Birth Control

Birth control is one of the most divisive issues in public policy, especially where it involves abortion. There are, I think, at least two reasons for this. First, it deals directly with one of the most important and personal decisions people can make, whether to bring a child into the world who will carry their genes into the future, and the question of who else can share that decision. Second, it brings into the focus the related questions of when a life begins, and when that life should be subject to protections against murder.

For most of human existence, these decisions were made in the context of the survival of the group that a person belonged to. Mating was sanctioned by the group, as it is still done by many families. As in much of the rest of Nature, the weak were killed or allowed to die as infants so the strongest could help improve the group's survival rate, and the birth rate was “controlled” by doing the same with the naturally higher number of females born. These methods primarily enabled a population to avoid extinction from overconsumption of available resources.

With civilization came the ability to access more resources on demand, enabled by technologies that enabled individuals to have more control over their destinies. As a result, the overall population began to grow as the birth rate grew and the death rate (which included infanticide) dropped. Value systems developed that promoted these trends, first in groups and then in governments, which assumed increasing responsibility for maintaining order as people became less personally involved in each other's lives. In the decreasing number of situations where increasing population could imperil people, the new values necessitated more humane methods of birth control; these were aided by both physical technologies (such as contraception) and cultural technologies (such as education and government mandates).

Demographers have noted that birth rates tend to fall as women become more economically empowered, which occurs in affluent societies such as the United States. My analysis of happiness shows that the world population's growth rate (essentially the difference of the birth rate and death rate) is nearly proportional to happiness, with an interesting difference: it stopped speeding up soon after happiness was twice the minimum happiness (in 1875), it stopped increasing by the time happiness was three times the minimum happiness (in 2008), and it will likely fall to zero relatively soon thereafter, in 2021. The apparent statistical correlation between happiness and population growth rate is consistent with the demographers' appraisal, and adds to the plausibility of a biological failsafe mechanism, like I described in the last post, which keeps our population from growing too large for our resource base. 

Unfortunately, without leveling off our consumption and compensating for our resource depletion, it may be too late to avoid an increase in the death rate – the last recourse in population control, which our ancestors used effectively in much more limited environments – as the final braking effort that becomes dominant after the peak and during the crash.

Running Out of Time

I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I'm a big fan of the recently-ended television series 24. It seemed that in almost every season, the terrorist-fighting hero, Jack Bauer, would exclaim what could be the tag line of the series: “We're running out of time!” That's the way I feel these days.

Last week, I updated the numbers in my population-consumption model, increasing its accuracy and finding almost no change in its dire projections for the future trajectory of the world's population if we continue with our historical behavior. The alternatives that allow the longest survival time continue to be the exploitation of the rest of the Solar System (increasing the mass of resources by at least 5% per year if we start now and can travel no faster) and relying entirely on renewable and reusable resources (“capacity”) here on Earth by the end of this century (reaching half, by mass, of today's constant consumption by 2024).

Waiting longer to start requires faster changes, mainly because we will be consuming more resources and the cost of consuming less is a loss of population. While I still haven't identified most of why the consumption equation works the way it does, and there is evidence that many of us can live on far less than we do, the historical trends are clear. Whatever we do, it will be too late when the population peak occurs, in 2021. If we waited until 2020, a procrastinator's dream, we would either need to be getting half that larger amount from capacity by 2025 (28% the first year) or start increasing our non-renewable resources by 17% per year; it's highly unlikely that even the most ambitious technologies could achieve those goals.

Many of the so-called engines of industry are fighting to maintain their expected growth in profits by paying lower wages, cranking up demand for more products at lower quality, and buying off governments and disseminating propaganda to avoid paying the social and environmental costs of their activities. As access to non-renewable resources gets harder, this is a natural response for a competitive enterprise: restrict the number of people who can see growth at the expense of the others who can't (this may be a big part of the “reality” behind some of my model's variables). What I've decided is the most practical choice – increasing capacity – is almost certain to be extremely unattractive to a profiteer, especially the end state of using a fixed amount of totally replenishing and long-lasting resources.

As ocean ecosystems are decimated by oil spills and birds literally fall dead from the sky, the public is getting a glaring wake-up call that something really bad is going on, and we may be the cause. We certainly can't save other species by getting additional resources from other planets, without reducing the amount of resources we get from this one. Extracting more from the Earth results in less for other species, and when converted to waste, fouls their environments and ours. It's probably no coincidence that my model projects our own population to start crashing soon after the time (five years from now) that the amount of resources we're using corresponds to double the amount of ecological resources (ecological footprint) that the Earth can support.  We are clearly running out of time.