THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT

(by George Grace)

1. The Human Predicament

The predicament that I'm referring to is that the population and "standard of living " of the human species have already grown beyond the long-range carrying capacity of the earth. [Click here for comment on population numbers]
(Although I use the familiar term "standard of living" here, the essential issue is the actions of the people in their guise as "consumers", and most essentially, the resulting decrease in those resources of the earth that are necessary to sustain life).

That is, the earth cannot support the number of people living today--at least at their present standard of living--for more than a very short time. Its carrying capacity will be all the more rapidly overwhelmed if the rate at which existing resources are being exhausted should continue to increase--that is, if either population or per capita consumption continues to grow. [Click here for comment on exceeding the carrying capacity of the earth]

The predicament is made more serious by the fact that there is little reason to hope that either the population or per capita rate of consumption can be reduced; it is made more serious still by the fact that there is little reason to hope that they even can be kept from continuing to grow for as far as we can see into the future . [Click here for comment on obstacles to reversing growth]

Therefore, not only is our present position unsustainable for any appreciable length of time into the future, but moreover the core policies of modern world culture, so far from working to head off disaster, actually accelerate the rush toward it. Clearly the future of the species, and very possibly of the planet as a habitat for living beings, depends on a policy reversal. Clearly the consequences of any policies that tend to promote economic growth or facilitate further population increase (such as any policy designed to keep anyone alive or to inhibit any means of birth control) should be critically examined. Clearly we should undertake at once to design and implement plans that improve the long-range prospects even at the cost of standard of living in the immediate term. But at this point we encounter the next problem: that our institutional structures--both public and private--are so designed that they simply do not permit significant planning beyond the short range. [Click here for comment on the limited purview of our institutions]

As a final note, it's sometimes said that even if we do nothing at all, nature will eventually see to it that our dissipation of the life-bearing resources of the earth ends and that human population is brought under control. In a way, that's certainly true. At the very least we can be sure that humans will quit dissipating the resources when there are no more resources to dissipate, and that human population will be reduced at any point in time to at most the number (which may eventually be zero) that the remaining resources are sufficient to keep barely alive. But there is certainly every reason to expect that nature's methods will be even more painful than the methods that we would have to employ today to bring ourselves under control.

The very quality--unbridled exploitation of natural resources--that has made our culture all-dominant in the world today is the quality that prevents it from having any long-term viability. Or that prepares an eventual Götterdämmerung in which we depart and take much or all of the rest of life with us.

COMMENTS

1. COMMENT ON POPULATION NUMBERS

I feel the need to say something about how insensitive people today have become to the reality behind population numbers, how population figures have ceased to have any absolute meaning for us. A billion people is (for me at least) an unimaginable mass, but so is a million. The only way I know of to imagine the two masses (a billion people vs. a million) differently is by means of intellectual exercises such as trying to figure out how much space each mass would occupy if all of the individuals were assembled together, or how long it would take shake each person's hand.
-----This relative rather than absolute way of thinking about population figures makes it possible, for example, for Henry Kissinger to say (as he reportedly did) about Micronesia, "There's only 70,000 people out there, who gives a damn?" Of course, it's true that 70,000 people is a small number in one relative sense--it is a small figure for the population of a political entity in the modern world. But from another perspective, it's an enormous number of people. 70,000 people would include all of the people I've ever known personally--all of the individuals who have ever meant anything personally to me--and a lot more. And I presume the same is true for anyone else. My point is that 70,000 people is a number too large to be comprehensible in an absolute sense. We've come not to think of population figures as having anything to do with individual human beings, but only to think of them in terms of relative figures in statistical tables. [Backup]

