Fewer people use fewer resources — The means whereby we can preserve both our natural resources, and more generally our environment, have become increasingly popular points of conversation over the past couple of decades — and for a variety of very good reasons. Energy dependence is at least partly responsible for dragging the west into conflicts with other cultures and political groups. There is significant evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is degrading parts of the atmosphere responsible for keeping solar radiation off our tender heads, not to mention the your sundry icecaps. There are a lot fewer fish in the sea than there used to be, and a lot more trash — also markedly fewer right whales. It’s certainly worth noting that not only the extinction of individual species, but the consequent disruption of the ecosystems in which they previously thrived, at the hands of human hunters has historical precedent; for instance, the Maori hunting of New Zealand’s large flightless birds led to the extinction of both the moas and the Haast’s eagles that hunted moas as a primary food source. As a more general observation: many of the planet’s resources are finite; if we use them without regard for this simple fact, we will run out of them, resulting in a very difficult life on a very ugly world.





So, I’m certainly in favor of a more sustainable way of life for our peculiar species. What confounds me, and perhaps I’ve just been talking with and listening to the wrong people at the wrong time, is that I’ve never heard a single other person bring up population growth as an issue to be addressed in the development of sustainable living. In fact, just a few weeks ago President Obama reminded me via Hulu that being a good father is the most important job in a man’s life (bad luck if you’re sterile — I suppose you’ll have to find something trivial like practicing medicine or engineering highways to fill your day…but I digress). Certainly, it’s come up that there’s a whole lot of humanity out there, and they can’t all consume resources like we do in the United States, or we’d be in serious and relatively immediate danger of running out. It’s pretty rare for someone to suggest, though, that maybe we should try making fewer babies.





I’ll suggest it. Maybe we should try making fewer babies; it’s something to consider. Presumably if we had a much smaller population, it would not only result in a cheerier mother earth, but also allow us to retain a reasonably high standard of living in the doing. What I intend in the following text is to explicate and evaluate a few reasons why we might not take this as our primary route to sustainability.





Babies are nice — Humans are fairly well hard-wired to breed, as far as I can tell empirically. People like making babies and they like raising children, or at minimum they usually think that they are going to like raising children. Humans (and bacteria) who weren’t all that interested in extending their family trees just weren’t very successful at passing on that trait. The family structure is also a part of our culture: one marries and produces the most charming, best looking and smartest children, and puts bumper stickers about it on one’s car. If that’s not a big part of your life-plan, you tend to be looked at a little askance, just a little. Seeing as it’s difficult enough to cajole people into turning off lights when they’re not in the room, or driving cars that don’t burn as much fuel as a Learjet, or lifting up the toilette seat at the appropriate times, it’s probably going to be no easy task to get them not to go forth and multiply, even if they agree in principle that restraint would be a swell idea. Of course, by producing a few (or several) offspring, they’re deceasing the chances that any of their numerous descendents have of living in a particularly desirable world, which might be worth mentioning to them.





I look at it this way: in most circumstances in our society, it takes two individuals to make a baby, and these two persons are usually a couple (at least if their goal is to make the baby). I mean this purely descriptively, and there are significant exceptions, but I’m concerned with this most usual scenario since it presently describes the vast majority of instances that I am trying to address. Now, if each couple had one baby, the world’s human population would gradually decrease, each generation being half the size of the previous. If each couple produced two offspring, the population would remain stable. More than two babies, and population grows at an exponential rate — say if each couple has three children: each generation is 1.5x the size of the previous. So, no one’s saying you can’t have a child of your own in order to fulfill your evolutionarily induced desire to see the genetic combination of yourself and your mate grow into an adult person. Heck, if the global population seems to be at a good place, go ahead and have two. Perhaps the number of siblings one has effects one’s development? Well, if you think that children should come in packages of three for their own benefit, make one baby and adopt two. It might not be an ideal fulfillment of the desire for a full family, but it is probably more amenable to most than simply raising fewer children than they want, and certainly better than running out of key natural resources.





“Standard of living” is capitalist pig code talk — That is to say, there might be something, or any number of things, seriously wrong with the way we live our lives in contemporary society; if we “lowered” our standard of living to one less focused on buying things we don’t need and that don’t make us happy we would solve a lot of our problems that way. Any plan to save the environment while maintaining a lifestyle of consumerist “plenty” is corrupt to begin with.





I’m not unsympathetic to a softer version of this argument. Riding around on the Boston underground for the past few months, I’ve come to the (informal) conclusion that people don’t look very happy. Many, many of them don’t, anyway. Maybe they just don’t like riding in closed tin containers with lots of other people they don’t know. That could be part of it; however, I have come up with another partial explanation (with some help from Karl Marx): human beings don’t like working from 9-5 at jobs in which they aren’t at all interested; a lot of people do it, and it’s not really what we evolved to do. Life has been developing on earth for roughly 3.5 billion years; on a geological time scale, cubicles are a relative latecomer. So, when we’re not working, we buy things to distract ourselves from the fact that we dedicate most of our energy to doing something we don’t especially want to do. By buying things, we generate the need for people to do jobs that they don’t enjoy, and they in turn feel the need to buy things and keep us in our jobs (that we don’t enjoy). Perhaps, if we made a concerted effort to live more simply, our time would be spent doing things with which we feel more connected, and as a result of this we wouldn’t want to buy all of the things that constitute a “high standard of living” after all.





