Seven Billion. That’s the number in the news this week as the Earth’s population tops yet another arbitrary milestone. I’m sure by now you are either sick of hearing about it or it has faded into the background noise behind the Much Bigger News that Mitt Romney has converted to Buddhism in an attempt to woo a previously unidentified Republican voting block.
I’m guessing you have had it up to here with the reasoned discussions about the lack of sufficient resources for the planets current population let alone the nine billion of us that will be living here by 2050. I’m sure that you have heard enough about global consumption patterns to last for at least sixteen years when there will be (yet) another billion of us treading the rainforest underfoot. And I’m sure that the Americans among you are so sick of hearing NPR pontificating about how evil we are for consuming so much more than the rest of the world that you’re probably going to drop your “Broadcaster’s Level” support and start getting your facts from Fox. Enough already about what’s so bad about sharing the Earth with (at this edit) 7,000,793,467 of your close personal friends; let’s look at the silver lining.
I’m deciding to weigh in on the side of unfettered growth because 1) I’ve come across some interesting tidbits that I didn’t see in mainstream reporting and 2) I can’t think of anything else and if I don’t write something then I’m going to have to go rake the meadow.
There have always been Optimists, Pessimists, and Realists. In Optimists, I have always seen a positive, upbeat attitude because they think everything will turn out for the best. In the current population boom most corporations fall into this group because each and every new bag of chromosomal glop that issues forth is a Potential Customer who will merely require some effective marketing to keep the engines of industry chugging along. On the other hand, the dour Pessimists are all walking around in a funk because they know everything’s going to Hell in a hand-basket and there really is no reason to be all chipper and gay. They look upon an Earth degraded, longing for simpler times. They hope for a return to the halcyon days when we all wore and ate squirrels.
For my part I have always considered myself a Realist. In the philosophical triumvirate, Realism is typically thought of as some kind of misguided median between Optimism on one hand and Pessimism on the other. Sort of like Agnosticism without having to drag God – who is still trying to figure out the calendar thing from last week – into it. Realists do not fall within these extremes. Rather, we occupy yet a third point, removed from the other two, where we maintain a cheerful outlook while, at the same time, realize exactly how bad it’s going to be.
For example, we realists know that seven billion is far too many people to live on a planet which was designed, by some accounts, to hold exactly two. But we also know that despite all of the facts and figures and experts and studies there will be exactly nothing done to correct any of the ills we suffer, AND, that it’s probably better that way because any time we have tried to fix a major problem we have only made things worse.
Despite my open claim to Realism, I have been accused, from time to time, of being an Optimist. It’s true that I do normally walk around with a spring in my step but, in fact, I am waiting for the next big disaster and merely hope that my happy gait will give me a jump on the scorching lava, rushing tsunami, or collapsing buildings which accompany that calamity. The whole Realism thing comes from the fact that, statistically speaking, one of those disasters will never happen to me; like my winning the Powerball except without all the happiness and money. I just want to be ready.
But disasters befall the unfortunate all the time and, if we step back far enough we can see that, statistically speaking, nothing good has ever happened, to anyone. The corollary to this is that with an ever-growing population disasters will affect more people, more often than ever before. From that falls the cheery reality that things will never again be as good as they are right now.
So go out and have some fun. We’ll do just fine because we always have.
This Day of Seven Billion seems like a fitting time to step away from the fray and take a calm, dispassionate look at what this means. From my seat high above the soon-to-be-raked micro-meadow I look out upon a world which, statistically speaking, is happier, healthier, richer, and more ethical than at any point in history. It is a place where tolerance reigns. Where people of different worldviews, races, and religions come together to make the place better for all of us.
I’m sure every last one of you, upon reading that previous paragraph, and if you had timed it right, would shout in unison: “Bullshit!” That’s because you look out and see the ongoing wars, disease, starvation, and injustice which have dogged humanity since the beginning. But, despite all the nastiness going on, things are better right now than they ever have been. People are reproducing faster than voles, they’re beating disease, living hungry, and – regardless of how hard we try – failing to die in wars at the rate necessary to maintain a stable and, dare I say it, sustainable level of population.
