|
Population, Environment and
Quality of Life
John Swan
Chairman, Australian and New Zealand
Association for the Advancement of
Science
The question of human population numbers has
immediate implications not only for urban, regional
and national planners, but confronts directly the
sensitive issues of fertility control,
contraception education and immigration policies.
These matters are of primary importance in the
current debates on ecological (and economic)
sustainability, especially between those arguing
for continued development and those espousing a
conserver society.
The discussion paper 'Ecologically sustainable
development' (Hare, 1990) states that 'Attempts to
characterize the debate over ecological
sustainability and population in terms of
population alone are too simplistic. Population is
one of three key factors at work in determining the
level of environmental damage done by any given
society The other two factors are the level of
consumption and the kind of technology used to
satisfy that consumption and to dispose of the
wastes generated. These two factors are reducible,
in essence, to per capita levels of resource
consumption. A major objective for government in
this context is to establish a population policy
that is consistent with the achievement of
ecological sustainability.'
While agreeing with the general tenor of these
statements, I would offer two comments. The first
is that the total effect for any country is
obviously the per capita level of consumption
multiplied by the total population. If that number
is growing exponentially (as it is for the world as
a whole), then the consumption of resources is
growing exponentially. Yes, it is true that world
populations have been growing exponentially for
several hundred years, but the numbers have now
reached truly alarming proportions. To quote Roger
Short's figures: in 1991, an additional 91 million
people; in 1992, a further 92 million, and so on to
the Third Millennium One million new people every 4
days.
My second point is that 'a major objective of
government is to establish a population policy that
is consistent wth the achievement of ecoogical
sustainability' is to imply that many such policies
might exist, and the government has to choose one
of them Australia may still be in this happy
position, but ecological imperatives do not respect
national boundaries Perhaps the time has come for
some blunt assertions. 'No country with exponential
population growth can hope to achieve ecological
sustainability', or 'Malthus was right&emdash;the
world's ecosystems cannot provide for unlimited
population growth'
It is true, as pointed out by the Business
Council of Australia (BCA) (1990), that 'Since the
early nineteenth century some of the most
thoughtful people of each generation have
predicted, against the observation of fixed
physical resources and rising populations and human
wants, the de pletion of the world's resources
within the foreseeable future All such predictions
from at least as far back as Malthus (1798) have
been wrong.'
The BCA suggests that these pessimistic
forecasts have failed to take into account the
effect of both increased knowledge and economic
behaviour Increased knowledge produces new
resources; rising prices for resource stocks as
they become scarce in turn encourage greater
exploration and more sophisticated exploration
technologies to increase supply Yes, all that is
true but it seems to me that the BCA is focusing on
inanimate resources such as mineral deposlts. There
is an extreme argument (which leaves out the
energy/entropy equation) that maintains (correctly)
that the only resources 'lost' to our world are the
materials comprising the rubbish left by Neil
Armstrong on the moon.
But a new factor has now entered the debate, a
factor related to the kinetics of biological
processes. The severe stressing of ecosystems
worldwide as a result of human population growth
has brought mankind to a dangerous pass, where
catastrophic change could, some would say must,
occur.
There is great irony here. Throughout the l9th
century, in the key subject of geology, which more
than any other gave real substance to Darwin's
theory of evolution, the concept of
'uniformitarianism' triumphed over 'catastrophism'.
That is, the idea that geological changes take
place slowly, with the present being like the past,
displaced the notion that geological changes take
place suddenly and cataclysmically. The biblical
view that the world was around 6000 years old and
the one significant geological event was Noah's
flood, gave way to a belief that the world was
perhaps 4500 million years old, and that
catastrophes such as earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions were rare events punctuating the much
slower physical processes which were more
effectively transforming the earth.
According to Hargrove ( 1989), 'What
uniformitarianism did religiously or theologically
was to undermine the idea that God personally and
consciously supervised and carried out catastrophes
that geologists had been studying' If we are now to
contemplate a catastrophic decline in human
population numbers, and are, I hope, unwilling to
ascribe this possibility to the action of a jealous
god, or a god punishing a wicked people, we have to
ask whether, through human knowledge, skills and
resources, the potential catastrophe can be
averted.'
William E. Rees (1990) has recently published an
important article on the ecology of sustainable
development, in which he concludes that true
sustainability demands a radically different
economics which fully recognizes the processes and
limitations of the biosphere. He concludes that we
may be fast approaching absolute limits to material
economic growth, that the real Utopians may be
those who still support the material growth ethic
and maintenance of our economic status quo.
Rees argues that although our world is an 'open'
and not a 'closed' thermodynamic system, because of
continuous energy input from the sun, ecological
productivity (in contrast to economic growth) is
limited. This finite character relates to the
availability of nutrients, photosynthetic
efficiency and the solar flux. These are all
factors which relate to the kinetics of biological
processes. I suggest that what ecosystems need for
sustainability is time Time for decompositions to
occur and new seeds to germinate and grow to
maturity. We can do very little about the kinetics
of organic growth and decay. Rees claims, I believe
correctly, that since our economies are growing,
and the ecosystems within which they are embedded
are not, the consumption of ecological resources
everywhere exceeds sustainable rates of biological
production We are running out of time Rees also
makes the important points that 'the closer we push
the biosphere to its limits, the more likely we are
to reach critical thresholds of unpredictable
systems behaviour', and 'we no longer have the
luxury of 'trading off' ecological damage for
economic benefits if we hope to have a sustainable
future'. My definition of 'sustainable development'
is development that minimizes resource use and
takes account of the kinetics of biological
processes. This does not mean that we cannot draw
on our capital in the form of stored energy
resources such as coal, oil and gas. But we had
better make sure that we put the investment returns
into education and research so that, before the
catastrophe arrives, we learn how to bypass the
kinetic limitations of biology Perhaps the proposed
Royal Society of Victoria lectures, and the reports
and recommendations that will emerge from them,
will give us some leads.
Source: John Swan, 'Population, Environment and
Quality of Life', Search, No. 22, No 4, June
1991, pp113-4.
Reproduced from Search: Science and Technology in
Australia and New Zealand with permission from
Control Publications (Melbourne, Australia).
|
