On Friday I released Chapter 16, “Exodus,” of Ada’s Children into the wild. This is the chapter in which the titular, self-aware AI decides it has to save both humanity and all life on Earth. And the only way to do that, Ada concludes, is to scale back both the number of humans and the amount we consume.
Yes, this chapter and the previous one featuring Ada raise the dreaded P word (population), not to mention the even more dreaded O word (overpopulation). Both have become a bit taboo, especially if you’re a white writer living in the developed world. Since I removed the paywall on this chapter, and because Ada seems just a tad genocidal by the end of it, I realized readers coming to it cold could get the wrong impression. Thus this post, featuring my thoughts and beliefs on the “population problem” as they have developed over the years. As with all of these posts, it’s good to remember I’m just a novelist, not a demographer or any other type of expert.
And before we get started,
has a great piece on whether we need to worry about world population one way or the other. It does a good job of covering current population trends, which might be surprising if you haven’t been keeping up with them. I agree with just about all of it, except maybe for what happens if we take the fate of non-human residents of the planet into account (which Sam certainly is also concerned about).Background
Back in the ‘90s, when my wife and I (well, mainly my wife!) were having our two kids, and when we were earnestly but somewhat futilely trying to cut our consumption footprint, a childless friend would chide us for having our priorities backwards. She believed that behind most environmental problems was the fact that there were simply too many people on the planet, and soon there would be more. By not having kids, she reasoned that she’d earned the right to consume as much as she wanted (not that she really did). She was maybe half right, but more than half wrong.
It was not long after this that a husband-and-wife team of scientists who had just published a book on the state of the planet made a presentation to the Desert Protective Council, a group with which I held various roles over the years. (I wish I could remember the couple’s names or the title of their book.) The central thesis was that the planet had two problems: an overpopulation problem and an overconsumption problem. The former was mostly in the developing world, while the latter was almost entirely in the developed world. And the overconsuming developed world was most responsible for many environmental problems, from the hole in the ozone layer to impending climate change. The big question was, how could the developing world achieve a just standard of living without compounding the already existing problems many times over? To me, the answer was clear: if there were going to be population controls, they should be on overconsuming Americans first, followed by Europeans.
At around the same time, the Sierra Club, of which I was a member, was wracked by debates over US population control, i.e. immigration. How could we protect natural areas if more and more people kept flooding into the country? Many parks and wildlands were already overrun by people “loving nature too much.” Some of the people making these arguments were overt white supremacists like John Tanton, a member of the club and also founder of FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). Others, including some of my friends, claimed not to be racist but simply concerned about the impact of a growing US population on wildlands. I thought they were acting locally while failing to think globally. Many of the organizations promoting these ideas have now come around to the view that population can’t be seen as a regional or national problem.
The elections for the Sierra Club’s board of directors in the late ‘90s and early 2000s were a preview of the immigration debates we’re having in this country (not to mention Europe) even now. I was extremely proud of the club when the anti-immigration candidates lost and the club continued and strengthened what I thought was a common-sense approach. It abandoned talking about overpopulation in terms of Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and turned its attention to one weird feature of development.
To reduce Earth’s population, try this one weird trick
It turns out there’s a path to reducing population growth without resorting to draconian one-child policies, eugenicist forced sterilization programs, or other measures that violate basic human rights. In fact, you don’t need to talk about population or overpopulation at all. Perhaps counterintuitively, that path is social and economic development. The more a country develops economically, the more it educates its people, and, crucially, the more it extends reproductive rights to women, the lower its birthrate will be.
This is what the Sierra Club banked on in its stance on population from 1994 onwards. This position was modeled on the approach taken by the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and also echoed a line of argument developed by Barry Commoner in opposition to the Ehrlichs. The ICPD framework also recognizes that overconsumption is at least as big a problem as looming overpopulation. The economic development was supposed to be “sustainable,” though exactly what that meant was a bit vague and some (or much?) of the development that actually happened might not be called sustainable at all.
