POP Goes The Weasel!!!

Long ago, when the earth and I were mere pups, there was a lot of talk about overpopulation. There were many dire warnings of shortages and plagues to come, based on an analysis of the raw data. After all, it had taken fifty years for the earth's population to grow by one billion, between the years 1900 and 1950. One billion extra mouths to feed within the space of only fifty years! Pundits were aghast.

They were even aghaster when an additional half billion people had arrived in the statistics by 1960. Half a billion in ten years! The aghastion was palpable. Wasn't there a book called, “The Population Bomb?” I'll ask Amazon. (Brief pause. Amuse yourselves.)

Yup. Paul Erhlich, “The Population Bomb,” 1968. There were many others, and numerous articles in the serious magazines. “Bomb” was somewhat alarmist, with frightful predictions starting with the 1970s. That made it somewhat of a Cassandra/ Chicken Little situation. Ehrlich pushed a bit too hard on the alarm button. The world, after all, did not degenerate into chaos in the 1970s. No, that has taken a bit longer.

Let's look at some numbers:

Year          Population

1950          2.5 billion

1960          3.0 billion

1970          3.6 billion

1980          4.4 billion

1990          5.3 billion

2000          6.1 billion

2010          6.9 billion

Now            7.8 billion

Wiki says that it took humanity two million years to reach a population of one billion people, and only two hundred more years to reach seven billion. You'd have to admit that the big picture does show a dramatic increase.

The dangerous part of all of this is not the over all increase, but the increase in the increase, so to speak. The level of the yearly increase is now such that the overall population will continue to zoom-climb. This should come to no surprise to anyone who pays even a little attention to world events. Advances in health care, personal hygiene, and sanitation, mean that whereas a poor couple out in the stix somewhere not long ago had ten children, of whom maybe three or four lived to adulthood, that couple in those same stix now has fewer children, maybe six or seven, but they all might live to adulthood. That's about twice the survival rate, out in the stix. All of those people are also living longer.

The above numbers roughly show that a rate of approximately half a billion new humans per decade persisted through the 1950s and 60s. Then it jumped to almost a billion new humans per year, a rate which remains the typical increase today. That's overall. There is, however, some good news elsewhere in the statistics.

It seems that over this same fifty or so year period, the rate of increase has gone down. Due to other societal changes, this still yields a considerable yearly increase in the overall number of people, who then procreate, etc. The world population is still climbing, some would say alarmingly.

Our modern society is beset by numerous complex and dangerous problems, and it is very difficult to prioritize the threats or analyze their interactions. People are just people, after all, and they act like people, for better or worse. Frequently for the worse. People in the world of one hundred years ago were well accustomed to eating a diet that included beef, pork, chicken, and fish. (That's the simplified list.) At some point, producing all of those provisions for a hugely increased population became problematic. This has led to giant messes, huge clouds of methane from the cow farts, over-fishing, and multi-acre pools of pig poop. Then there's the trash problem, or problems, there's the creation of trash, and the disposal of trash, and often the simple dumping of trash. That's only two of the problems that we face. All of them are made worse by human nature, capitalism, and population growth.

Reasonable regulations and sensible plans could provide solutions to these problems, but finding reasonable people among politicians, businessmen, and consumers, is practically impossible.

Achieving any meaningful decrease in the world population would be difficult to impossible, short of a new Black Death or a major war in which CBN weapons would be freely employed. (“CBN,” Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear.) Reining in the brand of capitalism now rampant in the world is another dead end. No one is answering the call for “statesmen” anymore, probably because there's too much money in the air. It appears that we will be continuing our slow-motion downfall. Most people are too busy trying to navigate our new thicket of TV streaming services, trying to find a way to watch their favorite shows without going broke in the process. It will take something really shocking to break us out of this malaise. Something like the full-throttle explosion of the Yellowstone caldera, something really impressive. That would yield ten years of winter, which should be enough to force changes in practically everything that needs fixing.

Or not. Our Ayn Randian rulers would probably only use it as an excuse to steal the rest of our stuff and what's left of our rights, blaming it on God, or maybe Obama. Alas, Babylon! Today I read that the White House has officially given up fighting the COVID-19 virus, preferring to simply wait it out. The world is obviously not in the mood to grant us much of a break.