[Thomas] Malthus was certainly correct, but [hydrocarbons like] ...oil has skewed the equation over the past [two] hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of [a fraction of] nonrenewable condensed solar energy [that was] accumulated over eons of prehistory. The “green revolution” in boosting crop yields was minimally about scientific innovation in crop genetics and mostly about dumping massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides made out of fossil fuels onto crops, as well as employing irrigation at a fantastic scale made possible by abundant oil and gas. The... [industrial] age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years. Within that comfortable bubble, the idea took hold that only grouches, spoilsports, and godless maniacs considered population hypergrowth a problem, and... [even raising the issue] was indecent. ...As [hydrocarbons like] oil... [have their] reserves... toward depletion, we will indeed suddenly be left with an enormous surplus population... that the ecology of the earth will not support. No political program of birth control will avail. The people are already [living] here. The journey back to... [a subsistence lifestyle] will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hypergrowth was... a condition [of industrialization], not a problem with a solution. That is what happened, and we are stuck with it.
— James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (2005), p. 8
Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness, and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of ten billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency – an unprecedented planetary emergency. We, humans, emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over two hundred years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, ...there were 3 billion of us. There are now over seven billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least nine billion other people. Sometime towards the end of this century, there will be at least ten billion of us. Possibly more. We got to where we are now through a number of civilization- and society-shaping "events", most notably the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and... the public-health revolution. By 1980, there were four billion of us on the planet. Just 10 years later, in 1990, there were five billion of us. By this point, initial signs of the consequences of our growth were starting to show. Our demand for water – not just the water we drank but the water we needed for food production and to make all the stuff we were consuming – was going through the roof. But something was starting to happen to [the] water. Back in 1984, journalists reported from Ethiopia about a famine of biblical proportions caused by widespread drought. [...] Water, a vital resource we had thought of as abundant, was now suddenly something that had the potential to be scarce. By 2000 there were six billion of us. It was becoming clear to the world's scientific community that the accumulation of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – as a result of increasing agriculture, land use, and the production, processing, and transportation of everything we were consuming – was changing the climate. And that, as a result, we had a serious problem on our hands; 1998 had been the warmest year on record. The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. We hear the term "climate" every day, so it is worth thinking about what we actually mean by it. Obviously, "climate" is not the same as weather. The climate is one of the Earth's fundamental life support systems, one that determines whether or not we humans are able to live on this planet. It is generated by four components: the atmosphere (the air we breathe); the hydrosphere (the planet's water); the cryosphere (the ice sheets and glaciers); the biosphere (the planet's plants and animals). By now, our activities had started to modify every one of these components. Our emissions of CO2 modify our atmosphere. Our increasing water use had started to modify our hydrosphere. Rising atmospheric and [sea-surface temperature[s] had started to modify the cryosphere, most notably in the unexpected shrinking of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets. Our increasing use of land, for agriculture, cities, roads, [and] mining – as well as all the pollution we were creating – had started to modify our biosphere. Or, to put it another way: we had started to change our climate. There are now more than seven billion of us on Earth. As our numbers continue to grow, we continue to increase our need for far more water, far more food, far more land, far more transport, and far more energy. As a result, we are accelerating the rate at which we're changing our climate. In fact, our activities are not only completely interconnected with but now also interact with, the complex system we live on: [planet] Earth. It is important to understand how all this is connected.
— Stephen Emmott, 10 Billion (2013)
[...] the gains of low infant and maternal mortality and rises in population longevity—brought about in great part by harnessing fossil fuels, the agricultural revolution, modernization, and disease and injury reduction efforts—in many instances impedes rather than facilitates moving toward sustainable living. It can be argued from the ecological perspective that most public health efforts, as humanitarian as they are by intention and immediate effect, through accelerating population pressures on the environment are paradoxically hastening the destruction of the earth's habitat on which the next generation of humanity depends. It raises the concern that our perceived gains may be only illusory and temporary, with huge but unmeasured and unlinked environmental costs that will eventually lead to shorter lives of misery for our descendants.
— Harold B. Weiss, while reviewing William R. Catton's Overshoot in Public Health Reports (January-February 2009)
Scarcely more than two generations had tasted the fruits of industrialization when the growth of population was still further accelerated by truly effective death control. The role of microorganisms in producing diseases was discovered. In 1865 the practice of antiseptic surgery began. It serves... as a reasonable demarcation of the beginning of an era filled with related breakthroughs in medical technology: hygienic practices, vaccination, antibiotics, etc. The total effect of this recent series of achievements has been to emancipate mankind more and more from the life-curtailing effects of the invisible little creatures for which human tissues used to serve as sustenance. Like other prey species newly protected from their predators, we have been fruitful and have so multiplied that we have much more than "replenished" the earth with our kind.
These achievements in death control re-channeled the effects of industrialization; they increased the rate at which [the] human population could increase. More of the unprecedentedly rapid rise in apparent carrying capacity resulting from industrial drawing down of resource stocks was devoted to supporting population growth, and less was devoted to supporting enhanced living standards than might otherwise have been the case.
Death control was a real boon to the first three or four generations that experienced it. Increasingly, parents were spared bereavement during their child-rearing years, and people of all ages were spared the suffering and debilitation that infectious diseases used to inflict. Fewer children became orphaned. Fewer adults became widowed in... [their] prime years of life.
But all these benefits helped us to overshoot [the] permanent carrying capacity. For most people, as this was happening, "carrying capacity" remained an unknown phrase. The concept was absent from the paradigm by which people... perceived and understood their world. Industrialism had given us a temporary increase in opportunities — a very dangerous blessing. Death control gave us a further rapid increase in population not based on a further rise in carrying capacity. Thus, in the seven generations since 1800, [the] world population quadrupled, and mankind came into a really precarious situation.
