World Population Day - what helps keep populations sustainable?

This is a response to Tony Boys' post of July 26th on "Stable and sustainable populations" Hi Tony, (Readers interested in the background to this exchange should read Tony's articles on Japan and Korea in Sheila Newman, The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK, 2008. Please let us know where we can also read that book on the Karen that your friend Ferguson wrote, Tony.) Good to hear from you. I note that there are many visitors still to your articles on Japan. Let us have some more please! Response to your questions: Indeed, there is a difference between: 'these societies had stable populations because they had reached the limit of their carrying capacity for the food producing technology available to the people there at that time, thus maintaining the population at a stable maximum for the given endowments/technology, but somehow not degrading the environment so as to cause a population crash' and 'These societies, because of their land-tenure systems, had stable populations AND lived well within their carrying capacities'. The first could mean survival on the edge of limits, with degradation always a possibility in times of environmental change, for instance. The second could mean survival at optimum levels for all species concerned. I think that the extreme richness of biodiversity, including massive energy intensive herbivores like elephants, rhinos, hippos as well as a remarkably wide range of carnivorous cats and bears, plus a huge variety of different human societies, in environments maintaining very rich soils over many centuries (India particularly) is incontrovertibly an indication that these societies, because of their land-tenure systems, had stable populations AND lived will within their carrying capacities. There can be no doubt that India is an extremely rich country in terms of soil endowment and water. I think that Africa's endowment was more varied, with many more deserts, but still extremely rich in many places – and, of course, Africa is much bigger than India. These qualities of soil and water richness are reflected in the traditional population carrying capacities of India and Africa, both quite high. Modern agriculture and reorganisation from the 18th Century caused population blow-outs and broke features of the natural systems and the carrying capacity of these lands is being affected downwards. For a time this was patchily masked by industrial agriculture and imports paid for through loans, but the draw-down on wells and the destruction of forests for firewood and building materials and to clear for new fields, shows that those apparent gains were transitory. When oil runs down and the prospect of an international growth economy fails, the carrying capacity of India and Africa will not return to what it was before the advent of the industrial revolution. [Tony Boys wrote:] "If so we need to know a lot more about these societies, and I hope you are going to do this for us in your upcoming book." Yes, I started with neolithic times and Pacific Islander societies, then looked at the Roman and then the Germanic land-tenure and inheritance systems. At the moment I am doing a detailed examination of the French Revolution in comparison with the British revolution and restoration and changes to laws. I believe that I have identified some elements of land-tenure and inheritance which allow some societies more control over numbers and consumption than others and also favour democracy. "This will be interesting, and in a sense earth-shattering (if true)." The information was well-known to anthropologists before the 1970s. But it was suppressed. Every so often someone discovers it and writes about it, but the matter does not get a wide reception. I may publish my book but the chances are that only a few will read it and the people who currently run economies and populations from a distance will not be motivated to allow us all to relocalise and regain control. For instance, in Australia, the current system needs to break down and for people to build sustainable communities around it. The government needs to be treated as an irrelevance, but that will require people to start talking to each other and having a look outside instead of reading the papers and watching American sit-coms. Widespread unemployment will probably do the trick. That will remove the government's tax base and give people more time. Hopefully they will quickly learn to share what is available. As people move back with their relatives in tough times, organic patterns of social organisation, from family up through clan, may naturally reassert, no matter what governments and vestigial big business may do. Sooner rather than later, I hope because the bigger the population the smaller the scope for survival. "The 'establishment' still wants everyone to believe that food production increases through ever more sophisticated technology are necessary to 'keep up with the rising population.'" That's right. There is a lot of money tied up in perpetuating the mass production system and constantly increasing product. If people relocalised their politics and production they would also quickly adapt their populations to the local visible realities which are so much easier to identify for you and me on the ground than the total carrying capacity of a continent or a planet. They would not need the global economy. Constantly increasing crop production for profit needs to perpetuate the problem of run-away population growth to justify itself. So we are constantly lied to about the inevitabilty of growth. "I think you have done a lot to demolish this myth and to show the economic and political forces that are still trying to push it. I have 'assumed' for a long time that, contrary to the 'establishment' notions, population increase was driven by food availability - the more food available, the more the population will rise. Thus the stupidity of calling for food production increases." It is actually very interesting. Population numbers (of mice and humans) probably ultimately respond to food availability, but not to the point where they uses up