EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
PhD candidate João Abegão and lawyer and PhD candidate Karin Kuhlemann discuss the current state of world population, population projections, and the validity of those projections.
About The Population Factor:
A series of key conversations examining the connection between our planet’s growing population & related issues. Expect to be educated on a range of topics including climate change, wildlife preservation, immigration policy & consumption patterns.
EarthX
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The Official Network of Earth Day.
About Us:
At EarthX, we believe our planet is a pretty special place. The people, landscapes, and critters are likely unique to the entire universe, so we consider ourselves lucky to be here. We are committed to protecting the environment by inspiring conservation and sustainability, and our programming along with our range of expert hosts support this mission. We’re glad you’re with us.
EarthX is a media company dedicated to inspiring people to care about the planet. We take an omni channel approach to reach audiences of every age through its robust 24/7 linear channel distributed across cable and FAST outlets, along with dynamic, solution oriented short form content on social and digital platforms. EarthX is home to original series, documentaries and snackable content that offer sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. EarthX is the only network that delivers entertaining and inspiring topics that impact and inspire our lives on climate and sustainability.
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PhD candidate João Abegão and lawyer and PhD candidate Karin Kuhlemann discuss the current state of world population, population projections, and the validity of those projections.
About The Population Factor:
A series of key conversations examining the connection between our planet’s growing population & related issues. Expect to be educated on a range of topics including climate change, wildlife preservation, immigration policy & consumption patterns.
EarthX
Love Our Planet.
The Official Network of Earth Day.
About Us:
At EarthX, we believe our planet is a pretty special place. The people, landscapes, and critters are likely unique to the entire universe, so we consider ourselves lucky to be here. We are committed to protecting the environment by inspiring conservation and sustainability, and our programming along with our range of expert hosts support this mission. We’re glad you’re with us.
EarthX is a media company dedicated to inspiring people to care about the planet. We take an omni channel approach to reach audiences of every age through its robust 24/7 linear channel distributed across cable and FAST outlets, along with dynamic, solution oriented short form content on social and digital platforms. EarthX is home to original series, documentaries and snackable content that offer sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. EarthX is the only network that delivers entertaining and inspiring topics that impact and inspire our lives on climate and sustainability.
EarthX Website: https://earthxmedia.com/
Follow Us:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earthxmedia/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/earthxmedia
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarthXMedia/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@earthxmedia
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EarthXMedia
How to watch:
United States:
- Spectrum
- AT&T U-verse (1267)
- DIRECTV (267)
- Philo
- FuboTV
- Plex
- Fire TV
#EarthDay #Environment #Sustainability #Ecofriendly #Conservation #EarthX
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00:00♪♪
00:00:10♪♪
00:00:30Hello, and welcome to The Population Factor. I'm Phil Caffaro.
00:00:37Population concerns are sometimes dismissed because the rate of global population growth is decreasing.
00:00:44But is humanity overpopulated already? And if we are, what, if anything, can we do about it?
00:00:51Here to discuss these questions are Karen Kuhlman and Joao Abegao.
00:00:57Karen holds degrees in law, politics, and biology.
00:01:00Her doctoral dissertation from University College London reconciles the human right to procreate
00:01:06with a legitimate need for government policies to limit population.
00:01:11She's the author of several terrific articles on population and the environment,
00:01:15including Any Size Population Will Do? The Fallacy of Aiming for Stabilization of Human Numbers.
00:01:23Joao Abegao's academic background is in ecology and environmental health,
00:01:28and he's now writing his PhD thesis at the University of Lisbon on the theme of societal and systems collapse.
00:01:36Joao helped organize a panel discussion on population and climate change at COP25 in Madrid in 2019.
00:01:45He's also the author of The Human Overpopulation Atlas.
00:01:50You can find links to Joao's and Karen's publications on our website.
00:01:55Karen and Joao, welcome to The Population Factor.
00:01:59Thank you for having me.
00:02:01Thank you, Phil.
00:02:03So let's start with the basics.
00:02:06Joao, how many people are alive on Earth today?
00:02:10And how does that compare to 50 and 100 years ago?
00:02:15So today we are roughly, if we can follow the estimates, we are approximately 7.8 billion of us,
00:02:25Homo sapiens on this Earth.
00:02:27Compared to 50 years ago, there was probably 3.8 billion humans on Earth.
00:02:33And around 100 years, there would be less than 2 billion.
00:02:39So we have almost quadrupled in 100 years from now, from today.
00:02:46And what are our population projections for the rest of this century?
00:02:51Those range quite a lot.
00:02:54It depends on a range of factors from fertility and the decisions that we make and the life expectancy.
00:03:03But they can range, and they have been changing quite a lot.
00:03:08This is worth noting that they have been revised upwards almost every year that they come out.
00:03:17So the estimates for the end of the century were, around 15 years ago, about 9.4 billion.
00:03:25And now they are close to 11 billion.
