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Today is the day of the estimated birth of the 7 billionth person. I have much to say on the subject, but the bottom line is that so many people so ait so much better, so here is my favorite with some links to some cool sites. Welcome to the world # 7,000,000,000. I especially liked the feature on theBBC site, the NY times debate was intellectually interesting, but I think the National Geographic feature gives the best overall picture. By JOEL E. COHEN ONE week from today, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion. Because censuses are infrequent and incomplete, no one knows the precise date — the Census Bureau puts it somewhere next March — but there can be no doubt that humanity is approaching a milestone. The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding the second took another 120 or so years. Then, in the last 50 years, humanity more than doubled, surging from three billion in 1959 to four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987 and six billion in 1998. This rate of population increase has no historical precedent. Can the earth support seven billion now, and the three billion people who are expected to be added by the end of this century? Are the enormous increases in households, cities, material consumption and waste compatible with dignity, health, environmental quality and freedom from poverty? For some in the West, the greatest challenge — because it is the least visible — is to shake off, at last, the view that large and growing numbers of people represent power and prosperity. This view was fostered over millenniums, by the pronatalism of the Hebrew Bible, the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church and Arab thinkers like Ibn Khaldun. Mercantilists of the 16th through the 18th centuries saw a growing population as increasing national wealth: more workers, more consumers, more soldiers. Enlarging the workforce depressed wages, increasing the economic surplus available to the king. “The number of the people makes the wealth of states,” said Frederick the Great. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pronatalism acquired a specious scientific aura from social Darwinism and eugenics. Even today, some economists argue, incorrectly, that population growth is required for economic growth and that Africa is underpopulated. This view made some sense for societies subject to catastrophic mortality from famines, plagues and wars. But it has outlived its usefulness now that human consumption, and pollution, loom large across the earth. Today, while many people reject the equation of human numbers with power, it remains unpalatable, if not suicidal, for political leaders to admit that the United States and Europe do not need growing populations to prosper and be influential and that rich countries should reduce their rates of unintended pregnancy and help poor countries do likewise. With the globalization of work, the incentive for owners of capital today to ignore or not address rapid growth in the numbers of poor people remains as it was for the kings of yore: lower wages for workers at any level of skill offer a bigger economic surplus to be captured. But just as pronatalism is unjustified, so are the dire — and discredited — prophecies of Thomas Malthus and his followers, who believed that soaring populations must lead to mass starvation. In fact, the world is physically capable of feeding, sheltering and enriching many more people in the short term. Between 1820, at the dawn of the industrial age, and 2008, when the world economy entered recession, economic output per person increased elevenfold. Life expectancy tripled in the last few thousand years, to a global average of nearly 70 years. The average number of children per woman fell worldwide to about 2.5 now from 5 in 1950. The world’s population is growing at 1.1 percent per year, half the peak rate in the 1960s. The slowing growth rate enables families and societies to focus on the well-being of their children rather than the quantity. Nearly two-thirds of women under 50 who are married or in a union use some form of contraception, which saves the lives of mothers who would otherwise die in childbirth and avoids millions of abortions each year — an achievement that people who oppose and people who support the availability of legal abortions can both celebrate. But there is plenty of bad news, too. Nearly half the world lives on $2 a day, or less. In China, the figure is 36 percent; in India, 76 percent. More than 800 million people live in slums. A similar number, mostly women, are illiterate. Some 850 million to 925 million people experience food insecurity or chronic undernourishment. In much of Africa and South Asia, more than half the children are stunted (of low height for their age) as a result of chronic hunger. While the world produced 2.3 billion metric tons of cereal grains in 2009-10 — enough calories to sustain 9 to 11 billion people — only 46 percent of the grain went into human mouths. Domestic animals got 34 percent of the crop, and 19 percent went to industrial uses like biofuels, starches and plastics. Of the 208 million pregnancies in 2008, about 86 million were unintended, and they resulted in 33 million unplanned births. And unintended births are not the whole problem. Contraceptives have been free since 2002 in Niger, where the total fertility rate — more than seven children per woman in mid-2010 — was the world’s highest. Women in Niger marry at a median age of 15.5, and married women and men reported in 2006 that they wanted an average of 8.8 and 12.6 children, respectively. Human demands on the earth have grown enormously, though the atmosphere, the oceans and the continents are no bigger now than they were when humans evolved. Already, more than a billion people live without an adequate, renewable supply of fresh water. About two-thirds of fresh water is used for agriculture. Over the coming half century, as incomes rise, people will try to buy agricultural products that require more water. Cities and industries will demand more than three times as much water in developing countries. Watershed managers will increasingly want to limit water diversion from rivers to maintain flood plains, permit fish to migrate, recycle organic matter and maintain water quality. Water shortages are projected to be significant in northern Africa, India, China, parts of Europe, eastern Australia, the western United States and elsewhere. Climate changes will increase the water available for agriculture in North America and Asia but decrease it in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Similar stories could be told about land, overfishing and carbon and nitrogen emissions to the atmosphere. Where is this taking us? The coming half century will see huge shifts in the geopolitical balance of numbers, further declines in the number of children per woman, smaller but more numerous households, an increasingly elderly population, and growing and more numerous cities. The United Nations Population Division anticipates 8 billion people by 2025, 9 billion by 2043 and 10 billion by 2083. India will have more people than China shortly after 2020, and sub-Saharan Africa will have more people than India before 2040. In 1950, there were nearly three times as many Europeans as sub-Saharan Africans. By 2010, there were 16 percent more sub-Saharan Africans than Europeans. By 2100, according to the Population Division, there will be nearly five sub-Saharan Africans for every European. In some ways, the growth in the numbers of people matters less than the growth in the numbers of households. If each household has its own refrigerator, air-conditioner, TV and car, the average energy demand for a given number of people goes up as the average number of people in a household goes down. The urban population of developing countries is expected to grow by a million people every five days through at least 2030, while the rural population falls. Many cities will eat into prime agricultural land unless they grow in density, not extent. And nearly half of urban population growth by 2015 will occur in cities of fewer than half a million people. The coming revolution in aging is well under way in the more developed countries. It will go global in the next half century. In 1950, for each person 65 and older, there were more than six children under 15. By 2070, elderly people will outnumber children under 15, and there will be only three people of working age (15 to 64) for every two people under 15 or 65 and older. Pressures to extend the “working age” beyond 65 will grow more intense. Is economic development the best contraception? Or is voluntary contraception the best form of development? Does the world need a bigger pie (more productive technologies) or fewer forks (slower population growth through voluntary contraception) or better manners (fewer inequities, less violence and corruption, freer trade and mobility, more rule of law, less material-intensive consumption)? Or is education of better quality and greater availability a key ingredient of all other strategies? All these approaches have value. However much we would like one, there is no panacea, though some priorities are clear: voluntary contraception and support services, universal primary and secondary education, and food for pregnant and lactating mothers and children under 5. These priorities are mutually reinforcing, and they are affordable. Providing modern family planning methods to all people with unmet needs would cost about $6.7 billion a year, slightly less than the $6.9 billion Americans are expected to spend for Halloween this year. By one estimate, achieving universal primary and secondary education by 2015 would cost anywhere from $35 billion to $70 billion in additional spending per year. IF we spend our wealth — our material, environmental, human and financial capital — faster than we increase it by savings and investment, we will shift the costs of the prosperity that some enjoy today onto future generations. The mismatch between the short-term incentives that guide our political and economic institutions and even our families, on one hand, and our long-term aspirations, on the other, is severe. We must increase the probability that every child born will be wanted and well cared for and have decent prospects for a good life. We must conserve more, and more wisely use, the energy, water, land, materials and biological diversity with which we are blessed. Henceforth we need to measure our growth in prosperity: not by the sheer number of people who inhabit the earth, and not by flawed measurements like G.D.P., but by how well we satisfy basic human needs; by how well we foster dignity, creativity, community and cooperation; by how well we care for our biological and physical environment, our only home.

