Population redux

[GliderGuider]

Over the last few days I've been thinking about world population again. Here are some of the things that have come up.

The first thought is that "we" (as in the aggregate species h. Sap) are not rational creatures. We are instead rationalizing creatures who make most of our decisions unconsciously, based on a stew of emotions and heuristics drawn from our previous experience. When a decision emerges fully formed into our conscious mind we then dress it up with post-facto justifications designed to preserve the precious illusion of our rationality. We do show some signs of rationality on an individual level, but these signs are generally submerged by herding behaviours as our numbers increase.

The point of this observation is that it seems vanishingly unlikely that we ever consciously plan our cultural environment. Our collective experience, expressed as culture and civilization, is probably better understood as a self-organizing, complex adaptive system. When seen in that light it seems clear that we do not deliberately plan many of its overarching qualities. Instead, they arise on their own out of the incredible complexity of 6.8 billion people each following their individual paths of least resistance to various local minima in the cultural fitness landscape.

As a result, the notion that we might ever design a rationally structured future based on reason, logic and the projection of observed trends is a chimera. I can see two reasons why people might object to any attempt to implement such a vision. The first is that such a clean, orderly vision has too many unpleasant authoritarian resonances for most people. The second is that asking anyone to do anything that deviates from their path of least resistance from one local minimum to the next is doomed to failure because of our herding instincts.

The next thought I'd like to throw in is that population really can't be separated from activity. As you point out, Jack, a civilization that preserves all that we have come to define as such would have to be limited to a virtual handful of people if overshoot is to be avoided. So, as much as we would like to take a single-factor, population-only view of the situation, I think it's impossible to effectively separate the "PA" terms of IPAT.

Reducing consumption, when continued consumption is seen as possible (even when its reduction is understood to be necessary), violates that "path of least resistance" principle I wrote about above and will therefore be rejected out of hand by our unconscious decision-making processes. That reaction means that the idea is a political non-starter.

So in the face of this, what do I suggest we do? The mischievous anarchist in me wants to say "Do nothing, just watch. Life has its own imperative and will unfold by its own rules." But on a personal level that is too much abdication even for me. My real preference is to leverage the fact that we seem to be more rational in smaller numbers. Since every decision is at its heart an individual choice, the best approach seems to be to educate, awaken and empower individuals. If a sufficient number of awakened people start acting based on their individual perceptions of "right action" then the complex system will adapt itself in some different directions. In my opinion bottom-up approaches are more likely to "succeed" (whatever that word means in this context) than top-down approaches. It's a nice paradox - if we want to change the direction of our civilization, we need to start with the individual "civis".

Finally, for those who feel compelled to organize social movements to accomplish change, there is one avenue that will be profitable to explore. It has long been known that the more affluent and educated a society is, the lower its birthrate tends to be. This prompted me to do the following analysis, that compares national fertility rates to various other factors: GDP per capita, life expectancy, literacy rates, and the Human Development Index which is a mashup of the other three factors. Here are the scatter plots I obtained:









National TFR correlates relatively poorly with GDP/capita (C = 0.47), reasonably well with life expectancy (C = 0.77) and literacy rate (C = 0.78), but very well with HDI (C = 0.89). This implies that if we want to maximize the reduction of TFR we need to concentrate on improving all three dimensions of HDI: Life expectancy (health care), knowledge (literacy and school enrollment) and income.

This approach neatly circumvents the objections to population reduction arguments when applied to the developing world. In this case the effort is put towards development, and reductions in fertility follow as a natural consequence of empowered individual choices as I discussed above.

As a word of caution, it may be very difficult to raise incomes significantly in the developing world, given the increasing degree of wealth consolidation and looming resource limitations that may put the brakes on much economic growth. Fortunately, improving the other two factors does not require high levels of income. So improvements in health and education must be the focus of our efforts.

Can we generate the political will, or any level of global interest in doing this?

[Speck Tater]

1. But can a bottom-up approach work quickly enough

to avert the possibility of runaway greenhouse or some other ecologically catastrophic response to overshoot? It sounds to me like the bottom-up approach could take a generation or two to have any real effect, and by that time the whole system could be swamped by millions upon millions of climate refugees competing for dwindling viable agricultural land, or by spiraling energy costs that make mere survival a full time job leaving no time or energy for a re-education program.

And consider that just as there is political resistance today to anything that can be characterized and demonized as "socialism", just wait until the stubbornly regressive launch their campaign against your "re-education camps."

I think the grand human experiment must run its course, and that course must eventually end, like it does for ALL species, in extinction. Maybe it will take a hundred years and maybe it will take ten thousand, but as the fossil fuel continues to run out we will discover that we have gone further into overshoot that we ever imagined. Without cheap energy to power corporate agribusiness there is no way to sustain the earth's current population. The population will crash. It is inevitable.

(A hundred years ago over 95% of the population worked the land to produce food. Today only 2% works to produce food. Without cheap energy we MUST go back to 95% or more working the land, but there's not enough land for 95% of the population to be working. Do the math. What we need in order to survive simply cannot be done. It's physically impossible.)