00:03:28So we have been seeing this number cripple upwards constantly.
00:03:35So just to throw a few more figures out at people,
00:03:38if you look at the UN's most recent world population projections from 2019,
00:03:45they have a main projection or median projection of 10.8 billion people in 2100.
00:03:53That would be up from 7.8 billion today.
00:03:56But they also note that those populations could fluctuate by billions of people,
00:04:04a point both of you have mentioned in your writings.
00:04:07So, for instance, the 10.8 billion median figure,
00:04:13if women on average have just one half more children per person between now and then,
00:04:21that figure increases to 15.6 billion.
00:04:24If they have one half child fewer, that instead would drop to 7.3 billion lower than today.
00:04:32So the point I'm making here is that depending on policies and choices that people make,
00:04:38we could be looking at very different populations in 2100.
00:04:43May I comment on this, Phil?
00:04:45Yeah.
00:04:46I feel like I have a bit of an axe to grind.
00:04:48Uh-huh.
00:04:51Population projections have a great deal of uncertainty about them, as Joao has mentioned.
00:04:58The further you look into the future, the less uncertain things become.
00:05:03I do, however, feel like the United Nations projections have proven fairly predictive over the years,
00:05:10and they have been improving their methods over time.
00:05:13And moreover, at that time when people were saying, oh, you know,
00:05:17population is going to peak around maybe 9 billion, maybe 10 billion,
00:05:23that's because projections were running to 2050.
00:05:27They were not running to the end of the century.
00:05:29That's just when the roll, you know, stopped.
00:05:32And people weren't thinking ahead and thinking, well, you know, that didn't look like it was coming down.
00:05:38So they just assumed that's the end of the story, all resolved.
00:05:41But projections can be made for a longer period of time, and the UN had made them before.
00:05:48I see the World Bank around 1992, both of them published long-range projections going all the way to the end of this century.
00:05:58Right.
00:05:59To 2100.
00:06:01And those projections were pretty on the ball.
00:06:05They were on the money, on what things are now,
00:06:07on what we now expect to be the situation at the end of the century.
00:06:10That was just before the Cairo Consensus, when discussion about population issues was muzzled,
00:06:16and where it became apolitical to think that fertility rates would just drop everywhere automatically,
00:06:25without people doing anything on their own.
00:06:28There was like this belief, almost religious belief, in this irrepressible,
00:06:32natural urge of humans to just have fewer children without any sort of help, any guidance, any support, nothing.
00:06:39And these UN projections ended up looking a little more timid for quite a few years.
00:06:45And then they peaked again.
00:06:47They started being adjusted and adjusted and adjusted,
00:06:49because reality was not tracking those optimistic views from the Cairo Consensus.
00:06:54And around 2013, they started publishing the projections to the end of this century,
00:06:59and people were like, oh, no, you're telling me we're going to be 11 to 12 billion at the end of the century?
00:07:04This is completely new information.
00:07:06It was not new.
00:07:08That information had been around since at least the early 90s,
00:07:11and projections that are older still had already predicted that path.
00:07:15And we are following the trajectory that basically means business is usually not doing very much.
00:07:20You're just letting fertility unfold naturally.
00:07:24So projections are just that.
00:07:26They're, in a way, a best guess about what might happen.
00:07:32And we always want to keep in mind that depending on, again, how people choose and what policies governments make,
00:07:39those numbers in the future could go up or they could go down.
00:07:43And the very act of projecting sometimes disguises that.
00:07:49If you tell people we think it's going to be 10.8 billion in 2100,
00:07:54they lose sight of the fact that there's a choice about whether we continue on that path
00:08:00or whether we choose higher or lower.
00:08:04Even the medium variant, which is the one that is cited most,
00:08:08and we have been sitting in a lot of studies recently just going against even this medium variant,
00:08:15which I think and probably Karen has her own opinions about this,
00:08:20that the medium variant assumes a lot of things,
00:08:23that fertility rates will continue to go down,
00:08:26that we will continue to make the progress that has been made in the last few decades in certain regions of the world.
00:08:34So this is just a lot of assumptions that are inherent to these projections that are not usually discussed.
00:08:41So the uncertainty that is inherent to these projections should be even made clear,
00:08:49because this is just such an important part.
00:08:52That's why the UN now has a lot of different projections, such as the high variant,
00:08:56the constant fertility that we will get no changes whatsoever.
00:09:01So this is all a lot of different scenarios that put the population much above what is already expected of close to 11 billion.
00:09:10So this is important to focus.
00:09:13Absolutely.
00:09:14Absolutely.
00:09:15And the medium variant is perhaps something that not everyone knows of the ones published by the UN,
00:09:22which I do think are the gold standard.
00:09:24That's the only real projection.
00:09:26The other ones are not projections.
00:09:28So the high variant and the low variant are just tracking the medium projection and subtracting half a child
00:09:35and adding half a child throughout the time period of the observation.