Food Diversity

Last month’s issue of National Geographic carried yet another story of the approach of the 7th billionth person, this one having to do with food production. Most people would automatically think that the food problem of a burgeoning society would be production of enough food and it is. As a planet we will have to double our food production to account for the new people and shifts in diet that are estimated to occur by 2050. However, there is another problem with the way we are going about doing this. Food crops are grown for various reasons such as color, durability, taste, productivity. Not too many are grown for safety anymore, but maybe they should be.

In the arctic there is an ark of sorts, an ark of seeds. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, set inside the permafrost of a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen just 700 miles from the North Pole. Here many of world’s seed banks send their seeds as a kind of back up to the back up. It is a safe place because it is in a point of high elevation free from climate swings and disaster as well as being naturally chilled. Food varieties extinction is happening all over the world, fast. Of course this saving of seeds is not for taste, it’s for safety. As variety of food becomes smaller so does the genetic variations available to those breeds.

In the United States an estimated 90 percent of our historic fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. Of the 7,000 apple varieties that were grown in the 1800s, fewer than a hundred remain. Here, in China, 90 percent of the wheat varieties cultivated just a century ago have disappeared. Experts estimate that we have lost more than half of the world's food varieties over the past century. As for the 8,000 known livestock breeds, 1,600 are endangered or already extinct. People are choosing to produce fewer varieties because they are able to produce more, better, with those varieties and so do so looking at the short term goal of volume of food production. So there is a push away from variety. Focusing too narrowly on producing more can, oxymoronically, lead to famine. The Irish potato famine is a great example of how relying on a narrow variety of food crops produced a large human population whose staple crop were they hit by a disease which lead to a steep decline in the human population. There are plenty of examples in the modern day as well and I am sure that there will be more as climate change continues to occur.
Diversity is important because when crop fails because of a change in climate, pests or disease, people suffer. In the past if there was a problem with popular crops humans could always go back to the wild varieties to find traits to interbreed that would overcome that problem. The problem now is that wild varieties are also becoming much scarcer as people are expanding further and further into every corner of fertile land with genetically narrow crops.
Both goals make sense, produce more to feed more and produce more variety to ensure safety. The challenge in the future will be to do both at the same time.

