Population is a Fundamental Question

So, how many human beings can this small blue planet actually support in a sustainable manner?

Before we think hard about that question we have to review the population pattern of homo industrialus.   Here is a graph from the Temperate Forest Foundation.  As you can see there were about 1 billion of us around 1860 and now there are over 6 billion of us and the trend continues up.

A short review of the population work of Thomas Robert Malthus may be in order.  Malthus thought that conflict, war, pestilence, famine were natural consequences and controls on population.  I don’t think Malthus could foresee huge leaps in human productivity, health, longevity that developed with the petro-industrial age and the advances in the sciences, but I think it is an open question whether these advances enable us to avoid the devastating controls on population that Malthus saw as natural processes.  I hope that an advance, a new paradigm, the birth of post-petro human culture may produce new ways of being that defy imagination and that such an advance might seek a  way to establish a sustainable and relatively peaceful human presence on the planet.  I think the transition is likely to be tough.  I don’t know how we get from the current dominant paradigm of capitalistic individualism to a more natural, sustainable, indigenous way of being a component of the diversity of life on this small blue planet.  I write here in the hope that by posing questions, by sharing advances, knowledge, wisdom, data that we may somehow collectively bring something new into the world.  Perhaps a view of the place of our species as a component of a diverse biosphere instead of a view of human as pinnacle of creation?   I suspect that the pride that comes with seeing oneself as the pinnacle of creation precedes a fall.

Enough back ground, in 150 years we went from 1 billion people to over 6 billion people and we may be headed for 9 billion by 2100.  How many people can the planet support in a sustainable manner?  And let’s define sustainable as a life of relative comfort and safety, but not an affluent life.  Let me do some research and we will then review that question.

This entry was posted on December 25, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Connect the Dots, Small Foot Print, Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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