00:09:39And that shows a dramatic difference that even a little change in initial conditions can make over time.
00:09:45It's a dramatic difference.
00:09:47Population takes a very, very long time to change its direction.
00:09:52But over time, the difference is gigantic.
00:09:56It's gigantic.
00:09:57So if everyone right now converged on a pattern of having just one child per couple,
00:10:04by the end of the century, our population will be about perhaps a little bit less than what it is now.
00:10:11It will not be 3 billion.
00:10:12It will be probably between 7 and 8 billion because you have to work through all the momentum that's already baked into the system.
00:10:19If everyone overnight adopted a one-child model,
00:10:23whereas people think, oh, no, our race will disappear if people don't keep having enough babies.
00:10:30It would take us to the end of the century to just get back to where we are right now if everyone was having just one child.
00:10:37Right. Right.
00:10:39So depending on what policies governments follow, we could see perhaps global population peaking toward the end of the century,
00:10:50or at least by the end of the century.
00:10:53That's at least a possibility.
00:10:55For many people, that would be sufficient, ending population growth.
00:11:00But Karin, you've written that aiming for population stabilization is insufficient.
00:11:07Why do you argue that?
00:11:09We have a psychological fear of shrinkage.
00:11:12Basically, we have a fear of aging populations.
00:11:15We have a fear of going back to a smaller size than we are now.
00:11:19And these are not rational attitudes to have.
00:11:23And we have a planet that is thick.
00:11:26It's running a temperature.
00:11:29It's messed up in many ways.
00:11:33Species are dying out at an unprecedented rate during the observational window of human existence.
00:11:40We have catastrophic climate change going on.
00:11:43We have dramatic loss of soils for agriculture that people are just not particularly aware of,
00:11:49because that's just, you know, it's like agricultural experts when we're talking about it,
00:11:53that people outside of their world don't really know.
00:11:56Dramatic loss of agriculture soils from producing food for feeding billions of people.
00:12:01So being very good at extracting food from the soil,
00:12:04keeping these enormous numbers of people that we've manufactured ourselves,
00:12:08that we've created a vast human population.
00:12:11We've been very good at keeping them fed.
00:12:14By ransacking resources, we're going to need to produce food in the future.
00:12:18What risk are you going to be here?
00:12:20So we're talking about maybe 65 years worth of crop production without taking account of climate change,
00:12:27just from the soil perspective.
00:12:29And then water scarcity.
00:12:31And population growth, that's just one of the dang things, isn't it?
00:12:34Population growth is highest where water is scarcest.
00:12:38So what can we possibly imagine will happen in a world that has climate change decimating crop productivity?
00:12:47About 50% more people than we have now.
00:12:50Crops decimated by lack of water, climate change and soil degradation.
00:12:57And a lot of people in areas that are already unstable.
00:13:00We're going to have a lot of human suffering, a lot of unrest, a lot of war.
00:13:07But perhaps not quite what people imagine.
00:13:09People imagine that, you know, overpopulation is just chaos, apocalyptic chaos on the streets, everywhere.
00:13:16You know, like cars on fire.
00:13:18Overpopulation creeps up on us.
00:13:21It's not something that we achieve overnight.
00:13:23It takes decades to run a planet into the ground.
00:13:26The symptoms are everywhere we look.
00:13:29Everywhere we look, the planet is saying, enough, stop abusing me.
00:13:33And people are not living like kings, right?
00:13:36The vast majority of the planet is living not very comfortable lives at all.
00:13:43Quite a lot of uncertainty and insecurity in our lives.
00:13:46If we care about our fellow human beings, we cannot think that maintaining this kind of life where a few of us have a comfortable life, which is very easy for people to criticize consumption.
00:14:01Because obviously there is consumption that is bad, but not all consumption is bad.
00:14:05All people need to consume to survive.
00:14:08So not all of it can be avoided.
00:14:11But also a lot of it is necessary to give people lives with dignity and comfort.
00:14:15And a large proportion of the population has neither of those things.
00:14:18If we want to achieve a world where everyone lives well, it has to be fewer of us, like dramatically fewer.
00:14:24But okay, let's say I'm convinced of that.
00:14:28But as we all know, annually, the global population is growing between 80 and 85 million people a year.
00:14:36So wouldn't it be good to at least start by stabilizing our numbers?
00:14:41And doesn't talk about population decrease scare people?
00:14:46Joao, let me bring you in.
00:14:48What do you think about that?
00:14:50If I may just to add another point too, because Karen mentioned topsoil fertility, which I think is a very important aspect, which is rarely mentioned.
00:14:59And I'm now studying collapsing past societies.
00:15:04And topsoil fertility almost always appears as a problem that societies developed along the centuries.
00:15:14And they lose the capacity because they destroy their environment, they deforest, they abuse their soils.
00:15:20And this is observed even in societies that were just a fraction of what we are today.