The precariousness remained unseen by many. Looking back on a century or two of remarkable technical achievements, accompanied by [a] growth of [living] human numbers that... [were] itself culturally denned as a kind of progress (as every town aspired to become a city), minds that had not yet learned the distinction between methods of boosting carrying capacity and methods of overshooting it foresaw no insurmountable difficulty in simply repeating past breakthroughs. It was imagined, for example, that "fast breeder reactors" and other technological eggs-not-yet-hatched could be counted on to provide further increments of carrying capacity whenever nature's limits began to hurt.
During World War II, the brashly American words of a popular song proclaimed [that] "We did it before, and we can do it again!" A generation after that conflict, we seemed to be taking a demilitarized version of that cliche as the basis for presupposing the supportability of further increases in the population-technology load upon finite environments. People displayed either persistent ignorance of the carrying capacity concept or naive faith that carrying capacity could always be expanded, that limits could always be transcended. Such an assumption seemed to underlie the stubborn refusal of capitalists and Marxists alike to acknowledge that the myth of limitlessness had, at last, become obsolete. There was also the assumption that further advances in technology would necessarily enlarge carrying capacity, not reduce it. Enlargement of carrying capacity had been the role of technology in the past; however, ...there has been a reversal of this role in the industrial era. Technology has enlarged human appetites for natural resources, thus diminishing the number of us that a given environment can support.
These achievements in death control re-channeled the effects of industrialization; they increased the rate at which [the] human population could increase. More of the unprecedentedly rapid rise in apparent carrying capacity resulting from industrial drawing down of resource stocks was devoted to supporting population growth, and less was devoted to supporting enhanced living standards than might otherwise have been the case.
Death control was a real boon to the first three or four generations that experienced it. Increasingly, parents were spared bereavement during their child-rearing years, and people of all ages were spared the suffering and debilitation that infectious diseases used to inflict. Fewer children became orphaned. Fewer adults became widowed in... [their] prime years of life.
But all these benefits helped us to overshoot [the] permanent carrying capacity. For most people, as this was happening, "carrying capacity" remained an unknown phrase. The concept was absent from the paradigm by which people... perceived and understood their world. Industrialism had given us a temporary increase in opportunities — a very dangerous blessing. Death control gave us a further rapid increase in population not based on a further rise in carrying capacity. Thus, in the seven generations since 1800, [the] world population quadrupled, and mankind came into a really precarious situation.
The precariousness remained unseen by many. Looking back on a century or two of remarkable technical achievements, accompanied by [a] growth of [living] human numbers that... [were] itself culturally denned as a kind of progress (as every town aspired to become a city), minds that had not yet learned the distinction between methods of boosting carrying capacity and methods of overshooting it foresaw no insurmountable difficulty in simply repeating past breakthroughs. It was imagined, for example, that "fast breeder reactors" and other technological eggs-not-yet-hatched could be counted on to provide further increments of carrying capacity whenever nature's limits began to hurt.
During World War II, the brashly American words of a popular song proclaimed [that] "We did it before, and we can do it again!" A generation after that conflict, we seemed to be taking a demilitarized version of that cliche as the basis for presupposing the supportability of further increases in the population-technology load upon finite environments. People displayed either persistent ignorance of the carrying capacity concept or naive faith that carrying capacity could always be expanded, that limits could always be transcended. Such an assumption seemed to underlie the stubborn refusal of capitalists and Marxists alike to acknowledge that the myth of limitlessness had, at last, become obsolete. There was also the assumption that further advances in technology would necessarily enlarge carrying capacity, not reduce it. Enlargement of carrying capacity had been the role of technology in the past; however, ...there has been a reversal of this role in the industrial era. Technology has enlarged human appetites for natural resources, thus diminishing the number of us that a given environment can support.
— William R. Catton, Overshoot (1980), p. 30-31
There is no way we could keep going as we have been. The increase in human population in the 1990s... exceeded the total population in 1600. The population has grown more since 1950 than it did during the previous four million years. The reasons for our recent rapid growth are pretty clear. Although the Industrial Revolution speeded historical growth rates considerably, it was really the public-health revolution, and its spread to the Third World at the end of the Second World War, that set us galloping. Vaccines and antibiotics came all at once, and right behind came [the] population. In Sri Lanka in the late 1940s life expectancy was rising at least a year every twelve months. How much difference did this make? Consider the United States: if people died throughout this century at the same rate as they did at its beginning, America's population would be 140 million, not 270 million.
—Bill McKibben, "A Special Moment in History
", in The Atlantic (May 1998).
", in The Atlantic (May 1998).Humans collectively must ultimately face the uncomfortable question of whether Earth’s natural systems can support 8 billion or more people at a modern standard of living. Since the resource footprint of a U.S. citizen is at least four times that of the global average, the key question is whether the planet can support an increase in material throughput four times higher than present when the strain is apparent already. As noble as it may be to wish a modern living standard for an eventual ten billion or more people, it is likely that committing to such a course could result in more human suffering than would transpire under the adoption of more modest goals. The responsible path is to reduce global resource dependencies and abandon the imperative for growth starting now.
— Murphy, T., Murphy, D., Love, T., LeHew, M., & McCall, B. (2021), "Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: Developing a PLAN for the future", Energy Research & Social Science, 81, 102239
", Energy Research & Social Science, 81, 102239"These things breed like fruit flies. It's a population control issue."
— Cruella De Vill, Robot Chicken, "101 Dalmatian Reproduction"
