population fact sheet

This page is under construction.

This page is under construction.

Some civilisations meet challenges and survive.

Hundreds more have failed. In Asia, Africa and America, ruins of great cities lie in deserts that they have often helped to make. Remnants of cultures cling to places that once were more fertile – eg the Dogon of Africa.

Some people are not worried about the crises ahead of us. They say that Science will save us, or God will save them. They say, humans are clever enough, they will think of a way out. That belief has often proved to be a vain trust.

Some people say we are doomed anyway

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But we can learn from observing how other civilisations have self-destructed, and how others have survived, to avoid calamities ourselves.

Some have been destroyed by invaders, but hundreds of others have ‘done it themselves’ or climate has done it for them.

The ancient Greeks thought that civilisations rose and fell on a wheel of fortune, and that decline was marked by their own stupidity. ‘Whom the gods destroy they first drive mad’. There are signs of that today.

Examples to study range from Easter Island and the now deserted island of St. Kilda in the Atlantic, to Mayan, Nubian, Benin, the Olmecs in Meso-America, the series of civilisations from Sumer, Ur and possibly earlier, in the garden of the Middle-East, where now are deserts, and the now Gobi desert of central Asia.

The centuries of history of China are marked by dynasties which rose and fell in a cycle where low population pressure grew until there was overpopulation, causing population crises with great famines and wars as the people multiplied beyond the resources available. Then the series of spikes and collapses began again. Currently there is another up-rising spike, the greatest and most serious yet - and it is a question what sort of down-turn there may be.

History may be seen as a series of challenges and responses by civilisations which failed or succeed according to how they met those responses. (Arnold Toynbee’s massive survey). It can also be seen as a series of population cycles and crises, as in a short historical survey by Clair and WMS Russell (1990). They document how so many cultures have failed, or staggered through crises through populations that outgrew their resources or destroyed them, in all parts of the world. Climate changes may have assisted, or even been instigated by humans deforesting.

Hunter-gatherers have killed off the animals they relied on.common pre-history story is represented by the Clovis People of North America, around 10,000 years ago, who abruptly vanish from the archaeological record, replaced by a myriad of different local hunter-gatherer cultures. Why this happened no one knows but their disappearance coincides with the mass extinction of Ice Age big-game animals, leading to speculation that Clovis people either over hunted these mammals and drove them into extinction or over-hunting eliminated a "keystone species" (usually the mammoths or mastodon) and this led to environmental collapse and a more general extinction.

There is speculation that Australian aboriginals killed off the megafauna of the continent, and Eurasian hunters killed off the mammoths.

Swidden farmers who make and farm a clearing in forests or plains, and then move on to make another when that soil is exhausted, can survive as long as they do not become too populous so that the forests have no chance to revive. Farmers like the Mayan appear to have simply exhausted their soils, and the villages withered away.

Irrigation has enabled populations to increase dramatically, but then salination and increasing drought may leave them high and dry, as in civilisations of the Euphrates basin, and the Hohokam of North America.

In the past, a civilisation could collapse in one area, and the rest of the world was unaffected.

Today, we support our billions of population by globalising – resources are imported where they are short. Many countries today cannot grow their own food. But as the global resources run short, there may only be extreme and suicidal measures left – for example resorting to biofuels to make up for oil shortages will only deplete both food resources and the soils needed to grow them.

And even more self-destructive today are the wars over resources, as wars now destroy everything, not just soldiers.

At what stage should a population stop growing because it makes life worse, not better?

Do more people improve the quality of life?

It needs a certain number of people to have quality of life, with trade, culture, specialisation of work, and for many benefits of civilisation to be economically possible.

When do too many people reduce quality of life?

Across the world megaslums of over 10 million people are growing. The number of rich remains about the same but their wealth increases. The number of poor increases, and while quality of life and health has been improving to date, now these are reducing, with more crowding, more disease, more malaise.

'Too many' depends upon where. A city like Melbourne with only 3.74 million people in a State of five million, may become overcrowded with the official goal to push for another million by 2030. This growth has been promoted as a benefit - Australia's largest port, sporting and cosmopolitan cultural capital, and with many of Australia's largest companies.

Further growth has downsides.

Water is the most serious problem. Restrictions already reduce quality of life, with constant advertising campaigns to save water, and reduction of Melbourne?s famous gardens. The major proposed solutions are an ecologically damaging desalination plant, taking water from northern farmers via pipeline, at a cost to Victorian food supplies, and recycling water from sewage. Time was, Melbourne had the purest, best-tasting drinking water to be found anywhere.

