The idea that the world is overpopulated is not new. Throughout history, people have always fought over resources. There has always been greed, hoarding, and injustice. And so there have always been wars, as well as fears about having “too many people” to share the resources.
World Population Split in Half, 2016
Even though the world is still mostly empty, we now have 100 times more people on the planet than we did 3,000 years ago. The global population has grown at a fairly steady rate, for many thousands of years (with some drops due to war and disease). But in the past few centuries, because of medical and agricultural breakthroughs, the global population has been growing more quickly, And at the same time, people are progressively living longer, healthier, and safer lives.
The main culprits for poverty have always been injustice, corruption, and greed. And there is little evidence for a correlation between global population growth and poverty. This is because we humans are always finding ways to make natural resources work more efficiently. Dr. Erle C. Ellis explains why:
There really is no such thing as a human carrying capacity. We are nothing at all like
bacteria in a petri dish.
Why is it that highly trained natural scientists don’t understand this? My experience is likely
to be illustrative. Trained as a biologist, I learned the classic mathematics of population
growth — that populations must have their limits and must ultimately reach a balance with
their environments. Not to think so would be to misunderstand physics: there is only one
earth, of course!
It was only after years of research into the ecology of agriculture in China that I reached the
point where my observations forced me to see beyond my biologists’s blinders. Unable to
explain how populations grew for millenniums while increasing the productivity of the same
land, I discovered the agricultural economist Ester Boserup, the antidote to the
demographer and economist Thomas Malthus and his theory that population growth tends
to outrun the food supply. Her theories of population growth as a driver of land productivity
explained the data I was gathering in ways that Malthus could never do.
You can read the full article by Dr. Ellis in the New York Times: Overpopulation Is Not The Problem
Why Does The World Feel Overpopulated?
For most people, the experience of being in a big, crowded, uncomfortable city feels like overpopulation. And that feeling is more powerful than legitimate demographic and sociological data.
Of course, most people in the world don’t live or work in big cities. (If you live in a big city, you might forget sometimes forget that fact.)
But influential decision-makers do live in big cities. And after influential ideas about overpopulation were spread throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, it was impossible to stop them.
Like a spiritual enthusiast who blames every problem on demons, or an anti-vaxxer who blames every disease on vaccines, Malthusian ideology has fostered the sentiment that our economic and social issues mysteriously arise from a crisis of overpopulation.
Famous 20th Century Malthusians
“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
–Mikhail Gorbachev, former U.S.S.R. president“I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.” Prince Philip, implying that human population needed to be reduced in order to preserve the Amazon rainforest. (Ironically, Amazon forests were largely cut down in order to facilitate cheaper beef exports to Europe, which had nothing to do with overpopulation in South America or anywhere else.)
“I hate Indians… The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” –Winston Churchill, whose military policies in India created the Bengali Famine of 1943, killing 2 million people
Saying that overpopulation causes poverty is a classic example of victim-blaming. Don’t blame the victims. Blame injustice.
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