De-populate or perish

As I said earlier, the number of people the Earth can support depends on the amount of bioresources each person demands. Please note, I did not say the amount of bioresources each person needs. If we had to live as hunter/gatherers no doubt some or, perhaps, many people would adapt to that level of consumption, but I doubt if many of us would enjoy such a lifestyle.

Let us take Australia as an exemplar of the living standards people might expect to enjoy; but then suppose Australia could halve its carbon footprint so that the total footprint per Australian person dropped from 7.8 gha to 6.8 gha. In 2005, the total biocapacity of the Planet was 13.6 Ggha, so in these circumstances the Planet could sustain a population of 2 billion people - less than one-third of the present world population - and, parenthetically, the population when I was a child!

Of course, this calculation makes no allowance for the effects of climate change on the world’s biocapacity. In aggregate, these effects will be extremely negative although some regions may become more productive. (A map of the world in 2100 published in New Scientist, February 2009 shows most of Australia, Southern Europe, USA and South America, China and India as uninhabitable desert.)

Even the UN low-growth (unlikely) world population projection peaks at 7.4 billions in 2050 and gradually declines to 2.3 billions by the year 2300, but I doubt if we have 290 years grace in which to avert disaster. In fact, I suggest it is highly probable that by 2050 our demise will have become a very unpleasant, bloody process as mass migrations of people from inundated and no longer arable areas occur, and the starving billions slaughter each other for the last handfuls of rice.

Assuming climate change does not become so severe that the Holocene mass extinction kicks in (although I believe it is already well underway), how can the world’s population be reduced by non-lethal, non-discriminatory means, quickly enough to avert disaster? Leaving aside contingencies such as Earth being struck by a large extraterrestrial body, or the super-volcano Toba erupts, the only means I can think of is universal contraception: and the only question then is, is contraception to be voluntary or involuntary?

I think most people who agree contraception is the answer say it must be voluntary. The world’s population must be persuaded of the need to practice contraception, and must be provided with the means to do so. These people say that educating and empowering women, and giving everyone a reasonable standard of living is the way to achieve voluntary contraception.

Unfortunately, there are counter-arguments that seem to me to be a lay-down mazaire.

Argument - educating and empowering women

Counter arguments

1. It doesn’t work - US and Australian fertility rates are increasing. Women in these countries are among the best educated, and with the highest standards of living.

2. There is implacable religious hostility towards contraception, as Pope Benedict recently demonstrated. Fundamentalists in the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are united in opposing contraception and, in the case of Islam particularly, against educating and empowering women - although there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for empowering women in both Judaism and Christianity.

3. Having no children is not just a change of preference, it is a fundamental shift in the mindset, “It is the inalienable right of every woman/couple to reproduce and have as many children as they want …” In fact, this proposition is stated in Articles 12 & 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Even if the will to reduce population growth were there, generational change processes such as this take 25 years to begin to take effect, and then another generation to be fully implemented, which is just about the timespan for the UN’s medium growth curve. We do not have time for this process to take effect!