7 Billion

I had seen the January issue of National Geographic for sale a few times around town, but there is a little second hand book store that I go to every month where I can buy the previous month’s issue for a deeply discounted price. However, this time they did not have it available and so I finally relented and bought a copy online to be delivered.
I especially wanted this issue because I knew that they were running a story on the world’s population, something that I am very interested in. To my happiness I found out that this article was just part of a series that the magazine will do this year as the world approaches the birth of the 7 billionth person sometime late this year.
The story itself was interesting, but mainly just confirmed a lot of things that I had already learned from other sources. What it really did was open up a discussion between Aya and I about children. We have talked about having children and we plan to soon, but the issue is really how many and whose? Of course, they will be our children, but there is a question of if we want that to be biologically so or not.
As the world’s population swells it brings a number of environmental questions forward which is really why I am interested in population issues. Obviously more people equals more consumption of goods and more consumption of goods mean more of the planet’s resources must be used to make those goods and more waste is produced as a result.

Food and the resources used to produce it will sky rocket in use. Not only this, but as people become more wealthy their diet often turns to more meat consumption and that means much more water and grains used to produce that meat. Every pound of meat requires many pounds of grain and 600 gallons of water must be used (an average, beef is more, goat is less). Common sense will tell you that grain takes much less. Think of how many more people could be fed off of the grain and water than could be fed with the pound of meat. Now multiply that by a few hundred million.

Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would vastly outpace food production and at the root he was right, but thanks to the efforts of the Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug the impending train wreck between population and food was averted for a time. However, we are facing it again. Norman’s goal was to produce crops that yielded more food per acre/plant in order to eliminate starvation. It pretty much worked, but could not continue to work. The simple reason is that the world’s population did not stand still. People did not think to reduce growth rates to coincide with food production. When less people starved more people had babies. Somehow the connection gets lost. This means that while crop yields grew so did numbers of people. All this wouldn’t matter too much except for the one factor we can’t improve on greatly. That is our planet, its arable land, its clean water, its natural resources and ecosystems.
As medicine and nutrition have improved life spans have increased dramatically, basically doubling in developed countries within the past few hundred years so that the traditional population pyramid became more top heavy. In developed countries, the number of centenarians is increasing at approximately 7% per year, which means doubling the centenarian population every decade, pushing it from some 455,000 in 2009 to 4.1 million in 2050. Japan is a great example of this.
The neat thing is that once countries became developed their growth rates declined. Most of the countries you can think of as developed nations have a negative growth rate. However, most of the countries you think of as developing nations are not necessarily the environmental plagues of the world. Although human numbers do add strains to environments it is also the habits of those people. Those in the developed world consume far more per capita in terms of goods than those in a developing country. So that begs the question, who is more environmentally irresponsible? Is it the person in the developed nation with 2 kids or the person in the developing country with 5?
These things all lead me to the question of, should I have children? How many? Whose should they be? Now before I pose the next batch of questions lets assume that I desire to have children, which I do, and that I want to be as good to the planet and everyone on it now and in the future, which I do.
The questions tumble out; if I wanted to be environmentally friendly I would have no children? The world will go on after I am gone, why should I add to its problems by having another mouth to feed, cloth, educate, and comfort? Would not my energies be better spent helping the people who are alive now? Would not I be better off helping a child who has already been born, but is not wanted? Should I adopt a child? If I adopt a child thinking environmentally I should adopt one from an area of the world with a similar consumption habit to the one I live in right? Otherwise I will be raising a child who would have consumed less in a lifetime I a developing society to a society in which they would consume more, correct?
However, they would not be my biological child and I have to assume that part of my desire to have children is to have one of my own. Yes, there is a degree of selfishness in all of this. Despite all my concerns for the future of our species as a whole I also have a bit of concern for myself. The fountain of youth is not in the Florida everglades, it is in the genes you pass on to your kids. I should have just as much right as anyone else to do so, but I can’t get past the idea that on an intellectual level I am betraying my principles to quench my emotional desires.
However, I have my other half and it takes two to tango so I am pretty sure that we will have at least one biological child of our own. Not to mention that Japan, a country with a rapidly shrinking population, offers a hefty monetary incentive to have a child. I can’t be certain, but it looks to be in the neighborhood of 8,000 dollars in payments and benefits. Many other countries are doing the same thing in an effort to create a boon of young workers to support their aging society.
As most people in the developing world I think we will stop with one child to ensure that we can devote as much time and money to the upbringing of that child as we can. However, the question of adoption then is still on the table. If we were to adopt a child from a similarly well off country would we be tipping the scales any more than had already occurred? I think the answer is no. I can assume a certain degree of consumption and actually the child might consume less in a household with environmentally conservative parents.
Once the world population creeps past the 7.25 billion mark my child should be entering the population pool. I guess the only real question is, will they be using the buddy system.