one actual solution to which population levels have no real bearing. We could have a potentially infinite population that would survive to the end of the universe if we all lived sustainably and spread ourselves across the stars. We could have a vast population here on Earth that live as long as the Earth remains and, again, we lived sustainably. The only limit would be space yet we have proven fairly industrious at utilizing space above and below. The question the developed world dares not ask is what they would have to give up in order to actually live sustainably. Many think of returning to the land and having to live like people did a millennia ago, which is a fairly good way towards living a sustainable life yet not the only path open, which is just as well as it is a very space inefficient way to live. We either have the technology or it is at our fingertips to live very closely to how we do now and remain sustainable. The problem is that there is no infrastructure or significant government policy that supports and enforces sustainable living. As such, most of the technology has remained out of reach or undeveloped thus leaving it woefully inadequate to compete in the market. This in turn makes matters seem worse and ensures it will be harder to make a transition to a sustainable lifestyle. If someone tells you there are too many people in the world you should tell them to go and live a sustainable life themselves before they complain about population. Any reasoned logical argument against high population must concede it is only a delay tactic at best and that the only long term solution is sustainability.

There are other arguments against population beyond maintaining our current lifestyle as long as possible in terms of consumption. While some people thrive in city life and love to be surrounded by others it is not for every one. Overcrowding reduces the quality of life for people who enjoy space, nature, peace and quiet. Fortunately we are a long way of this being a valid argument against population levels. Roughly half of the global population live in crowded built up urban areas yet these area's combined only occupy about three percent of the total land area of the Earth. The population of the planet would have to drastically increase for their to be insufficient rural living areas to meet demands. We would hit the cap of natural resources and growing land as a limiting factor to further growth before we would start to run out of rural living land.

The real irony is that we think we need to control our own population levels as we have advanced beyond our environmental and evolutionary constraints. This is an arrogant and somewhat dangerous position to hold. Calling it a food chain is misleading, it, like every other natural process, is a cycle. Many things feed from humans despite the fact that we place ourselves atop the food chain. We claim we have no natural predators yet succumb all the time to various diseases. Yes, our predators are vastly smaller than us and for the most part don't consume that much of us. You might say we have antibiotics and other medicines within our arsenal against the very small predators however we operate in entirely different worlds. The very small live and die so fast that mutate far quicker than we are able. Vast populations will spring up and just as quickly die off again , like who civilizations rising and falling within just a few days. The evolutionary process for those that are very small and live very quickly relative to us happens much faster. As soon as a successful strain of something mutates it quickly multiplies and spreads. The tools we use to combat harmful bacteria and our other micro-organism predators expediate their evolution, we kill off swathes clearing the path for the few survivors to flourish. As soon as something evolves to be immune to our defences it will spread like wildfire among us. We cannot rely on evolution to protect us and are as a result locked in an ongoing scientific battle with micro-organisms to develop cures, effective antibiotics and immunisations.

You may recall from biology at school we were shown a graph for natural variation in populations over time for rabbits and foxes called the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey system. They both would undulate up and down like a sine wave however they would be slightly out of phase with one another. The fox population would rise and eat more rabbits causing their population to decline. This in turn would reduce the food supply for the foxes who would in turn start to decline in number. This would then allow the rabbits to thrive again thus restarting the whole cycle. This simplified example shows a trend that is applicable in a wide sphere of events not limited to just biology. As humanities population and density increases we improve the odds for the micro-organisms in evolving a resilient or impressively contagious strain. A graph against population levels of known human diseases and parasites and of humanity over time would not look much like the neat fox and rabbit relationship however a similar process is going on. The success of micro-organisms is far more based on adaptations than it is on resources, particularly when those resources entail human hosts which are typically abundant. While the fox and rabbit will respond more directly to the population levels of the other, the prey of the pathogen will be more inclined towards stability until an adaptation occurs in the pathogen which is then more liable to cause a sharp and rapid decline in population of their hosts. The way in which disease spread and mutate is more random and spontaneous than the slower more continual change of larger organisms. Human ecosystems are hard to isolate in the same way a rabbit and fox system is, they are also dependant on far more factors such as war and scientific discovery than it is on our predators abundance. Even so, you would see spikes and troughs such as the effect of the bubonic plague or black death in the mid fourteen century if you were to create such a graph.

It may look as if the global human population has been growing continually for a long time and is picking up pace. This is understandable and somewhat masks the very real relationship between humans and their natural predators. In the distant past humanity was more isolated into smaller ecosystems like the rabbits and foxes as our ability to travel was much more restricted. With many isolated ecosystems the undulations in human population due to the efficacy of predators would tend to average out so as to seem non-existent. As our ability to move about increased the number of effective ecosystems we occupied in regards micro-organisms fell quickly. In the modern day we effectively occupy just one huge ecosystem with the odd tiny pocked of isolated indigenous peoples such as Amazonian tribes. One of the best reasons to leave these tribes undisturbed is that they may one day be the key to the survival and continuation of our species due to their isolation from potential pathogens. Despite our ecosystems merging and falling in number we have not had an epidemic in a very long time. This is a result of the vast scientific progress occurring alongside our ability to travel more quickly and freely. By merging our ecosystems we lose the ability to average out any undulations in population as a result of our natural predators however there having not been an epidemic for such a long time means we should not expect to see any undulations any way. The only thing our prolonged and steep population growth ensures is that future epidemics will be far more severe in the ease in which they spread and the numbers that they affect.

All this is to say that population levels are not the most worthy or relevant subjects for debate. We live in an effectively closed system that is highly effective at self regulation which is often described as the Gaia hypothesis. We are not yet so above this system that we need to burden ourselves with performing its role. We can happily go on breeding and living with total disregard for the consequences and sooner or later Gaia will rebalance the scales for us. Living sustainably is one key way to limit the number of potential mechanisms by which we can upset the balance an incur a rebalancing change in the system. This however does not solve the issue of our natural predators for which we probably need to populate more isolated ecosystems to ensure our ongoing safety. In the modern world this really means populating new planets which is some way off. We may well encounter some serious epidemics that wipe out significant portions of the global population before we get round to populating new worlds however it is very unlikely that any would completely wipe us out or basically reset all progress as would be the case if only isolated human ecosystems survived. It is not in a parasites best interests to efficiently wipe out all of its hosts as that ensures its own demise as well. Natural variance within species also serves as good protection against such outbreaks.

I shall simply conclude by reiterating that attempts to limit human populations solve no long term problems and would mostly just limit our capacity as a species. Living sustainably is the only solution and ironically facilitates and maintains a greater population. A greater population also theoretically reduces the time it will take us to populate new worlds with more great minds able to work on the problem, more division of labour to make that work efficient and more pressure on space generating a demand for more. This in turn is the most obvious way in which we can escape the restraints of Gaia which will ultimately limit our population of it's own accord thus further making attempts to limit our population seem like wasted effort.