00:15:27So this is the most important point that we have to bring here.
00:15:31Because when we talk about past complex societies that collapsed, we are talking about most of the times thousands of people and rarely millions.
00:15:40And now every time that we look at a nation, a country, we talk in the dozens or thousands or even billions, if India or China.
00:15:49So it's a completely different picture.
00:15:51And all the things that Karen mentioned, there are many more tropical forest loss, urban sprawl, marine fish capture.
00:15:59We can just name them all as the overpopulation is a multiplier of everything else.
00:16:06So this is just to put that on the side.
00:16:10To aim for civilization, as Karen said, it's not enough because we are seeing all of the entropic signs that we are in overshoot.
00:16:21And this is mentioned all the time. We have gone from, we have abused the planet, we are abusing it.
00:16:29Right now we are in an ecological overshoot.
00:16:31We are consuming more resources than the Earth can replenish every year.
00:16:36And this will continue to increase until 2050. It will probably be 3 Hertz if the population keeps increasing and consuming higher in the food chain.
00:16:44So we have all of these compounding factors.
00:16:47And if we just remain as we are, it's just a matter of time until everything collapses, because this is completely unsustainable.
00:16:55The only thing that we can do at this point, even if it's scary, is not just stabilizing, but degrowing, degrowing the population.
00:17:03I usually talk about the human enterprise, as Dr. Willem Ries talked about, which is the economy, the global economy, plus the population.
00:17:12We have to decrease them both. It's not just a matter of the population or the economy. We have to go about it.
00:17:20But as you both know, I mean, when we bring up problems like soil degradation and the question of whether we're going to have enough food for people in the future,
00:17:33the way most agricultural scientists, most policymakers talk about those kinds of questions is,
00:17:40well, look, we're going to improve our management of farmlands. We're going to improve our technologies. We're going to reduce food waste, perhaps.
00:17:51Very rarely do they say anything about limiting the number of mouths.
00:17:56And they seem to have, at least in the recent past, some justification for optimism that we could deal with it that way.
00:18:05Because, of course, food productivity has increased around the world in the last decades.
00:18:11We are feeding more people than ever. What do you say to people?
00:18:16Karen, what do you say to people who say, well, look, you're flagging real issues, but the answer is better management and smarter technologies?
00:18:28Well, this belief that technology can fix everything because it has allowed us to hack the planet basically in the past and basically steal resources from the future
00:18:42is not common amongst agricultural scientists who, by and large, are not very optimistic.
00:18:50If food production are not optimistic, I have met them and I have met them in conferences, they are not optimistic.
00:18:56And they don't come out and say, oh, this will not be a problem.
00:19:01They're trying to come up with some sort of pathway and always trying to come up with something, you know, a little more speculative every time because the problem keeps getting worse.
00:19:12But they're not saying it will happen, you will be fine.
00:19:15They're trying to say it could happen this way. It could be OK.
00:19:20But no scientist worth their salt in the situation that we're in would lie on Ryan's day.
00:19:26It's going to be fine because probably not, probably won't be fine.
00:19:31And we don't know the future. I mean, it's possible that some magnificent technological breakthrough is going to come in.
00:19:39It's going to bring in a new green revolution.
00:19:43But that was a little hanging fruit. That's that's what I understand from discussions.
00:19:48And that was a little hanging fruit. And the improvements we're seeing productivity now are now 0.5 percent here.
00:19:55You know, a little bit there. They're tiny.
00:19:58And when you consider a scenario where climate change could reduce productivity by 50 percent for some key crops, that's not going to cut it.
00:20:09And that's not taking account of all the factors combined.
00:20:12You know, soil degradation, lack of water, all of those things combined, a lack of some key fertilizers.
00:20:17They're running out. You know, they are not optimistic.
00:20:21The people who are techno optimists, you know, that's a position to have.
00:20:26But it's it's a bit like religious faith.
00:20:29You know, you can't just jump off a building and say, God save me, because, you know, you can't you can't just trust that future completely hypothetical,
00:20:44non-existent technology will save and then keep on doing things that will hurt you, because that makes no sense.
00:20:49That's irrational and immoral because you're hurting people that have no choice in the matter.
00:20:54Sure. Younger people haven't chosen to be here and children who haven't come yet, but will.
00:21:01And they will perhaps come into a planet that cannot accommodate them at all.
00:21:05If I may just to add. Go ahead, Professor.
00:21:09Because not to give the impression that we are Luddites here, that we completely dismiss the advancements that were made in technology,
00:21:17because these people, these techno optimists are founding their beliefs in something.
00:21:22For example, there has been a lot of a lot of improvement.
00:21:27Now, it's less, as Karen said. But in the past, there has been a lot of improvements in the crop yields per hectare, for example.
00:21:34And they base this disbelief that they extrapolate into the future that people continue to have.
00:21:39The problem is that, as Karen just said, that this progress have been slowing down and they have practically stabilized entirely.