Thirty years later, what the ICPD predicted in terms of population growth is precisely what has come to pass. As an unprecedented and truly amazing number of people have been lifted out of poverty, birthrates in much of the world have plummeted to below replacement level. (The economic development that paved the way for this has of course had its own drawbacks, as the UN Environmental Program points out.) The approach has been so successful in reducing the birthrate that the most conservative projections have global population peaking not at 10.5 billion but 9.5, with that number declining to 8.9 billion by 2100. Some capitalists are seeing an approaching population black hole that will bring about an end to growth. (Good news is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.)
But wait, you say, isn’t global population still going up? If we’re at eight billion now, and if we’re going to get to nine or ten billion, depending on projections, how can that happen if birth rates are so low? The answer lies in something called population momentum. Even though the birthrate is decreasing, more children are making it out of infancy and people are living longer. More generations are alive at the same time. People of child-bearing age are already here and will have some number of children. Even if that’s below replacement rate, the overall population will continue to grow for a time.
So if you’re still concerned about world population, the solution is not some voluntary or forced zero or one child policy. It’s to do away with grandma and grandpa! You hit your allotted three score and ten, then you’re done. As a person of grandparent age, I hope you’ll agree that this would be an unjust, immoral, and all-around atrocious solution. I’m glad that I, so far as I know, am the only one who has even thought of it.
That said, efforts to extend human longevity beyond one hundred years, and even up to immortality, will only make population momentum permanent. The same with efforts to reverse declining birth rates. There’s an element among the left that thinks resources are limitless and it’s only capitalist greed that makes us think we live in a world of scarcity. Some economists share a similar view of limitless resources, but from a pro-capitalist perspective. But biology and ecology tell us that ecosystems have carrying capacities, and this is surely true of the entire Earth. Some day, if population were to continue growing beyond what we already expect, we will hit that carrying capacity, despite all our technological tricks. (And many would say, given our impact on the natural world and the climate, we already have.)
To my mind, a world in which a smaller number of people can lead fulfilling lives with all of their material needs being met in a sustainable manner is much superior to a more populated world with people starving, endless conflicts over resources, and an endless destruction of habitats. If a gradually shrinking population is a problem for capitalism, maybe we need to re-engineer our economic system. Maybe Japan has some clues for us here, since its economy is doing pretty well right now, despite its long-declining birthrates. Or maybe the answer lies in a different way of measuring our economies, like green total factor productivity (h/t
) or Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics.To sum all this up, we’re already doing all we can or should do about world population. I shouldn’t be deciding an ideal population for the world, nor should governments or NGOs or anyone else. It’s up to each individual parent to decide how many children to have. At the same time, overconsumption remains the more important and more intractable problem.
But what about the planet’s other residents?
We are at the beginning of the Sixth Great Extinction (or I guess we’re calling it the Sixth Mass Extinction now, because extinction ain’t so great). It might actually be farther along than scientists formerly thought. According to one study, its principal drivers are “Land Use Change” (habitat loss and fragmentation) and direct exploitation of wildlife, with climate change following in third but catching up. (The same study points out that seventy percent of Earth’s land has been disturbed by humans, a much higher percentage than a rosier number I cited in a previous post.) It’s hard to see how increasing population doesn’t make the first two causes worse, even if those growing populations get all their energy and transport from clean sources.
On the other hand, a lot of habitat loss is caused by resource extraction, often flowing from the developing to the developed world, which is tied more to the overconsumption problem than the population problem. A 2019 comprehensive review of “the largest assessment of the state of nature conducted as of yet” calls not for population reduction but an “immediate transformation of global business-as-usual economies and operations.” (The paper’s recommendations are behind a paywall, so I don’t know exactly what its specific recommendations are. A physical copy should arrive in the mail soon, so I’ll update this post at that time.)
