The Copenhagen summit on climate change is drawing to a close, an exercise in legitimation for the world’s governments. The facts of climate change are but one strand to a wider problem that goes beyond any kind of agreement on the tricky issue of emissions. The root cause of the worsening state of the environment on which we depend is too many people consuming too much. It is in our nature to reproduce; it is in our nature to be ambitious and acquisitive beings. The debate stops abruptly at the point where those labelled as various stripes of green advocate a radical reorganisation of our entire global society and everyone else stays in denial, either by simply ignoring the problem or getting angry at what should by now be obvious. None of these people are helping.
The juggernaut of our collective manifest destiny that is lurching to this precipice for our species goes way, way back. Back before access to abundant energy in the form of oil caused our present population spike. Back as far as when we first began to spread across the planet and started to change the environment we inhabited to make survival a little easier, day-to-day and generation-to-generation, unable to have the foresight to understand that eventually this would have far-reaching consequences for the biosphere.
It has become a serious problem since the exploitation of abundant and accessible sources of energy in the 19th century was responsible for an explosion in human population numbers, a growth rate of such rapidity and enormity that 150 years later the species is left in what looks to be an
increasingly precarious situation. We have an economic and political situation that is reliant on finite resources for growth, but encourages such growth in the face of irrefutable logic that counsels otherwise. The debate around the effects of human beings on their environment is pressing yet is at a level that seems absurdly myopic to the key feature of our predicament, one of too many people. It doesn’t matter whether we become more efficient at using what we have, or whether we develop new technology to deal with problems we’ve already caused. If the population keeps growing, or even
if it stabilises at some future point, the consequences are still the same as we can expect the majority of people to desire ever higher standards of living in the form of the ability to overconsume.
Those who haven’t got past the primitive notions of religious tenets as a meme for tribal survival most frequently advocate unfettered expansion, an attitude that belies a hideous cruelty to those not fortunate to be born in the wealthier parts of the world. The crunch, when it comes, will be felt by those least able to afford it. But what of the more enlightened movements of our age? How do they perceive this problem?
One way to get a rough idea of the priority with which mainstream pressure groups view a particular topic is to perform a site restricted search on Google for the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘overpopulation’.
The keywords ‘climate change’ appear together over 27,000 times across these 8 sites. ‘Overpopulation’ in the context of human overpopulation is mentioned a total of 4 times. This looks like not so much a case of emphasising one issue over another but of deliberately ignoring a major issue that is seen as problematic to address. Government isn't interested and neither are human rights groups, despite population size being a significant pressure on resources.
Greenpeace:
climate change (6,480) /
overpopulation (0,001)
Oxfam:
climate change (6,150) /
overpopulation (0,000)
Friends of the Earth:
climate change (4,490) /
overpopulation (0,002)
WWF:
climate change (4,130) /
overpopulation (0,000)
defra:
climate change (2,860) /
overpopulation (0,001)
People and Planet:
climate change (2,590) /
overpopulation (0,000)
Amnesty International:
climate change (633) /
overpopulation (000)
Green Party:
climate change (511) /
overpopulation (000)
Greenpeace UK’s tagline is:
“Providing solutions is just as important as identifying problems”. Except when the problem is so massive and unpalatable to a donation-funded pressure group they’d rather ignore it. The same goes for Friends of the Earth:
“Making life better for people by inspiring solutions to environmental problems”. Friends of the Earth mention ‘overpopulation’ on their site four times, excluding forum mentions, with two mentions being directly relevant. One is a motion to the board from September 2008 from a local group calling for
“the promotion of the stabilisation, and ultimately the reduction, of the human population; both within the UK and, via the Friends of the Earth International network, globally, in line with depleting natural resources”. The motion was denied. The reason for the denial was the same as given in the other mention
which is part of their FAQs. The reason given is that they do
“not believe that population growth is the main cause of environmental pollution. The richest 20% of people consume 86% of the Earth's resources and have the lowest birth rates”. Incredible. Their reasoning is therefore that we have to reduce consumption, which I would argue requires not only a complete change in the way global society presently operates but a complete change in human consciousness. I am not saying I don’t find this desirable; it is more that I think it highly unlikely to happen.
These groups would ask that you do not stick your head in the sand over the issues they care about yet are quite happy to ignore the size of the human population as having anything to do with the issues they supposedly wish to solve.
We can conclude that these groups will only push things so far. They are happy to accept financial support from their members to campaign on issues sufficiently abstract that it does not require change to the lifestyle or thinking of the general populace. Recommending actual solutions such as changing your diet or choosing not to have children will not be contemplated as a position that will prove acceptable to the continuing survival of the organisation. If this is the best we can expect from campaigning groups then the chances of most of the population alive today surviving and perpetuating themselves are vanishingly small. None of this is about ‘saving the planet’. It has always been about ‘saving ourselves from ourselves’. The Earth will endure even if we pass.
The human mind represents the pinnacle of evolved information processing ability in the universe; from the big bang to big brains. The destiny of such a feat of complexity does not lie in the drudge labour of hand-to-mouth survival or of a ghastly fate from preventable disease, nor should it fall prey to petty ideological squabbles or a poverty of imagination as to the path we travel through our days. The challenge we face in our time is to elevate our perception, not to raise the population. That necessity is obviously long gone, the aberration of our recent explosion in numbers would be horrifying if we could perceive it over a longer timeframe than the snapshot our threescore and ten grants us. Irony of ironies, the very act that once ensured the survival of the species now edges it closer to destruction.
