Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 15:02:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Nicholas C. Arguimbau" <nicka@well.com>
Sender: "Nicholas C. Arguimbau" <nicka@well.com>
Reply-To: "Nicholas C. Arguimbau" <nicka@well.com>
Subject: population control - how urgent, how strict
To: PPN@csf.colorado.edu
cc: nicka@well.com
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9807041234.A22427-0100000@well.com>
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I am a new member of this list.  My interest is more practical than academic.
I hope you will excuse my naivete.

I share the view that there is a close relationship between achieving a 
balanced population and achieving a variety of humanitarian goals - in 
particular, adequate social security and health care for aging people 
and adequate education and professional opportunities for women, and in 
general a sufficiently stimulating environment that people are content to 
do something other than constant procreation.

I also recognized that in the best of all possible worlds, population 
control would be implemented through voluntary means.

Those things said, I can't help make the following observations.  There 
are at least the following THREE reasons why population REDUCTION is very 
urgent:

1. Deforestation, global warming, El Nino, inability of science to keep up 
with the mutation of the AIDS virus, the probable fact that humanity has 
more biomass by far than any other species in history on earth, the 
projected very soon depletion of oil reserves (which were/are largely 
responsible for the enormous increase in agriculatural productivity 
around the world in the last several decades), all suggest to me that we 
have gone substantially beyond our carrying capacity on the planet - 
perhaps by as much as a factor of ten.

2. There is a serioius problem with anthropocentric control of the 
biosphere even if we haven't yet gone beyond our carrying capacity in 
other terms, which is this:  the former biological diversity of the planet 
resulted in an almost limitless set of "response times" to fluctuations in 
weather patterns, energy inputs, etc., permitting the entire system to remain 
stable almost regardless of inputs; compare, for example, an algal bloom 
with a redwood forest in ability to serve as a carbon sink.  We have 
essentially one guiding response time - the human generation time, 
which is roughly the reciprocal of the interest rate.  I think a healthy 
biosphere must, to be a stable and efficient reflection of the energy and 
other resource inputs, have a biodiversity such that biomass as a 
function of generation times should be roughly a Laplace 
transform of the energy/water inputs.  When that relationship gets out of 
kilter, we must inevitably see serious instabilities, such as are already 
showing up.  To put this all in simple terms, we are heading for trouble 
by having an entire biosphere controlled by the human economic interest 
rate, practically inevitable if the biosphere is dominated by people.

3. All around there are enormous numbers of very frustrated creative 
and aggressively "leading" people.  The market won't support them.  There 
are on the positive side the talented writers who can't publish, the talented 
musicians who can't find pay as musicians, etc; on the negative side, 
there are the Saddham Hussein types who would be quite happy to blow up 
the world (and might on a personal level have the capacity to do so) to 
acccomplish some personal "creative" objective.  I have been in places 
where population dnesity was very low On the other hand, I have been in two 
places (e.g. Alaska in 1974 and Idaho today) where that frustratioin didn't 
appear to be present - people could be observed thriving in an "anything is 
possible" atmosphere.  I am inclined to think this is related to an aspect of 
human evolution - that we evolved as a tribal species in which a certain 
percentage of creative individuals in the tribe (say 1-3 out of 200) 
would benefit the tribe whereas a larger number would destabilize and hurt 
it.  Given that we are still essentially genetically what we were when we 
evolved as tribal, we now have a higher percentage of "creative" people and 
would-be leaders than a stable society wants - hence the frustration and the 
dangerous destabilization.  The earth can be neither a happy nor a safe 
place when the population is too high for the numbers of such people to 
stay at a level such that their frustrations can be kept within bounds.

In short, it seems to me that there are at least three ways of looking at 
whether we have exceeded our carrying capacity on the planet, all of 
which suggest that we have.  The problems seem to me to be sufficiently 
dire that realistically, going about slow, humanitarian, voluntary means 
of halting population growth, especially given the fact that the 
population is expected to grow in the neighborhood of 50% after the ZPG 
level of individual procreation is reached, will cause more severe pain 
to more people than more stringent measures taken today, and that present 
policy makers are just burying their heads in the sand.  In particular, 
adequate population control measures must be far more than voluntary 
measures including (a) availability of birth control devices, (b) social 
security for the elderly, and (c) equal opportunities for women. These 
are good things in themselves, but they will be "too little, too late."

Having said all the above, I admit I may be totally wrong and would like 
to get some education.  I have the following questions:

1. Quantitatively, what needs to be done in terms of social programs to 
bring about voluntary ZPG?  (i.e. has anyone found that thus and such 
investment in education for women results typically in thus and such 
reduction in reproductive rates?)

2. What is the dollar cost of #1 ?  Who can pay it?  How far over 
present payments is it?

3. What is the realistic carrying capacity of the earth over the short 
term (next century) and long term (geological) for humanity under each of 
the constraints outlined above 1-3?

4. Which will really be more painful to humanity - a benign voluntary 
program to eventually reach ZPG (followed perhaps by a drastic, violent, 
chaotic reduction to a much lower carrying capacity) or a less benign, 
perhaps mandatory program to reduce population which will eleiminate the 
painful uncontrolled reduction?  If one doesn't perceive that we have yet 
reached carrying capacity, a variant of the same question still applies - 
whether implementation of a voluntary and benign program is justified 
when the tradeoff is taken into account of postponement, perhaps 
indefinitely, of goals of adequate standards of income for the poorer 
nations.

This is a long e-mail.  What I would like is to be directed towards 
literature, preferably on line, which quantitatively and objectively 
addresses these questions, and towards progressive activists and activist 
organizations, also preferably on line, interested in the same issues.

Thank you in advance for any guidance you can give me.

Nick Arguimbau