Human Overpopulation

Human overpopulation is relevant to environmental degradation because it is our expansion that is reducing habitats and resources for non-human creation.

The human population was relatively stable until the advent of civilization. However with a surplus of food civilized populations began to grow; rapidly, exponentially.

At first it took 2,000 years for the world population to double. The next doubling took 1600 years. By 1700 it would take only 200 years for the human population to double. The next doubling, between 1900 and 1960 took only 60 years. The population then doubled again by 1996, in 36 years. Human overpopulation is accelerating exponentially.

This is scary stuff but the human overpopulation effects and implications are not well understood. The reason for this is because people look at human populations in isolation. But our growth needs to be understood in the context of all life on Earth as a whole.

Earth's Biomass Has Limited Growth Potential

There are finite food resources on Planet Earth. As a result there is a finite limit to the total mass of living matter that can exist on the planet at any one time. This is called the biomass. The sum total of all living things on Earth, the biomass, is existing comfortably at the carrying capacity of this planet. It has been doing so ever since there was life here.

Life on Earth cannot grow beyond the limits of its food resources. It is physically and biologically impossible.

With a limited amount of sunlight falling on the ground there is a limited amount of vegetation that can grow and thus a limited number of animals that can be supported.

Because of this scarcity of resources most living things are in a constant cycle of growth and decline relative to their food supply. For most of humanity’s time here we participated in this waxing and waning. But with the birth of civilization one culture decided that it didn’t want to let its population decline. So it carried on growing. Its growth inevitably displaced other species. Because there is a limited biomass, the more food these humans required the less there was for others.

This group of humans now represents the culture of over 99% of all people. This culture that began in the Fertile Crescent has displaced, absorbed or wiped out almost all of the indigenous cultures that used to cover the Earth.

The Issue of Carrying Capacity

All the fuss about human overpopulation and exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet doesn’t quite represent the issue properly. We cannot exceed the carrying capacity of the planet any more than ants or whales or zebra could. There are finite resources for our consumption and we cannot grow beyond the limit of these. It is an overpopulation myth that we could somehow exceed the Earth's capacity.

What the serious ecological issue is with human overpopulation is that our expansion inevitably results in the reduction of other species. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every human that is added to the total biomass an equal amount must be subtracted from the total biomass.

The reason this is a problem is that as we grow and other species dwindle biodiversity is reduced.

Biodiversity is required for the health of the global ecosystem. If we knock out too many species underneath us to fuel our growth we will collapse. It's just like Jenga.

This distinction is missed by people who don't understand that humans are in fact a part of nature. People think that nature is off doing her own thing while humans overpopulation is an unrelated phenomenon.

Deep Ecology recognises that humans are a part of the community of life. We are deeply interconnected and interrelated with all non-human creation. It's not "us and them." It's all of us together.

As human overpopulation continues then the rest of creation must be equally reduced. But the ecosystem will not support 20 billions humans, their cows, sheep and chickens and their fields of rice, corn and wheat. The other species on this planet are a base that supports us and we are hacking away at the base, destroying them in order to create more room for us and our food.

We will reach a point in time where we cannot grow any further. The question is how much we will have destroyed in the process?

The Wrong Message

The message we regularly hear in our culture is that we must keep human populations in check so that we can advance our civilization. This message fails to recognise that it is our civilization’s inherent way of operating that has created the problem.

The only way we know how to create a civilized settlement is to practise agriculture in a way that denies resources to other parts of creation.

We fell forests to make way for our pasture. We fence in livestock to deny other predators the chance to compete. We spray produce to deny insects their dinner.

Our whole system of food production is based around reserving food for humans and denying it from others. We act like the world is our garden and every wild animal is a pest. This creates abundance for us and a lack for them. Naturally this results in human overpopulation and the decline of other species.

We can’t keep our numbers in check so we can carry on living in the same destructive fashion. We need to understand why the way we are living is unsustainable and how we can change the fundamental perceptions of how we live.

Related Articles From Deep Ecology Hub:

• Rainforest Deforestation
• The Story Of Civilization
• A Mass Extinction Is Underway
• When Do We Call This An Environmental Apocalypse

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