To get a handle on this I decided to find out where I fit in the rich tapestry of humanity and visited the BBC. Their handy calculator told me I was the 2,697,858,732nd person on the planet when I was born. At the time I was born mankind’s biggest worry was a sudden drop in population due to an uncontrolled detonation of the Earth’s combined nuclear arsenals. We dodged that bullet and in the intervening years packed in another four-point-three billion of us.
When you look closely at things, as does the United Nations, there are some things to cheer about. First, it appears that population growth is finally beginning to slow. It took humanity about 400,000 years to make the first billion of us. That watershed year was 1804 but nobody was paying attention back then. The next billion filed in by 1927, a mere 123 years. Billion three, took a mere 33 years, and we were at four, five and six billion in 14, 13, and 12 years respectively. The good news is that going from six to seven billion also took 12 years showing that the formerly parabolic growth curve has become merely linear. Whew! On top of that the prediction branch of the United Nations forecasts that population growth will continue to slow to such an extent that billion eight will take a full 16 years. Gasp! And billion nine – the ultimate billion – doesn’t show up for 19 years. At that point the world drops into a state of Utopia and no further population growth occurs. I am not making this up.
Well, it turns out that those pranksters at the UN are joking with us anyway. The same august body that predicts an ultimate population of nine-point-something billion by 2050 is also warning that, at current levels of consumption, we will require the equivalent of two Earths to supply the resources needed to sustain ourselves – by sometime in the 2030s. Since, as far as we know, there’s only one, it’s kind of hard to imagine getting enough stuff when we need one-point-one Earths’ worth of resources let alone two.
So, why is my view of the world so full of hope? Easy. It’s in the words: “statistically speaking”. Buried in the numbers, barely noticeable, is humanity’s best hope. If we look to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd we learn that they are condemning the “1%” for taking so much more of everything than the other “99%”. But the 1% to 99% ratio is possibly the most favorable proportion of resource distribution in the world’s history. I think going back in time you would find that, what is now one percent, is more typically one-half percent, or less. But the 99% – who, to the rest of the world are the 5% – who consume one-quarter of the world’s fossil fuel, who own more cars than driver’s licenses, and who generate three times the amount of hazardous waste as the rest of the planet combined, should probably should shut up before anybody else notices. They are the ones with everything and their hand-wringing and finger-pointing at the one percent is distracting us from those who could save us all: the 0.3%. The 0.3% live in a developed economy, isolated from most of the world’s ills, in a land packed with natural resources and unaffected by the reproductive binge the rest of world is on. Forget the 1%. These are the people we should be emulating.
The Australians.
They are the 0.3% and the last bastion of reasonableness in a world gone mad. Imagine, less than twenty-three million people packed into an area the size of the continental United States. That’s the equivalent of taking the populations of New York, New Hampshire, and Maine and redistributing them to the US East Coast, Mobile, Alabama, and Los Angeles (after first removing everybody else through some unspecified but humane method). One Australian shares each square kilometer of Australia with only two others, as opposed to the fifty-plus people packed in each average square-kilometer in the rest of the world. Well, OK, there are six sheep in there with them too. Our antipodean cousins are self-sufficient, or easily could be, in anything that really matters. They have a robust culture, slow population growth, lovely beaches, universal health care, kangaroos, and a median income level equal to the United States. Most importantly, by every measure, that income is more evenly distributed than almost anywhere else on the planet. This is the place our 99% dreams about.
So while Europe crumbles under the weight of decades of underfinanced social programs; while America’s experiment in democracy withers and dies; and while Africa and South Asia sink under a doubling of population; there will sit Australia: a shining beacon in the Southern Ocean reminding us of what the rest of the world could have been.
If only we had been paying attention.