00:21:49We are not achieving the progress that we needed to continue to feed the population and act away from the planet
00:21:58and stealing its resources to continue to increase our population as we have done, because we don't have this capacity.
00:22:05And the techno optimists will eventually encounter a wall or an obstacle that will not go through it,
00:22:18because there are limits and this is a huge problem in their discourse.
00:22:23When we talk with a lot of these people, they do not recognize the biophysical limits of the planet that we are.
00:22:30Everyone depends on something from the planet. And this is just a compounding issue.
00:22:36And I suppose, you know, even if there's uncertainty about whether we can keep barreling ahead, feeding more and more people,
00:22:45that might well be a reason to step back and be a little more cautious.
00:22:52After all, if we get it wrong, even if we get it right for three generations, if we get it wrong for that fourth generation,
00:22:59you're talking about really potentially tremendous suffering.
00:23:07To switch a little bit here, although Karen did bring up climate change and for many people,
00:23:13climate change is sort of just shorthand for all our environmental problems.
00:23:17They just think of it as climate change.
00:23:19So if we take a look at a graph showing global population and CO2 emission trends from 1850 to the present, they seem to move in tandem.
00:23:32So my question is, is climate change itself evidence that humanity is currently overpopulated?
00:23:43I was just going to say that climate change in itself is not a proof that we are overpopulated,
00:23:51because there's something like natural climate change, which is provoked by volcanoes and ocean currents and the earth and solar variation.
00:24:04So just saying that climate change is evidence that we are populated is not enough.
00:24:08But saying that in the last thousands and millennia, actually, almost one million years,
00:24:15we have never achieved the concentration of carbon dioxide that we have in the atmosphere right now is correct.
00:24:23That is much more, that is stronger evidence that the climate change now is provoked by humanity, by human activity.
00:24:34So just to give that there. Sorry, Karen.
00:24:38No, that's fine. Maybe we should assign girls' bills. We don't talk over each other.
00:24:46I assume that our viewers are not climate denialists and we don't have to explain climate change as an anthropogenic,
00:24:57catastrophic risk of cumulative damage to the atmosphere's capacity to regulate temperature in the planet.
00:25:09Population growth alongside economic growth, the two of them are the principal drivers of climate change.
00:25:18Yes, in past history of this planet, there has been climate change that was not human made, but this one is.
00:25:26Now, is it the case that the reason we have a catastrophically altered atmosphere is because there are too many of us?
00:25:35Yes. If there were few people living high on the hog on fossil fuels, that wouldn't happen.
00:25:45But then one could also ask, well, in a world where there wasn't reliance on fossil fuels, could you have 10 billion people, 11 billion right now?
00:25:55Could you have 7 billion people sustainably over time in a world that never got hooked on fossil fuels?
00:26:01Perhaps from the perspective of climate change, not the perspective of maintaining healthy ecosystems,
00:26:10maintaining our ability to feed ourselves, not destroying the vast majority of interesting life forms on this planet.
00:26:18So that would not follow. These are several questions.
00:26:21What I find today is that because overpopulation began to boost since the current consensus in about the mid 90s,
00:26:31when people want to express anxiety about overpopulation, they find that they can express pretty much the same anxiety about climate change.
00:26:41What they mean is overpopulation.
00:26:45So part of what you're saying there, then, is that we really shouldn't just look at climate change as in isolation.
00:26:54It's it's part of a larger suite of problems, perhaps global environmental problems.
00:27:00But I want to get back to to to try to ask a simple question.
00:27:06You know, is it is climate change evidence that we're overpopulated?
00:27:10Because some people would say, look, we need to change our lifestyles.
00:27:15We need to consume less. Again, we need new technologies.
00:27:18So what a population of eight or 12 billion vegetarians driving electric cars powered by solar electricity.
00:27:27Would that be sustainable? João, why don't you take a take a crack at that?
00:27:34OK, so if we keep increasing the population, we know that climate change is just one side of all of our impact.
00:27:42We have the planetary boundaries, which includes the carbon emissions and greenhouse emissions.
00:27:49Those are just one in many of the planetary boundaries that we are facing.
00:27:53And we know that even if everyone went vegetarian or even vegan, we could have a lot of progress here.
00:28:02But that would be far from, let's call it sustainable, because people need to be fed.
00:28:07People need materials, people need houses, people need clothes, people need water and transportation and energy.
00:28:15And all of these things are just something that figures and reflects.
00:28:23Even if we are all vegetarian and even if we are all vegan, this would create a lot of other impacts.
00:28:31Because most of the time, and this is just going from the current perspective.
00:28:35People that are usually vegan and vegetarian usually have a very stable or high income.
00:28:42And income is a very good proxy for efforts.
00:28:46So if we have that money in our pocket, we are probably spending it on other stuff that doesn't make us all that sustainable.
00:28:54So that's just one side of the question.
