The other very important thing that The Population Bomb underestimated was human innovation. The prediction of doom was strongly influenced by the food crisis that was looming in 1968 – people in poor countries had been dying of starvation on a massive scale over the previous few years. But with the recognition of world hunger as a problem, innovation and cross-nation cooperation kicked in, taking the form of the Green Revolution, which ramped up food production many times over in just two decades, and thereby staved off mass starvation for a billion or so people. Later, along came computers, the internet and mobile phone technology, which now make possible a global conversation about any world crisis, and harness what could be called a global brain – at last count more than six billion connected people – to formulate and implement feasible solutions. So we bought some time through the last bit of the twentieth century. What about now?
One more lesson comes out of the nearly four decades we’ve had since 1968 to observe how population growth and the human spirit actually work: despite the fact that things didn’t crash by the end of the twentieth century, we are not out of the woods by any means. We now know with reasonable certainty that in just the next half a lifetime, some ten billion people will be on the planet, seething masses overwhelming the capacities of poor countries and banging at the doors of rich ones. As a result, cities will at least double in size, the old will outnumber the young in many communities, and many more places will see their social, political and economic systems put in a pressure cooker. Mind you, this is the best-case scenario – where we rapidly bring fertility rates down to replacement rate in all the nations where that is currently not the case. Even this optimistic scenario means that population growth is about to tip humanity into a future that will be as different from the present as the India we experienced in 2007 was from our home in the United States back then. Whether that future ends up looking like Ehrlich’s Hell remains to be seen – it still could, if we make the wrong choices.
But one thing is for sure: sustaining at least the quality of life that the world provides to people today is not going to happen if we ignore how an extra three billion of us are going to impact the planet. It’s not just our numbers we have to worry about – it’s also what each of us needs and wants.
3
Tony, near midnight, southern Colorado, around 1960
My heart was pounding just about as loud as his fist on the door. Bam! Bam! Bam! ‘I want my money! I want my money!’ Bam! Bam! Bam!
I was a little kid, maybe eight years old, eyes shut tight, hunkered down in our tiny house, a well-worn clapboard whose once-white paint had seen better days and was peeling here and there. Inside was hideous grey wallpaper with big maroon flowers in the cramped living room, a linoleum-floored kitchen with a chrome-legged, red-topped Formica table, one institutional-green bedroom for my parents, and a dingy pink room where I slept. One of the windows in that room had a prime view of the dirt alley where ragweed liked to grow, and the other opened right onto the slab-concrete front porch, which sat there like a pitiful stage in full view of one of the town’s busiest streets. My bed was right next to the porch window, wide open that hot summer night, so the slamming door of a ratty pick-up truck less than twenty feet away had awoken me, followed by the angry stomping of feet up the two porch steps. At that point all that was standing between me and the drunk man pounding on our door was a flimsy curtain and a rusting screen. I fully expected his fist to come smashing through at any second. I lay there as still as I could, tried not to breathe too loud, and hoped for the best.
I had had a lot of practice in hoping for the best, because we were poor. I never got the full story on why that man was beating on our door in the middle of the night, but as near as I could work it out, he thought he was owed some money, and whether or not he was, we just didn’t have any to give him. That year was a particularly bad one, I think – probably the same year when there was a month or two when we had to choose between getting our electricity or our gas shut off because we couldn’t afford to pay for both, and when some meals came from hunting rabbits or doves on the outskirts of town.
The point being, I didn’t have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. But I certainly knew a lot of kids who did. And like anyone who is forced to do without, I came to equate having nice stuff with having a better life. For whatever reason, that seems to be human nature, which is in large part why, fast-forward nearly fifty years, our family is now like millions of other middle-class families in industrialised nations. We have a decent house, with climate control and a nice irrigated yard, a couple of cars, computers, mobile phones, and what sometimes seems like an uncountable number of gadgets, the purchase of which makes us feel good, at least for a while. And, like most parents, we’ve done our best to make sure our children have all those things that we thought would make us happy when we were little. In a word, we’ve attained what a billion or so people consider normal.
Normal for places like the United States, the European Union and a few other small pockets throughout the world, anyway. Most of the human race now exists on less than $10 a day, and about a billion scrape by on less than $2 per day. Poor as we were by American standards when I was growing up, I now know that even back when that guy was beating on our door, we were well off in comparison to most people in the world. And I’d wager that, just like me when I was young, the vast majority of those people are looking for that sense of accomplishment that comes from bettering their situation, and especially from working to make sure their kids have a better life. Happily, the opportunities for advancing the next generation are growing in many countries that harbour huge numbers of poor people, among them the most populous nations on Earth – places like India and China. Which means that, if human nature follows the same course in such places as it has in already-developed nations, in many, many more households over the next thirty years the presents will pile high as the old stuff is replaced with the newer models.
The emotional satisfaction that ever-growing pile will bring to billions is hard to deny, both in principle and in reality. Although material goods are certainly not the route to true happiness, in today’s world, like it or not, they do in large measure help define social status, self-worth, and are often the currency with which to outwardly express affection, even love – diamonds are forever, so they say. And some material things – like our electronic communications network, planes, cars and so on – are in fact necessary to maintain the global connections that society now so depends upon.
All of which leads to a major conundrum, because the material stuff we value so much does not appear out of thin air. Ultimately, each and every thing we manufacture ends up eating a little bit of Planet Earth, and the pie is going fast. The best estimates, from a group called the Global Footprint Network, indicate that presently we are using up the planet at a pace that would require one and a half Earths to sustain us over the long term. Assuming no changes in how we do business, and taking into account the growing numbers of people in the world and the entry of more and more of them into better economic situations, we will require the equivalent of two Earths to sustain us by the year 2030, and three Earths by 2050. Actually, if everyone lived the lifestyle of the average American – that is to say, the lifestyle we live, and that many of you reading this book live – we’d need five Earths to keep us going. The problem, of course, is that there is only one Earth.
None of us are actively trying to trash the planet. We are simply enjoying the stuff we have, and in some cases actually need, in today’s world. Mobile phones are a prime example. Most of the people in the world now carry around these electronic wonders, facilitating everything from the casual chat to getting