[GliderGuider]

2. Possibly not. Luckily it's not an "either or" proposition.

We can pursue a bottom-up approach aimed at education and health care at the same time as doing any other top-down social or technical engineering projects.

But, and there is a big but...

Top down approaches that have population control as their stated objective will not work. The only way they are acceptable to anyone is if they are applied only to others. People in general can't even agree that population growth is a problem.

From a top-down perspective we may have to accept that tens or hundreds of millions of climate refugees, spiraling food and energy costs, oozing pollution and dying oceans are just the price we have to pay for being such a clever species. We also need to get over the arrogant idea that every problem has a solution.

In the mean time it's more fun to do what we can to make the world a better place to live (for however long we'll live here) rather than worrying that we're all going to die - which will happen no matter what we do or don't do.

[pscot]

3. You state the case neatly

in the first 5 paragraphs. Civilization is the evolving sum of random behavior based on self-interest. Self interest is as old as the species. Thinking has been mainly used to further that self interest, but the goals of our self interest have tended to be short term: I want that girl, I need food, those guys in the next hollow are bad, stick it again, it's still moving. Rationality has always been the subordinate henchman of basic, animal drives that seem to govern everything we do. Few of us live rational lives. Suvival of the species didn't require it.

It would be nice to believe that like-minded people gathered together can change the world, but I just don't see it. Time is too short, the scale too large. A British environmentalist, whose name escapes me, suggested the need for a sort of religious conversion; a Jonathan Edwards approach to environmental redemption. Sinners in the hands of an Angry God rewritten as an environmental screed. I doubt even that would work. It may happen, further on down the road as we try to bargain our way out of the inevitable catastrophe. I look for it as part of the general unpleasantness of the end game.

[GliderGuider]

4. I agree with your first paragraph completely.

It's a very succinct distillation of the realities of our situation.

I do have a small problem with the language in the second paragraph, and I think it comes from your unstated assumptions.

You say "It would be nice to believe that like-minded people gathered together can change the world, but I just don't see it." Of course, like-minded people can and do change the world all the time. I think what you really mean is something like "can fix the problem and let things continue as they have in the recent past" or "can shift human civilization to a sustainable path." This same observation applies to the phrases "time is too short", scale is too large" and "end game." There are assumptions embedded in that language that may not be doing you any favours.

IMO there is no end game. There is only what there has always been - change. Some change is small, some large, some pleasant, some unpleasant, but all of it, regardless of its quality, is unrecoverable. The arrow of time flies only in one direction in this particular reality, and anything that is done cannot be undone. Similarly, time is not "too short", nor the scale "too large". Things simply are what they are, and they are always in the process of evolving into something else. Like a fractal, that same rule applies to big things and small things, over long times and short times.

This may seem like a fatalistic view, but it is utterly realistic. What makes it seem fatalistic is the same thing that gives rise to that knot of fear when we think of unpleasant possibilities: we have been taught to cling or attach to specific outcomes. Outcomes that meet our expectations are good, those that don't are bad - and we all know how often outcomes meet our expectations. Expectation is the true enemy, not change.

Sorry to wax philosophical on you, but I struggled for a long time with the same feelings you express here. They are hopeless, despairing feelings, given validity and a feeling of reality by the truth of the facts you have perceived. I found it helpful to realize that while the facts may be true, the feelings are not - they were merely my own inner constructions, as real (and as UNreal) as any other fleeting emotion.

This next thing may sound cynical and sarcastic, but in light of what I just wrote, it's anything but. Abandon hope - you'll feel better for it. "Hope" in this sense is an expression of expectation, of grasping onto a desired outcome and devaluing all other possibilities. Hope leaves less room for the reality that unfolds moment by moment, the state that simply is.

Change is inevitable, and we are only human. Within those parameters, we do the best we can.

[pscot]

5. Kafka said, Yes, there is hope

but not for us. I gave up hope a while back. I'm traveling light. Our minds seem fundamentally different. You tend to quantify; I deal in metaphor. We come from different directions, but we are here, now. I don't despair. I am angry and sad at the losses we're inflicting on our world and the mess we're leaving others to face.

[GliderGuider]

6. Quantification vs metaphor

I write in two domains: ecology/energy/population and non-duality/love. My approach to the two is fundamentally different. Here I'm number-heavy, in the other arena I do metaphor and imagery. I'm still looking for a way to blend the two, preferably by bringing more metaphor over here. I haven't found it yet. Here's an example of what I do "over there":

Love Sonnet with Fractal

The process of merging - in which two "ones" become a "two" which in turn melts into One while still remaining Two - resonates across many dimensions. Through this process the essential truth of fractals, of self-similarity at every scale, is revealed as a fundamental aspect of Being.

Riding on that awareness is the understanding that the chaotic multiplicity of holarchies within which we swim is the fractal froth on the ocean of Oneness. From there it's a very short hop, skip and jump to the doorstep of the Divine. Just as we can see the world in a grain of sand, we can see the All That Is in our lover's eyes.

The expression of love is universally catalytic, and drops like a single crystal seed into our supersaturated noosphere. The racing web of manifestation that it triggers holds us all in the embrace of God.

It's hard to get across the significance of fertility rate correlations with that language, though. ;-)