00:28:57I care a lot about income because I think this is a very important aspect.
00:29:02And it's mentioned in, for example, a nature study of 2018 that says what it would take for all of us to have a good life.
00:29:11And they reached the conclusion that it would probably be similar to what people now are living in Guatemala, Morocco or the Philippines.
00:29:20And this was in 2018 and they did it for 7 billion.
00:29:25We are already 7.8, so it's already updated.
00:29:29Probably we would have to put more austerity in there.
00:29:32We are continuously degrading the biosphere, which means that the entire carrying capacity of the planet will shrink.
00:29:40So the ceiling that we would have of these types of welfare that people have in these three countries would probably go even lower.
00:29:51Something like Chad or something.
00:29:54Because when we put all of the things together, the ecological footprint, the income that would be necessary,
00:30:01it's far from something that a utopia of 12 billion would allow.
00:30:07So what I'm hearing is if you simply imagine the current 7.8 billion people,
00:30:16your claim then is that to really live sustainably, those people would have to consume an awful lot less per capita.
00:30:24There are several problems with that.
00:30:28One is that people in general don't want to consume less, apparently.
00:30:31The other is that it's not clear that there's a safe and equitable pathway toward hugely less consumption.
00:30:40So all of that might well drive you toward arguing that to really have a sustainable population, it's going to have to be a lot less.
00:30:50Joao, you mentioned the nine planetary boundaries for safe human use of the biosphere.
00:30:58That, of course, refers back to that work by the Stockholm Resilience Institute.
00:31:03And some of those other boundaries that they talk about are ocean acidification, nitrogen deposition, human freshwater withdrawals from natural systems.
00:31:14So their point is that climate change, keeping the earth from heating too much and changing the climate too much,
00:31:23that's one important problem that we should be looking at and limiting our demands.
00:31:29But there are eight others that they've recognized.
00:31:32So let me perhaps ask Karin, when you think about some of these other planetary boundaries,
00:31:41what role does limiting population numbers play in staying within those safe boundaries?
00:31:53Stabilizing population would not achieve that.
00:31:55We've never really got to your question, but certainly everything that goes towards reducing an increase in our numbers would make things less bad.
00:32:07And catastrophes accrue less rapidly.
00:32:11But it would not be enough.
00:32:13Our population, the size we're in, is driving all of those limits to be breached.
00:32:19That's still with like six billion people living in poverty.
00:32:23And as John was mentioning, studies that have looked at what kind of standard of living would be achievable for everyone,
00:32:31it's a pretty miserable standard because our numbers are so large.
00:32:35And leaving aside the very practical and obvious question, how would you implement such a standard,
00:32:41just bring everyone down or equalize everyone at a fairly miserable standard?
00:32:46We know even secondary education is available because it's just too much.
00:32:51Well, let's leave that aside. Is that a world that we want?
00:32:55And what is the trade off here?
00:32:57Well, what is it that we are trying to protect that is so important that we would face a world where we are condemning a vast proportion of humanity to poverty,
00:33:09saying to the people that are living in comfort, you're monsters,
00:33:14and telling all other species on this planet goodbye, starve and die.
00:33:19You know, what is it that we're trying to protect?
00:33:21We're trying to protect atavistic ideas that should have died a very long time ago.
00:33:27When we're talking about, for example, veganism and these are the very best people in the world.
00:33:34They override a very genuine human taste for pleasure.
00:33:41Right. Eating eggs and cheese is delightful.
00:33:44Right. I try to minimize my consumption of animal products, but they are genuinely tasty.
00:33:50Right. I've met many vegans and vegetarians who readily confess.
00:33:55They find their convictions wavering when they smell bacon.
00:33:58Right. It's not something that it was just easy for them.
00:34:01It's really hard. Whereas having loads of children is not something that comes naturally to most of us when we have a choice.
00:34:09And that's why we have a natureless culture. It's relentlessly Italian.
00:34:14A normal person has children. A normal person wants to dedicate their adult life to raising children.
00:34:20A normal person will have a few children.
00:34:23Depending on the country you're in, that could be as many as nine or twelve.
00:34:26Depending on the country you're in, it could be a lot.
00:34:29That culture is telling us that's what we should desire.
00:34:33If we have this urge to have, for a woman, a quite uncomfortable and very painful way to bring a new person into the world,
00:34:41and years of drudgery, and yet the delights of raising a child,
00:34:45but parents reliably rank childcare as the least enjoyable of all their activities.
00:34:51And there's a lot of research showing that parents' happiness dips relative to before they had a child.
00:34:57So it's not something that comes either naturally to us, or something that gives us a lot of enjoyment.
00:35:06There are some compensations, as someone who has two kids.
00:35:12I have a child myself. There are compensations.
00:35:15But my point is, we're trying to protect a system of belief that is that humans cannot help themselves.
00:35:22They just want to have lots of babies, and that's just not true.