every available calory. The setting point is somewhat below total uptake of resources available over a relatively extended period in a given area. It is not true to assert that in the past and in other species, everyone is living on the edge of survival. That is really naive and ill-supported. It relies on the ahistorical normalisation of colonial and ex-colonial population overshoots. A problem arises where a population is misinformed of what is available in a situation where they do not have the means to work out the situation for themselves. Australia is a case in point. A farmer can look at the dam level falling and the grass wearing down in his dry paddocks and immediately know that he should not increase his flock. The flock also realise this. The signs are obvious. But how does the population in North Melbourne know if they are close or far away from starvation? They get their information from the newspaper and the television. They assume that they will be told if the situation warrants alarm. They are told by people promoted as 'authorities' - church, politicians, Bernard Salt, the Pope, the Property Council of Australia, etc - that Australia needs a much bigger population, that we are rich and selfish. How would they work out that this is not true? No-one is visibly starving in their street and the media and government always have always other explanations than a stretched economy for the increasing number of homeless, buskers and thieves. There is one thing that will, however, indicate to the people of North Melbourne that supply is getting dangerously low, and that is increasing costs for necessities like water and food. A declining standard of living will reduce their reproduction. The Growth lobby has a way of overcoming these signals though. The public can be strung along for a while with the illusion that borrowing money will take care of these rising costs and that the water crisis will be overcome with investment, technology and higher charges to make us less selfish. And as marginalised people begin to suffer visibly, the public will be told that this is because they are lazy or have brought it upon themselves in some way. There is no way that the growth lobby could con people to this extent if they could verify what was happening locally with their own eyes and by comparing their perceptions with other local people. Manipulation of populations requires disorientation, a complex system, and propaganda from distant sources sources of 'authority' - the high priests in banking, talk circuits, media and government etc, talking the garbage-jargon of the religion of global economics. There is another way to stimulate population growth in a country where people are instinctively limiting it, and that is via high immigration, preferably from countries with denser populations with lesser incomes than the receiving country. The immigrant is even more disoriented and dependent on the manufactured reality of the growth merchants. They may be told, for instance, that Australians are too lazy to work, so there is plenty of work here. If Australians are unemployed it is their fault that they don't want to 'work hard'. Likewise, they may hear that Australians don't have large families because they are selfish, so the immigrant may easily be made to believe that it is quite okay to go ahead and have large families in this country. And the immigrant may hear that the water shortage will be taken care of by technology and higher prices. Well that's okay, isn't it, since there are lots of well-paid jobs etc etc. And, oh yes, they may be told that Australians are racists, so don't pay attention if they tell you that the population is growing too fast and they don't want immigrants. Australia needs immigrants and a much bigger population! So that's okay, don't listen to the locals; the government doesn't. "But you seem to be saying that this is too simplistic, and that there have historically been many cultures over large areas of the world (India and Africa) for which this has not been so. Although there are bound to be many cultural differences, how, basically, did these societies suppress their fertility?" I think it was a random evolutionary option. The societies that preserved certain patterns of land-tenure survived and the ones that used other patterns did not survive. Those patterns, to do with restrictions on marriage (meaning mating with view to procreating) and procreation with near relatives, seem to be present in most or all animals. Once upon a time you had to walk a very long way to find someone who either wasn't already married and wasn't closely related to you. The opportunities for marriage/having legitimate children were low. And no-one would marry you and have your children if you couldn't show that you had land to support children, because without land they would not survive. So people without land did not get married and did not have children. At times, events, particularly climate events causing seas to rise, probably pushed distant populations together, bringing more opportunities for meeting non-relatives. Technologies evolved from necessity to serve denser populations, but people still could see the limits to the carrying capacity in their local area. Sometimes one people invaded and subjugated another and made them work as slaves and servants, with the ruling caste living a high quality of life and the lower castes living in very reduced circumstances. The ruling castes learned to preserve and aggregate land among themselves by intermarrying, but their rate of reproduction was slow due to their social organisation which ruled out marriage with anyone outside their own caste and kept their population small and sparse therefore few opportunities for marriage. (Think of how long it takes a member of a royal family to find a spouse because of the limited number of suitable royals in the world. ) Marriage or 'fertility opportunity' for the lower castes, however, could go two ways. In France, for instance, prior to the Revolution, the lower castes - the serfs - were often not allowed to marry anyone outside the manor lands they were born to. Incest avoidance and the