Escalating prices of real estate benefit some, but harm most. Housing is beyond the reach of most young people, and mortgages can be lifelong.

Countryside and fertile local farmland is constantly whittled away.

Timber is being supplied by logging in catchments - a sure way to reduce quality of water and silt up storages with sediments and polluted runoff.

Traffic congestion reduces quality of life and proposed solutions are tunnels and ever more freeways. Pollution increases, with measurable effects. Yet the sprawling outer areas of Melbourne suffer from too little public transport.

To reduce sprawl and costs of supplying its infrastructure, pressures are to redevelop existing suburbs for denser housing, destroying liveable homes, and crowding families with insufficient outdoor play-space and recreation. The 'Australian dream' of the quarter-acre block has to be ridiculed as impractical.

With greater population size comes the crime and social problems common to big cities. More anonymity, more alienation and loneliness. More noise, now documented as a serious stress problem. Local councils of excessive size administer their business like small states. Overlarge schools in small grounds prepare children for crowded lives without community.

It becomes harder to holiday locally in uncrowded beach or country resorts.

The Victorian government relies heavily on gambling rising property values and the building industry as other industries disappear. Business also profits from mass markets.

There has been research on the ideal size of cities according to their available resources. Melbourne has gone beyond that. History also shows that size does not ensure innovative cities with the richest cultures and contributions to civilisation. Sure, London, New York, Paris. But classical Athens, Renaissance Florence and 18th century Edinburgh show how wonderful small can be.

The Western fear of ageing populations must be faced one day, and the sooner the better. The solution to an ageing population cannot be by increasing the younger population, because they in turn will age and need more younger populations – the situation will only get worse.

News reports of worries about the demands on the economy and shortage of labor with an ageing population can be immediately followed by worries about present unemployment especially for youth.

Ageing populations are a problem in rural areas, notably in Japan, because the younger people have gone to the cities because they lack opportunities.

In general, people are living longer because they are healthier. The aged at 70 are usually fitter than the aged at 60 even decades ago. At present, at age 40-plus people can become permanently unemployed - yet with modern health, half the 65-75 age-group and thousands over that age are still capable of great contributions to our society, including a higher proportion in regular employment. Australia today needs brains more than muscles.

Even in retirement, the elderly make tremendous contributions to the welfare of society, in childcare and voluntary work, and in continuing intellectual contributions, with the wisdom of age. Grandparents provided 68% of all informal child care in Australia in 1997. Look at the average age of our farmers today, and how may are over 70! A large proportion of elderly remain self-supporting, and often support the younger generations, so they are no financial burden.

Older people consume less as they usually have established households and fewer needs, except in medical services. This health problem is only for a proportion, and is not tremendous or necessarily insoluble. The health of the elderly can still be improved.

Support ratios of workers to the elderly of 4:1 are not a problem for Western countries. The total dependency of old people in nursing homes is only on average 7 months for men and 2 years for women. On average, people require two years of substantial health care before their deaths regardless of whether they are young or old.

The reduced consumption of the elderly may be a bother for commercial profits, but not an overall problem. Modern methods of production mean that very few workers are really needed to keep the rest of us alive. Children are more costly to the economy than the old. . Their rearing and education costs far more in worker time and in expense than costs of the elderly.

Look carefully at who is putting forward the 'ageing population' argument for increased population and why they are putting it forward. It is business councils and property investors who push for more population because that means more markets, more building, and increasing property values. And overseas there are millions of economic refugees who need somewhere to go. Declining populations are truly a bogey. And more than blue eyes, it is the best of our civilisation that needs saving and promoting, not dependent upon national origin.

Prosperity does not depend upon continual quantitative growth and can be destroyed by it. There have been thousands of prosperous societies in the past with stable populations. There still can be.

See also: The demographic false alarm by Tim Murray and Brian McGavin of 10 May 08, Catastrophists versus Cornucopians of 17 Jul 08

The ideal family for a stable sustainable population size would be two children per couple, with fair conditions to rear them. Actual family sizes however depend upon the psychology of population and the luck of the game, sometimes claimed to be the Will of God.

Who think they gain from population growth?

1. In developed countries, Governments and commercial interests in developed countries seek continual growth of mass markets, increasing consumption, a prosperous building industry, rising prices for real estate, and docile labor pools. They fear supporting ageing populations (See Fact Sheet 8). However, Government funding of babies is most likely to encourage fertility at the welfare-receiving end of the socio-economic scale, where larger families may not receive a fair chance in life.