00:35:26We operate in this saturated environment full of messages telling people they have to have lots of children,
00:35:32or they have to have at least some, or they're not normal.
00:35:35And the very presence of these messages tells you that, historically, it has proven to be the case that you have to keep family in the man,
00:35:43or people are not going to pop out those babies.
00:35:45And there is some pretty good evidence for that.
00:35:48I mean, after all, throughout the world, we've seen that when women and couples are provided with contraception,
00:35:56the fertility levels tend to come down relatively quickly.
00:36:01Karen, you're from Brazil.
00:36:04Several generations ago, fertility levels were quite high there.
00:36:08I think they're quite a bit below replacement rate now.
00:36:12Joao, you're from Portugal, and I believe the fertility rate is quite low there.
00:36:19That's something that was quite different several generations ago.
00:36:22So, absolutely, Karen, the evidence is clear, isn't it?
00:36:26Yeah, but it's perhaps a little...
00:36:28At this point, I feel the population was a little hijacked by the ideologues from the Caracasense,
00:36:35in that it became an article of faith.
00:36:37So as long as you give people contraception, they're going to use it.
00:36:40And you have to factor in the cultural factors that are driving people to desire large families.
00:36:46And if people desire a large family, and you're saying, well, you know, just have exactly the family size that you like,
00:36:52we're not going to pass judgment.
00:36:54We're not going to say it's a bad idea.
00:36:55We're not going to say it's going to cause problems for your society.
00:36:58Then in some cases, that can mean a family of 5, 6, 9, 12 children, even if contraception is present.
00:37:06In Brazil, there wasn't much of a relationship between contraception becoming available and the vast drop in percentage that occurred.
00:37:15You always need to have some means of fertility regulation as a necessary condition, but it's insufficient.
00:37:21It is insufficient.
00:37:23In Brazil, there was this shift in attitudes where people started seeing a large family as weird and, you know, not the done thing.
00:37:32So how did that happen?
00:37:35Well, one of the major factors that appears to have influenced people's ideas about this is soap operas,
00:37:42where for narrative expediency reasons, families were portrayed as unnaturally,
00:37:48for the reality that applied at the time, unnaturally small,
00:37:52because it was much more interesting to have dramas involving several feuding families of two or three kids,
00:38:00rather than maybe two with 10 each.
00:38:05You know, that just made the story more interesting.
00:38:08What happened was it got internalized.
00:38:11When people started seeing a family of two or three at most, that's what a normal family looks like.
00:38:18And seeing a large family, such as my grandmother, my mother's mother, had nine children.
00:38:24Yep.
00:38:26And at the time, it was completely normal.
00:38:29Like, they frequently had lunch with someone that had 20.
00:38:33And I don't even know how that's possible, but, you know, 20.
00:38:38And that was normal.
00:38:39And by the time my mother came of age, it was no longer the done thing.
00:38:45Right, right.
00:38:46And that was much more about cultural and attitudinal changes than about, you know,
00:38:52oh, there was more education in Brazil or poverty had declined.
00:38:55On the contrary, the changes in attitudes were the drivers of those changes that followed, making people's lives better.
00:39:02Right, right.
00:39:03If I may add, Professor, just a point, because it's also about government.
00:39:10And this is something that leaves me very cynical at the moment,
00:39:13because all of the countries, or at least according to the UN, 62% in 2017 of countries
00:39:21that have achieved below replacement rates have enacted pro-natalist policies.
00:39:26And this is just something that it leaves me in despair, because this is countries like Portugal,
00:39:33we have one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, but I cannot bear myself to have a conversation
00:39:38with someone I know or on the streets or anyone else that speaks about this as an achievement.
00:39:44There is not even the imaginary there.
00:39:48There's not even the place for the narrative to propose that this has been something that took a lot of trouble,
00:39:55something that took a change in perspective in the country.
00:39:59And it's just mentioned as something that needs to be put away.
00:40:02It was done, and now we need to replace it.
00:40:05We need to bring back the fertility rates up.
00:40:08We need to put it above 2.1 for replacement.
00:40:12And this is something that if countries achieve below replacement rate,
00:40:17the first thing that they should do is hold on to it.
00:40:20It's just doing everything they could to hold on to it.
00:40:23And this is not being seen. It's not even talked about.
00:40:28So how do we get people then to see below replacement fertility or decreasing populations as an achievement?
00:40:41I think we have to attack the growth as a whole because all those ideas are wedded together.
00:40:47So there's this fear of population shrinkage that goes hand in hand with this idea that the economy must grow,
00:40:54no matter what, the economy must grow, which is killing the planet.
00:40:58It's killing our life chances.
00:41:02And then it goes, oh, but the population must grow to keep the economy growing.
00:41:08And all technology will solve everything, and resources are infinite, which is mystical thinking.
00:41:15It's not even rational. It's just deeply irresponsible.
00:41:18And those ideas need to be attacked.
