The growth myths that currently hold humanity hostage

By Frosty Wooldridge

Have you heard of the myth that all of humanity can fit in half the state of Texas with a half acre of extra land for a garden?   How about the one that says America possesses unending space for endless growth?  Anyone hear about oil being continually created deep within the bowels of this planet?

As we head toward 7 billion humans on Earth within another week, we need to expose these myths as the human race heads toward 10 billion by mid century.  My long time friend Tim Murray of Canada stands at the forefront of his country’s understanding of overpopulation.

Pick your myth:

      1.      The shoe-box fallacy eg “You can fit all the people in the world into Texas….”  This is a really stupid myth furthered by really limited minds.

2.  The Demographic Transistion Theory, ie., economic ‘development’ is the best contraceptive.” As people get richer, they have fewer children. So relax, it will all work itself out.” No mention will be made of Abernethy’s “Fertility Opportunity Thesis” or the fact that oil-rich states and the post-war generation of North Americans had more children because of increasing prosperity, or that couples in the impoverished  republics of the former Soviet Union had fewer children in response to their poverty.

3.  All we need is for women to be educated and “empowered” to make their own reproductive decisions. The fact that many of them will nevertheless choose to have an unsustainable number of children will not be acknowledged. Neither will that the fact that inherited cultural norms themselves ‘coerce’ women as much as any population policy does.

4. Population “control” backfires. Look at Indira Ghandi’s fiasco. And the OCPF policy in China is coercive and a violation of ‘human rights’. No mention will be made of the fact that with the OCPF policy, an extra 400 million Chinese consumers would now exist, and this would violate human rights across the globe (by driving up GHG emissions and resource shortages) as well as curbing the rights of other Chinese to less overcrowding, pollution, etc.

5. The birth rate is falling. Therefore it will all sort itself out. But as we know, nature does not care about birth rates, but absolute numbers, which are nevertheless growing (demographic momentum). And then there is the “Youthquake”, a lot kids will be reaching child-bearing age.

6. Technology will bail us out—it always has.  With technology we can ‘grow the limits’ and indefinitely minituarize our footprint. The Jevons Paradox (tech efficiencies only provoke higher total consumption), the effect of the Green Revolution (a case study how technology increases total demand) and the Hopfenberg thesis (humans, like any other species, will grow to meet the available food supply) will be left out of the conversation.

7. The Simonian argument—”The more people there are, the more geniuses will be born to invent new solutions” . AKA the “People-are-our-greatest-resource” platitude, always a favourite among politicians and crowd-pleasers.

9. Reproductive rights will be confused with pro-creative rights. In other words, the right of a woman to refuse to have children that she doesn’t want will be conflated with a procreative “right” for a woman or couple to have as many children as they desire.  This is like saying that because I have the right to drive a car, I have the right to drive it as fast as I can without any limits imposed by society.

10. We mustn’t do anything that is “coercive”.  Two facts will be neglected. One is that all laws are by nature “coercive”. The law against driving over 20 MPH in a school zone coerces speeding drivers into conforming to the speed limit or face penalties. The law against smoking in airplanes coerces smokers while they are on board. The law against fishing over the limit coerces those who would over-fish.  Why then should the one activity that affects the environment more than any other—namely the decision to inflict another human consumer on it by siring or birthing a child—-be exempt from the imposition of limits? 

11. “Coercive” birth contol laws are unnecessary. “Kerala, Bangledesh and Thailand achieved lower birth rates by ‘voluntary’ means. And even the Chinese were on the road to lower birth rates before the OCPF law.”  What will not be discussed is the question as to whether even those lower birth rates in the aforementioned regions—even if universally implemented—would suffice to save us from the consequences of overshoot. In other words, no serious discussion will take place as to what actually is the scale of our overshoot. Instead,  tired old and outdated conventional numbers will be recycled as if their constant repitition makes them accurate. We will hear the phrase “2 billion” a lot. What we won’t hear is compelling evidence that it is probably less than 5 or 10% of that number. We will also not hear that while that no law can ultimately be enforced if there has not been grassroots support for it—eg. Prohibition—-without legal penalities, that support would not translate into desired results. For example, a large constituency of people came to believe that smoking on planes and in restaurants was unacceptable. But without anti-smoking laws in place, planes and restaurants would have continued to be polluted by cigarette smoke. Similarly, a vast majority of people believe that murder is wrong. But withhout laws against murder, none of us would be safe.

Sometimes, I wonder how much dumber humanity can become, but when it comes up with more dumb stuff, I am not surprised.  The human race stands on the abyss of overpopulation whereby only Mother Nature will solve it by exceedingly brutal means: famine, war, pestilence, disease.

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