Ants on an Apple - Infinite Growth in a Finite Space. This is an essay about the need to control human population.

Ants on an Apple
Infinite Growth in a Finite Space - April 28, 2007
Global Warming Paragraph - June 18, 2007
General updates and Added Facts - October 25, 2007

I just read an article in National Geographic about “Saving the Sea’s Bounty”. From it I learned that humanity now consumes about 100 million metric tons of fish every year, more than four times the amount consumed per year in 1950. To put the number into perspective, that’s about 274,000 metric tons per day, or 190 metric tons per minute, or approximately the weight of 140 mid-size passenger cars. Every minute. Some fish stocks, like Newfoundland cod that fed the world for centuries, have essentially disappeared.
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But it’s not just fish. As human population grows and we divert ever increasing amounts of the world's resources and land area to support our numbers, the population of every other living thing declines. For example, the population of many common song birds in North America has declined by more than 70% since 1967. Worldwide, on average a distinct species of plant or animal becomes extinct every 20 minutes. The last time anything comparable happened was 65 million years ago when scientists believe a meteorite struck the earth, changed its climate, and caused the last great mass extinction. This time, we are the meteor.
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There are about 247 births and 107 deaths per minute in the world, making a net increase of 141 people per minute. That's 203,040 people per day, approximately the population of a city like Reno, Nevada. And, the more people there are, the faster our population grows. Currently, the world's population doubles every thirty years. That means there will be twice as many people in thirty years, four times as many in sixty years, eight times as many in ninety years, and so on. Compounding the effect of our exploding numbers is the fact that each individual now uses far more resources than did a person of the previous generation. For instance, in the United States between 1950 and 2005, an average individual’s petroleum consumption tripled, and the size of an average new single family home increased by over 2.3 times.
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The production and consumption of all those resources is releasing greenhouse gases into our atmosphere at rates never before seen. In a report issued in April 2007, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the effects on wildlife will be major. The most immediate impact is to Arctic wildlife like seals and polar bears. Survival of these species depends completely on sea ice, and new research funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research suggests that summer sea ice in the arctic may be completely gone as soon as 2050. In 2007 one million square miles of sea ice melted. That's an area six times the size of California. Polar bears are already drowning in record numbers for lack of floating ice upon which to rest, and studies show that large numbers of them are malnourished because they are no longer able to catch enough food in the open water. According to the U.N. report some parts of Europe could lose up to 60 percent of all their wildlife species by 2080. In addition, as many as 130 million people could face severe food and water shortages across Asia by 2050, and by the 2080s it may be impossible to grow wheat on the African continent. "Even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further impacts of climate change in the next few decades," the report concluded. Of course the United States has yet to make any serious effort to mitigate global warming, and China hasn't even thought about it.
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Worldwide, half of all children live in horrific poverty. 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health services. In 2003, 10.6 million children died before they reached five years of age. But, these are the good old days. As our booming population stretches the world's resources even thinner and collapses ecosystems that supply the raw materials for everything we have, increasing numbers will be forced to the edge of survival and beyond. The economics of supply versus demand will pull multitudes into the clutches of poverty.
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For most readers this is not a matter of personal survival, yet. It is more a quality of life issue at the moment. National, state, and local parklands are already so overcrowded that visitor bussing systems are being implemented in many locations, with more on the way. These are parks, and they are so crowded you need to take a bus! Does anyone see anything ironic or wrong with that? Congestion and trampling are not the only problems brought to natural spaces by our increasing numbers. In many areas visibility is already significantly reduced by air pollution. Acid rain from this pollution is killing fish, amphibians, and vegetation. Countless lakes in the northeast and Canada, acidified by air pollution from industrial cities, are already completely dead. More severe weather events fueled by global warming damage cities, towns, and park infrastructures and resources with increasing regularity. For instance, in recent years air pollution often prevents visitors from seeing across Grand Canyon. Clouds over Great Smoky Mountains National Park are often literally as acidic as vinegar. Storms of record intensity have seriously damaged parks like Mount Rainier, Glacier, Everglades, and others. The hope of preserving wild lands in the face of two, four, or eight times as many people is no more than a fantasy.
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The effects of unbounded population growth are seen everywhere. I recently spent some time doing photography in Florida, visiting places I visited a couple of years earlier. The changes during my brief absence were simply unbelievable. In Cape Coral, Home Depot, strip malls, houses, and roads have replaced open space and burrowing owl nests at an amazing rate. A little further south, not far from Naples and Audubon’s Corkscrew Swamp, the land is stripped bare as far as the eye can see for new housing developments, golf courses, and shopping centers. The roads are filled to capacity and beyond, always. State officials say about 1000 people move to Florida every day, and 76 million or so visit every year. They call this prosperity. Of course people always want to move themselves to nice places, but I have to wonder how crowded a place can get before it’s not nice anymore. When Florida's last wetland is paved over and the roads are all in continuous gridlock, perhaps people will stop going. On the other hand, I have some confidence that we humans will keep our priorities straight, and Disneyworld will be a big draw no matter how bad things get. Thinking about this makes me glad to be old.
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It is clear that population control is an absolute necessity if any humanitarian or conservation effort is to have long term meaning or sustainability. But, for some inexplicable reason we believe we can expand endlessly in a finite world with finite resources and not end up in a living hell. The notion is idiotic, but we choose to believe it anyway. We swarm over the surface of the earth like ants on a big apple, laying to waste everything in our path as we multiply, build, drill, dig, and develop. Unlike the ants we have only one apple, but that doesn't bother us either because we refuse to think about it. Obviously, doing anything about our runaway numbers is out of the question since it is seldom acknowledged as a being problem.
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At least I feel better having written this. Now I can get back to more immediate matters, like a nice dinner of fish and chips.

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