And again, we’re already doing everything we can or should do with respect to population. The overconsuming way of life in parts of the world seems to be the main culprit. And this overconsumption isn’t mainly a matter of individual choices or “consumerism,” but is baked into the structure of everyday life in things like urban and suburban layout, public transit (or lack thereof), building codes, and more. So there’s a lot of work to be done.
And even here, there’s some good news. It could be that we’re already hitting peak agricultural land use. As the amount of land needed to feed the still-growing population is reduced, more can be put aside for conservation and restoration. And then there’s the “peace pact with nature” signed at the COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal in 2022 by more than 190 countries. According to Science Alert, “The deal pledges to secure 30 percent of the planet as a protected zone by 2030, stump up US$30 billion in yearly conservation aid for the developing world and halt human-caused extinctions of threatened species.”
Those are ambitious goals, and will do a lot to save species if they can be achieved. The deal is also supposed to protect Indigenous rights, but sadly, that doesn’t always happen. Here is another dark side of all that development: some portion of it has been achieved by moving people engaged in low-impact pastoralist and agricultural lifeways into jobs in cities, in a process of proletarianization that has been going on since the 18th century in England.
Here I’m encouraged by the efforts of organizations like the World Food Programme to keep people on their traditional lands, following something like their original lifeway.
That’s the real world, but what about the world of Ada’s Children?
In dreaming up a situation dire enough to warrant a rogue AI usurping power to save both Earth and humanity, I had to create a perfect storm of existing trends and extend them into the future, assuming they would only worsen. What are the chances that all these things will get worse and not better? Oh, I don’t know… what are the chances that Trump will be president of the US in 2025?
Two of the trends I focused on were mass migration and disruption of agriculture, both fueled by climate change. We’re already seeing both those trends right now in places like Honduras, according to NPR: “The changing climate is reshaping migration from Honduras. Drought and erratic rainfall are undermining agriculture, pushing young people to migrate in search of a more secure future.” In the US, parts of the Ogallala Aquifer are drying up, shrinking corn production in that area. In Midwestern areas with dryland farming, it’s either too wet or too dry (although 2023 was a record year for US corn production, despite starting in drought). Add in the effects of war in Ukraine, including increased fertilizer prices. According to the World Food Programme, production of corn, wheat, soybeans and rice all fell in 2022.
Still, we currently produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. The big reason that we don’t get that food to the people, according to the WFP, is global conflict. Between conflict and climate shocks, “783 million people are facing chronic hunger.”
Now extend these trends twenty years into the future. With another billion or billion-and-a-half people on the planet, will more of them go hungry, or will we still be able to produce enough food? Will weather-related shocks to agriculture get worse or get better? As more people are driven from their homes by climate change, will conflicts be more or less prevalent? With more refugees on the move, are nations likely to become more closed, authoritarian, nationalistic, and xenophobic or more open and democratic? And as all of this happens in the human sphere, will our non-human companions on the planet fare worse or better?
I’m not saying all this will happen, but it’s not irrational to bet that the former outcomes in all these areas are more likely than the latter ones. And if most or all of them do come to pass, it’s not hard to imagine billions of people going hungry, millions of them dying of starvation, thousands (if not millions) dying in conflicts, and many millions more living in misery. Not to mention the loss of countless plants and animals that make up the wondrous web of life on Earth.
While there’s a lot we can do to avoid such a dark future, these are the conditions that compel Ada to save Earth from humans, and humans from themselves. Her initial plan isn’t quite as draconian as the sparsely populated world of the far future chapters would suggest, but you’ll need to keep reading (or begin reading) to find out what that plan is and how Ada carries it out.
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You can probably tell that I veer back and forth between optimism and pessimism, while trying not to engage in excessive amounts of either. That’s why I named this blog Glass Half Full. The truth is that none of us can know what the future will bring. Hoping for the best, pushing for positive changes and limiting damaging ones, all while preparing for the worst — that’s probably the best we can do.
Come back on Friday for the first half of Chapter 18 of Ada’s Children, “Revelation,” in which Carol and the rest of the world discover that a self-aware AI has taken control of everything.