Westermarck Effect (which makes us sexually unattractive to people we are brought up with in infancy) meant that these serfs in France had a low marriage and birth rate. In Britain, however, the serfs were dispossessed early and turned into land-less labour. These landless laborers moved all around the country and had many opportunities to have children with other landless laborers whom they had not grown up with. Furthermore they were encouraged to do so by the fact that parishes and local governments paid more to a woman with children and the man who married that woman derived benefit from this. And child labour (Queen Elizabeth made laws that forced children as young as 7 years old to be sent to work on farms) meant that children brought in an income. The British were brutalised for centuries in this way. "Were they just 'clever' because they knew roughly what their carrying capacity was and consciously decided to stay well within it (by having fewer offspring than they were capable of) because life was sure to be more comfortable that way? Or was there some other mechanism(s) working to keep the population in check at some optimum level well below the carrying capacity?" Yes, the mechanism, as I said above, was incest avoidance and the Westermarck effect plus the fact that their familiarity with the territory and their reliance on a local economy meant that the limits to carrying capacity were obvious. Folktales and memory of old people of what their parents and grandparents had described would have given them knowledge of variations over time. "Or is it possible (as in the areas of N Thailand, N Burma and N Laos up until at least the second half of the 19th century) that populations in these areas simply had not reached their limits for the carrying capacity of the land?" I don't think that a population that has self government and local control over its economy and is not subjugated by an enslaving caste gets out of control. The only reason that it would is if it starts very small in conditions of isolation. Then, if the population does not override incest avoidance and the Westermarck Effect, it will die out. But if it does override these built in brakes on multiplication, it will theoretically multiply to infinite numbers. Another cause would be a sudden change for the better in the productivity of the environment, causing an influx of immigrants and more opportunities for marriage, followed by an exhaustion of the windfall resource, leaving a larger population suddenly overwhelming the available resources - as with discoveries of minerals or changes in sea-level increasing or decreasing land-supply. "We 'know' this is true for the 'Golden Triangle' region because it was still possible to carry out semi-nomadic (periodic relocation of villages) swidden (slash and burn) cultivation up to that time. The population does seem to have been increasing, though. The land horizon (the ability to relocate villages or establish sister villages) seems to have disappeared by about the 1930s, but this is at least partly (largely?) due to pressure from lowland populations seeking new farmland in relatively mountainous areas." Ah yes, but I have, of course, read your anthropological notes and we know that the land-tenure arrangements and inheritance conditions have changed. :-) Once the women controlled the land and married late. They were not obliged to find a husband to keep them and they had other roles besides the role of mother and wife to occupy them. I think that land was not bought and sold, so it remained in the hands of the same families. Money was not necessary, even though the Karen you describe had a complex society with beautiful art and clothing and their own writing - does my memory serve me in this last detail? It was the usual traditional thing of having to go a long way to find people not related to you to marry and you needed to have land in order to marry. Furthermore you would marry within the Karen culture, which had a limited number of members. You didn't consider the neighboring tribe that spoke a different language and wore strange rings around its neck, and it didn't consider the Karen suitable either, marrying within its own people. Oh, there was always a certain amount of immigration, but it required the consent of the receiving community which might be granted if for some reason there was a greater lack than usual of marriage opportunities within the tribe. But, in the situation you are talking about, with the encroachment of the industrial economy of mass production, land speculation and travel for education and work brought more and more people in contact. People were pushed off their land by the military who claimed to be able to manage it more efficiently. The military were often preceded by the church, which had the job of softening up the traditions by giving people new expectations and making them unhappy with themselves and dissatisfied with their lifestyle. The rules about needing land before you married were relaxed. Married couples cohabited where perhaps they did not before, (this was a factor in the population explosion of Pacific Islanders after the missionaries interfered) and you only needed a wage to marry, and maybe a credit card. Phut! Along with the land and the old communities the social organisation was lost. And the knowledge of contraception. The same thing happens to kangaroos and mice when they are disorganised. "Hope you have time to reply, even if briefly, to the above and look forward to your answer, and in the (near?) future to reading your book." Thanks. Obviously I've left a lot out - like all my sources. I have to publish first. Hope you may answer by talking more about the Karen, maybe quoting that book about them and from your chapter on the Edo period of Japan and the Industrialisation of Japan, and also from your chapter on how the Koreans starved when the could no longer afford to purchase enough oil on the world market. How are things with the Karen at the moment? Last time I heard from you things were going terribly badly. I have come to feel deeply for those people. Best wishes, Sheila Newman, population sociologist home page