Obviously, that’s just a sketch of a much larger set of economic and philosophical theories, and at present I’m not interested in proving whether consumerism is or is not the bane of our civilization. What I am interested in is whether the equation of consumer society with a high living standard constitutes a sufficiently nuanced stance. It may be true that much of modern human “leisure” activity is a desperate attempt to escape undesirable lives, an attempt that only digs us deeper into them. Be that as it may, it does not follow that everything our natural resources are spent on does not, or under the right conditions could not, constitute some of the elements of true happiness. Medical technology occurs to me as something that we want to preserve. It would be nice if we could have flying vehicles that allow us to experience, from time to time, the exquisite beauties of nature and human civilization first hand. I’m also a fan of gas and electric ovens, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, wikipedia and JSTOR, to name just a few modern artifacts I think I genuinely enjoy and appreciate.





Let’s also remember that while population reduction might allow a continuation of our way of life, or one distinctly similar to it, it does not follow that we must keep that way of life if we reduce our population. We could both simplify and reduce. On the other hand, if population expands indefinitely, we will eventually run out of resources such as ground water and arable land, which are pretty important to any lifestyle, no matter how simple (assuming that medicine is retained to a degree that allows global population to expand).





Fewer scientific breakthroughs — It sounds odd, but bear with me a moment. Let us start from the premise that a certain percent of the population has the necessary talent and inclination to become great geneticists. Let’s say, very hypothetically, that this number is 2% and that there are a hundred human beings in the world. That means that there are limited number of persons, two persons, working away at a very large field, perhaps one that will never be exhausted. They can only do so much, and more of the potential discoveries would be made if there were four geneticists instead. If we assume, I think reasonably, that there is some conceptual synergy between the discoveries made by different scientists, then it is also true discoveries are made more slowly not only because there are fewer people to go through the material, but because they aren’t able to avail themselves of each others’ work, because that work doesn’t exist. I think this might be a legitimate issue with population reduction; what I am not convinced of is that the benefit of additional scientific researchers and research will outweigh the problems produced by a population of 30 billion.





Where will the labor come from? — If there are far fewer persons in the world, then there will be a much smaller labor pool. Who’s going to make things? Traditionally the presence of a class living in relative ease and comfort has required a much larger class of workers. If, as I am proposing, we retain a relatively high standard of living, who is going to make the things that are needed for it?





Well, presumably the number of persons demanding a large number of goods will decrease by roughly the same proportion as the producers of those goods, assuming there is a globaly uniform agreement to reduce or counteract population growth. Here we get back to the standard of living issue (what counts as a genuinely good standard?) and the question of whether or not it is O.K. to have a small percentage of the population benefiting from the labor the majority. I don’t see this as being an objection to my “fewer babies” suggestion, since it applies to pretty much any total population number. There’s also the technology factor — machines can do more and more things with great finesse; the need for a huge laboring class should be consequently reduced, lessening the need for a large industrially oriented population.





THEY will overwhelm us! — A couple of years ago Rick Santorum came to speak at my college, bringing with him any number of dubious premises, intriguing fallacies and misapplied obvious truths. One point he did speak on though that stuck with me qua my thoughts on population was his stern chastisement of the French for not having enough babies, thereby allowing North African (and more importantly Muslim) immigrants to slowly overtake their culture. I’m well aware of the strong undertones of bigotry in this proposition, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we have to help preserve “our culture” by making more babies than the other cultures. It remains, however, that our stage of human civilization (may there be a following one) retains much of the pack instinct of our distant Cenozoic ancestors and of the tribal structures that were the cradle of all cultural and political activity. That is to say, we have much more loyalty to people from our own little corner of the world than we do to others, and we’re generally willing to harm others if we think it will save, or provide great benefit to, us and ours.





We have wars, and larger countries tend to fare better in wars than smaller ones. Access to a larger population than your rival, assuming relative parity of technology, provides both a larger labor pool for the production of the tools of war and a larger pool of potential soldiers. It is also likely that a major reduction in population, or population growth, in any country would force some major restructuring, which would at least temporarily weaken it on the world stage. This all leads up to one big problem, perhaps the biggest — if we are going to try to counteract trends in population growth it has to be a worldwide project. Not only do we have to convince most individuals, or procreating couples, that it is in their (and their offspring’s) best interests to have fewer children; we also have to convince people that is in their best interests as regards their national affiliation, that we aren’t going to use their smaller population to our advantage to invade their country, kill them all, and take their resources. We would presumably have to convince the governing bodies of every major nation to do its own part to promote voluntary population control.





By and large, this is not a problem to which I can provide an adequate solution. I can, however, offer a partial one. Some wars are fought over ideals; some are fought under the command of egomaniacal tyrants; many wars are fought for control of resources which are not sufficiently plentiful in the territory of the aggressor nation to provide for the needs or desires of their citizens. With a vastly smaller national population, there would be vastly less stress on national resources. In light of this, it seems advisable under any population reduction plan to bring down each nation’s population to one that can be sustained, at least in terms of resources significantly available in that nation at all, by its own national product, or by non-coercive trade with a country possessing enormous natural resources (which would in turn have to determine its goal-population with reference to both its resources and the percentage of those resources traded to other countries). This strikes me as another very good reason to have fewer people.





Closing remarks? — I’m sure I’ve omitted a tremendous wealth of potential objections, interesting counter-objections and fascinating digressions. I have been, after all, attempting to treat a very broad subject (actually a number of broad subjects) in about 2500 words. I certainly don’t claim to have achieved anything like a flawless or conclusive account of the issue; this wasn’t my goal to begin with. My intention herein was, and is, simply to bring up in an acceptably cogent and reasonable manner a subject that I think gets much less attention than it deserves.