2. COMMENT ON EXCEEDING THE CARRYING CAPACITY OF THE EARTH

I certainly have no intention of attempting to "prove" the case here. (In fact, I hasten to point out to anyone whose mental health requires more sanguine assumptions that--as the lawyers have by now made clear to all of us--a plausible case for a "reasonable doubt"--about this or any other proposition--can always be made.) However, for anyone left who really doesn't know what I'm talking about, the following mention of some of the kinds of indications I have in mind might help:
-----The world's supply of cultivable topsoil being reduced every year by erosion, some of the best agricultural land being paved over every year, advance of deserts.
-----An ever-increasing number of fish species being essentially fished-out.
-----Declining quality of the air and of the water available for drinking.
-----Primary forests (presumably irreplaceable) being cut down because of population pressure and/or the demand for timber.
-----Large numbers of plant and animal species being extinguished.
-----There are various other developments that are less well understood but that may also be reducing the carrying capacity of the planet, such as acid rain, reduction of the ozone layer, increase in "greenhouse gases", etc.
(2008 note: The development of greenhouse gases certainly seems well enough understood for us to be concerned about now!) [Backup]

3. COMMENT ON OBSTACLES TO REVERSING GROWTH

Even an attempt to reduce the rate of consumption is hard to imagine in a world culture where stimulating greater economic growth is constantly proclaimed as a primary objective. It is also hard to imagine in a culture where increasing the "standard of living" of the entire population is also constantly proclaimed as a primary objective, and where standard of living is understood as being closely linked to levels of consumption.
-----Reduction of the population size also presents great difficulties. I believe we may safely characterize any proposal to reduce the population by doing away with already-living people (no matter what the means or how those to be done away with were to be chosen) as "unthinkable" in the existing cultural climate. The only alternative that this seems to leave would be reducing the birth rate to something below the level of replacement.
-----However, that is easier said than done. China provides an example of this. It has made the most ambitious attempt at controlling population in this way that I'm aware of in recent times. But the measures it took have on the one hand been insufficient to achieve their purpose, and at the same time they have been judged unacceptable by the most influential moral arbiters of the modern world culture. I suppose that it couldn't be said to have been proved that no birth-control measures could ever exist that would be both stringent enough actually to reduce population size and at the same time would be judged morally acceptable by the world community, but the prospects of finding any certainly seem unpromising.
-----But it hardly matters anyway, because, whether or not a morally- (or read "politically-", if you prefer) acceptable program of birth control could be devised, it is hard to imagine that the consequences of such a program would be found acceptable. The reason is that such a program would rapidly lead to the familiar problem of an "aging population". In my experience, whenever any country has experienced a temporarily-declining birth rate, it has quickly begun looking for measures to stimulate an increase in births. Why? Because an aging population has consequences that are considered undesirable. Its most obvious consequence is that there come to be too few earners supporting too many retired people. But there are also too few of military age, too much demand on the medical services, too little flexibility and imagination in the working and voting populations, etc. Such a country is seen as being at a competitive disadvantage. But even if all countries agreed to proceed simultaneously, it would be expected to lead to a population of reduced vitality. [Back up]

4. COMMENT ON THE LIMITED PURVIEW OF OUR INSTITUTIONS

Many people seem to believe that the people in charge, government and maybe business leaders, are the problem--that if they would just decide to do the right thing, they could make everything work out. I think that's entirely wrong. In the first place, no one can really know what the "right thing" to do is. The world is much too complicated for anyone to be able to estimate at all accurately the results of any course of action. But in the second place, these leaders have constituencies who very often would not tolerate their doing the "right thing", even if they had been able to determine what it was, and who would be prepared to replace them very promptly with others who would do what the constituents want instead.
-----For example, I can't imagine that any candidate for high political office could afford openly to acknowledge the existence of the problem I'm describing here in anything like its full scope. Any candidate who mentioned it could immediately be asked what he/she proposed to do about it, and any plan to solve it--any plan that was not patently unrealistic--would call for sacrifices that would appall the voters. The voters in such a case would surely demand, and be offered, candidates who were prepared to maintain that there was a reasonable doubt that the problem even existed, and/or that, at worst, whatever problem did exist could be managed relatively painlessly. [Back up]

For supporting information on a number of the points made here, see Jay Hanson's page and links.

I think this must have been originally posted on the Web in 1996 or 1997.
I've more recently made minor format changes and, on 3 January 2008, inserted a brief note