Western nations’ pronatalist policies for their own countries is scandalous in face of overseas soaring distress of overpopulation beyond resources. National pronatalism is economically wrong because even with the most open of doors, the West could not contain the rising tides of economic refugees from the South. Imagine Australia taking in the overflow of millions, not dozens or hundreds, from Indonesia, PNG, East Timor, the Solomon Islands and other brimming islands of the Pacific. There are even more millions in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the smaller nations of the Indian subcontinent.

Vested interests may promote complacency about economic refugees because they can become low-paid labor in developed countries, including as seasonal workers, laid off when not wanted.

National pronatalism is also politically wrong because the West cannot promote family planning for the poor countries without being seen as horribly hypocritical and arousing cries of ‘genocide’.

2. In the worst hotspots of the world, populations are soaring, because of as well as in spite of failed statehood, social and economic chaos, wars, massacres, AIDS and famines.

Throughout history and folklore, the poor are burdened with more children than they can raise, as well as with the distress of no children.

Where there is no social security and child deathrates have traditionally been high, it makes sense to have many children, in the hope that some at least will survive to help support their parents. Increasingly states as well as families are depending on remittances from their children working abroad (as with Tonga and the Philippines). And children can be the greatest joy in life – and they may be the only joy the poor can have. Where women have access to education and family planning, they show their desire for smaller families, that they can cope with.

3. Religious and political outbreeding rivalries. Religious dogmatism overlooks that the first supposed commandment of God, to increase and multiply, is now the only divine commandment that has been fully obeyed, and now it is time to obey the other commands, about loving neighbours and so on. Religions and politics that foster outbreeding their rivals increase the hate and fear in the world as well as the scandal of using ,more children as ‘our weapons’. Influential American fundamentalism cares more for the unborn embryo than for the living child, and cares not for earthly future.

4. Providing food aid and policing for poor nations may even serve particular interests among the donor nations and aid organizations. This too is a problem that must be faced. But it is becoming increasingly clear, especially in Africa and among Australia’s neighbours that however generous the aid and the policing, they will be unable to solve population growth, or even keep up with its increasing needs.

It would seem that one of the two sanest things that humans could do to try to save the planet would be to redirect most financing of armaments to the education of women, supplying access to family planning, and helping states to become economically secure. (The other sane thing is reducing the footprint on the earth that currently accompanies rises in standard of living.) What are the forces that not only prevent this, but actively prevent such campaigning?

Capitalism has raised living standards through the whole world, and the poorest now wear T-shirts, not rags, but it must find a way to operate without requiring continual growth and consumption, seeking growing mass-markets and cheap labor.

Adapted from Watermark. December 2007

• Australia is the driest continent on Planet Earth
• Our rainfall patterns are the most variable on Planet Earth.
• Water consumption per capita in our cities and suburbs is now the highest amongst all nations.
• We are the highest exporter of embodied water in our exports amongst all nations - nearly 4000 GL net. The greatest proportion (nearly 50%) comes from Victoria!
• Population is a major driver of domestic water consumption and use. Net immigration is now the major element in this population growth. The Victorian government wants high immigration numbers maintained so as to keep driving a 3-4% "growth economy"!
• From this point onwards, energy use (and therefore carbondioxide emissions) and increased demand for water will be inextricably linked.
• Cities along the eastern seaboard are very poorly placed to come with the predicted decline in available fresh water.
• In many parts of the agricultural regions of Australia, freshwater and marine environments and the biodiversity that depends upon them, are now in free fall. As climate change spreads across Victoria, a substantial decline in surface water runoff is predicted for 28 out of 29 of Victoria's major surface water management areas by 2030 (average l5-20%). Without correction, these aquatic environments will decline further.
• The Victorian government has signalled several times that any situation of future water scarcity can be responded to by simply increasing water supply. Given the predicted changes in Australia's climate and the expected world­wide focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this approach is not sustainable.
• The alternate approach is that Australia must start on a pathway to become a water-efficient nation and then move to super-efficiency with water use.
• Simple technologies exist that will allow us to move in this direction.

Governments must decide to act, give the appropriate signals and initiate appropriate programs.

Governments across Australia have squandered nearly three decades in their failure to develop and embrace metropolis-scale water re-cycling programs. Each time this is proposed, public consideration is high-jacked by limiting discussion to a consideration of the use and consumption of treated human waste.

Some major national programs need to be initiated to better place and equip communities to deal with a water future that will be very different from that experienced over the past 50-60 years. The financial costs will be significant­, possibly $40-50 billion over 20-30 years.

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