Population Growth & The Environment

There has been a debate going on for over 50 years as to whether the primary cause of the growing environmental crisis is over-population or over-consumption. The debate still continues, even though the facts have been known conclusively for decades. Consider what we know to be the established facts.

60% of pollution and waste and 80% of resource consumption is caused by the richest 20% of the world’s population. There is your answer. It is very simple math. Over-consumption is the overwhelmingly central issue. Does that mean we can ignore population growth? No, clearly not. It just shows us vividly that over-consumption by the industrialized nations is the primary problem – and not that we have too many poor people in the world.

The next thing to realize is that the population growth problem has been solved decades ago. Kerala state in southern India proved it long ago. If you provide education for girls and women, and eliminate poverty, population growth halts in just 3-5 years. We know the answer, we just don’t want to do it.

25 years ago I was at an international development conference in the Netherlands, and the conference title was, Minder Mensen of Minder Wensen? “Fewer people or fewer wants?” That is, is the primary environmental issue over-population or over-consumption? The virtually unanimous answer given by everyone in the international development community was that it is overwhelmingly an issue of over-consumption by the affluent minority that is the central problem. And they cited the example of Kerala as the answer to population growth, which can be halted in under five years if we simply have the will to eliminate poverty and provide universal education for women and girls.

There is a simple sociological explanation for this. Among affluent families, children are a blessing, but also a great expense. Among poor families, children are not only a blessing – they are the only retirement plan, unemployment insurance, or safety net, that poor families have. And, if half of your children die before they reach adulthood, and children are your only safety net, you are going to have a lot of children. Eliminate poverty and educate women, and population growth quickly halts.

Of course, neither the ruling plutocrats nor the affluent middle class want to redistribute wealth, so the real answer to both global poverty and population growth is blocked – and it is blocked by the same richest 20% of the world’s population who are the main cause of the ever-worsening environmental crisis.

(See Tainter on vested interests, and how civilizations collapse.)

The situation is actually even worse than that, because the billionaire oligarchs are neo-Malthusians. They believe there are too many people on Earth, and many people will just have to die. The poor, of course. And billions of them. Their plan is genocide. It has happened before, and it will happen again, if we do not remove the sociopaths at Davos from their current position as the de facto rulers of the Earth.

Basically there are two answers to the environmental crisis. One is to redistribute wealth, power, and land, in order to eminate poverty and halt population growth, while restoring democracy and freedom, and cutting our consumption levels among the affluent 20% very dramatically. The other is genocide: eliminate a few billion people, so that the middle class can continue over-consuming, and the super-rich can continue to live as gluttonous god-kings. We know what side the business elite are on. Which side are you on?

The last I checked there was over $20 trillion sitting in the offshore bank accounts of the super-rich. International development organizations have estimated it would take 3/4 of a trillon dollars to eliminate poverty world-wide – less than what the US spends on wars and the military every year. If we were serious about stopping population growth, halting climate change, transitioning rapidly to a green, sustainable and regenerative society, or ending poverty and world hunger, we would immediately implement a wealth tax of 90% of the richest 0.1%, use $1trillion of that vast pool to eliminate global poverty and hunger, and use the other $17 trillion to fund the rapid shift to a sustainable and regenerative society.

A Green New Deal is vitally needed in order to seriously address the intertwined issues of the environment, poverty, real economic stimulus, and jobs. But it must be based in democracy and freedom, and it must be very bold, and very swift. We have no time left for mousey half-measures, tokenism or hollow gestures. The reality is that a Green New Deal requires a major redistribution of wealth and power, and land, from the richest 1% to the 99%, and now. That, of course, will require a revolution.

The question is not how to stop population growth. That has been answered. The question is whether we have the guts to do what is neccessary, which is to immediately launch a global wave of non-violent democratic revolutions – which is the only way we will quickly raise the trillions of dollars needed to answer the two most pressing problems on Earth in our time, which are global poverty, and the by now truly dire ecological crisis.

Well, do we?

What are we waiting for?

It is now too late for pettitioning the government. We tried that for over 50 years. It failed. There is only one recourse left: revolution.

As I have said before, it is now a matter of revolution, or slow and painful death. Which do you prefer? Only fantasy offers a third choice.

Revolution now.

J. Todd Ring,

June 18, 2021

See also:

Views From The South, by Sarah Anderson

Oneness vs The 1%, by Vandana Shiva

And my own books:

Enlightened Democracy

The People vs The Elite

And, comng soon:

All Hell Breaks Loose: Global Geopolitics 1945-2045