Holy Earth!

By whatever arcane calculation they use to measure these things, population experts have figured that this month—on the 12th, to be exact—the world’s population will reach 6 billion people. This should be a concern to anyone who cares about the environment.

It’s hard to imagine what environmental problem an exponentially growing global population does not exacerbate. Whether you’re talking air, water, soil, plants or animals—all have been adversely affected by the uncontrolled spread of humans set on exercising "dominion" over the rest of Nature.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we humans were living a lifestyle more in tune with our environment. Some people think that the planet could sustainably support an even greater human population. (We’d better hope so, since that’s the way the trend is going.) But when you combine the number of people with an economic system that is exploitative in its very nature, a political system that rewards the most rapacious, and a belief system that separates creator from creation, you have a recipe for disaster.

A look at a population graph gives an astounding picture of just how dramatic the change has been. From the beginning of humanity until about 1850, when the world population reached 1 billion, there is a horizontal line barely creeping upward. Then in the last 150 years, the line shoots straight up. It looks like someone knocked over a letter L.

Fortunately, the rate of population growth seems to be slowing down a bit from the explosive pattern of the last half-century. But the world is still expected to add about a billion people every 12 years until at least the middle of the next century. For those of us who are half a century old, that doesn’t seem that far away. You have to ask: where are we going to put all those people? And how are they going to live?

What are they going to eat? And drink? Most of the world’s ocean fisheries are already depleted. And the Green Revolution in agriculture has reached a plateau. Grain production worldwide has been dropping, along with water tables on every continent. The irrigation systems that have been the backbone of the Green Revolution are removing water from underground aquifers all over the world at a faster rate than nature is replenishing it. Clean water is becoming more and more scarce.

Global climate change isn’t helping the situation. Despite the intense rainfalls that with increasing frequency are causing problems in specific regions, much of the world (and most of the United States) is suffering drought or near-drought conditions. And greenhouse gases are building up, as developing countries try to emulate the lifestyle of the industrialized world.

This brings up one of the major dilemmas of the population problem. There is a direct correlation between poverty and population. In developed countries like the US and Western Europe, population growth is slowing, and even reversing in some cases. An affluent industrialized society, with the capital and technology to create excess wealth (and to equip a military force sufficient to protect its less-than-fair share of the market), doesn’t need to reproduce the workforce required by the labor-intensive subsistence farming practiced in most of the world.

On the other hand, the industrial world, in order to create this wealth, produces most of the toxins that are poisoning the planet. For a notorious example, the US, with 6 percent of the world’s population (third largest in the world), emits 24 percent of greenhouse gases. As developing countries like China and India (populationwise, numbers 1 and 2 respectively—although India, whose population just went over a billion last month, is projected to surpass China by the middle of next century) attempt to advance their own development by mimicking the western economic model, they will produce a greater share of global pollution. Based on what we’ve seen so far, pollution goes up as population growth rates go down. Catch-22.

But here’s another paradox. Affluent countries, with their cushion of wealth, can afford to implement environmental regulations to control their pollution. (Whether they do or not, or how strictly they enforce these regulations, is a question we’re all too familiar with.) Countries whose people are just this side of starvation often don’t have that luxury. So even though China, with a population quadruple that of the United States, produces only about half the greenhouse gases we do, Chinese cities have some of the dirtiest air in the world—mostly from burning coal.

Of course, the choice between economic growth and a clean environment is a false one—as the Chinese are discovering. The health and environmental costs of their "cheap energy" policies outweigh any economic advantage gained by ignoring the consequences of pollution. But like poor countries and poor people everywhere, they are caged in by a global market system whose dominant players have reached their current position by leaving the environmental costs out of their economic calculations, and now want to change the rules of the game. Is it any wonder that developing countries, which are often former colonies of the economic giants, feel cheated?

We can see a similar dynamic at work in high-poverty areas of wealthy countries, like here in West Virginia, where many people (though not a majority, according to polls) are willing to sacrifice environmental quality for the sake of jobs and economic growth. But here again, people are being presented with a false choice of limited options—limited to protect the political and economic power of entrenched interests, limited by an accounting scheme that leaves public health and environmental costs out of the equation, and limited by an absence of vision.

Yet even West Virginia is rich compared to most of the developing world, where too often the choice is not environment or economy, but environment or survival. One of the more serious results of forcing people into this choice has been widespread deforestation. Although industrialized nations are the world’s major consumers of commercial wood products, for nearly half the world’s population, wood is the primary energy source for heating and cooking. 80 percent of the wood harvested in developing countries is used for fuel. And for many of the world’s poorest people, "slash and burn" agriculture is the only way they know how to survive.

Worldwide, 600,000 square miles of forest have been cut down in the last ten years. In a period when the atmosphere is being choked with carbon dioxide, we’re losing trees when we most need them.

The problem of global human population is an immensely complicated one, inextricably tangled up in questions of politics, economics, race, religion, culture and ecology. It will require an enormous effort of imagination and will to solve—if indeed it can be solved. For environmentalists, it is a challenge that must be addressed, unless we just want to wait for Nature—who abhors imbalance as much as vacuums—to solve the problem for us.