00:41:21Growthism underlies capitalism, of course, underlies neoliberal economics,
00:41:26underlies the platforms that most of our governments pursue as though they were pursuing our interests.
00:41:32Instead of trying to see people's lives being made better by their policies,
00:41:36they're just checking if certain numbers are moving on a spreadsheet.
00:41:40And apparently that spreadsheet tells us we should incentivize people to have babies even when they don't want to.
00:41:48We should, you know, open up businesses that are socially not useful and environmentally damaging,
00:41:58because that will cause a low number to rise.
00:42:01All of those ideas go together, and one of them, just one of them, is a fear of shrinkage,
00:42:06a fear that the population must not shrink.
00:42:09It's irrational.
00:42:11Just imagine how much better lives could be in so many countries where,
00:42:17just imagine, like, property becoming more affordable, just the air becoming cleaner,
00:42:22all jobs becoming better paid, you know, because the population is shrinking.
00:42:28Those are not things to fear if you care about people rather than numbers on a spreadsheet.
00:42:33So part of what we're looking for then is, and this is something philosophers have been talking about for thousands of years,
00:42:41we need to focus on living good lives, not piling up wealth.
00:42:46Maybe at some points in human history it made sense to pursue greater wealth to improve our lives.
00:42:53Maybe that's no longer the case.
00:42:57So that makes a certain amount of sense to me.
00:43:01I want to bring in another aspect of sustainability and population here, though,
00:43:09and the simplest way to get to it might just be to ask what might a sustainable global population be,
00:43:16and should we think about that in terms just of human well-being,
00:43:21or do we want to think about sustainability in terms of leaving sufficient habitat and resources for other species?
00:43:28Joao, you shared with me a graphic from, I think it was originally from an academic paper,
00:43:37and it's subsequently been reprinted many times, Earth's Land Mammals by Weight,
00:43:42and we'll throw that up for our viewers to see as well.
00:43:47When you look at that graphic, you see that the vast majority of current animal flesh on the planet today is human beings and our pets and livestock,
00:44:00and only a few percentage points is still represented by wild animals.
00:44:05All the whales, all the great apes, all the rodents, on and on and on.
00:44:12We've taken so much of it.
00:44:14When we think about sustainability, when you two think about sustainability,
00:44:20how important is it that we share the landscape more generously with other people?
00:44:26I'll give each of you a chance to answer that.
00:44:28Karen, why don't you go first?
00:44:30You mentioned philosophers, and one thing that comes up in philosophy a lot is that it's just generally very dicey to make choices for others.
00:44:42Albeit that some people out there are extremely anthropocentric and would say,
00:44:47I don't care about tigers, I don't care about whales, I don't care about fetuses, I don't care about birds, they're all disappearing, I don't care, all I care about is humans.
00:44:57That's not the case for everybody.
00:45:00Lots of us do care and feel that our world is being impoverished by driving all the species to extinction.
00:45:08Those yet to come may also share those sensibilities, and we're foreclosing options for them.
00:45:13We're basically saying you will not have an option to live in a world where African elephants exist in the wild.
00:45:20This magnificent, intelligent, interesting species will not be in your world.
00:45:27Because we decided that we wanted to have kids and drive an SUV and eat steak every day so you don't get to live in a world that has elephants in it.
00:45:39That is inherently unfair because a lot of people have different value commitments than anthropocentric people, and we have to account for them as well.
00:45:48Those are not unreasonable value commitments.
00:45:51An unreasonable value commitment would say I want a world in which I, and only I, get to drive an SUV every day and eat steak and do everything that my heart desires without thinking about everybody else.
00:46:07So you would say, and Joelle, I'll give you a chance in a moment, but Karen, you would say that even just thinking in terms of human interest, we have good reasons not to want a depauperate world.
00:46:20Absolutely. Even if we did not think that animals had moral standing, that they're suffering matters, even if we did not think of them at all,
00:46:28on the basis of taking account of the interests and values that apply to other people and they're legitimate, they're not wrong in any way,
00:46:39no one's going to say that you're wrong to think that a world that contains wildlife is a better world than one that doesn't.
00:46:46They just perhaps value meeting their consumptive needs or their procreative aspirations more than that, but they're not going to say it's wrong.
00:46:56You have to take into account that a lot of people do value a world that has wildlife in it,
00:47:01even leaving aside the many potential consequences to human life on a planet that has ruined ecosystems,
00:47:09like for example, the decline of bees for agriculture and all sorts of other things that we don't know yet,
00:47:15because we keep pulling things from this Jenga tower and it's like, oh, I wonder what will happen if I take this other one out.
00:47:22You know, it could be that a lot of unforeseen consequences will be visited on us for messing up with so many ecosystems at once.
00:47:31But even if we do not care or do not know about any of those things, there's still a lot of people that care about a world that has wildlife in it.
00:47:39I'm one of them.
00:47:41I am, too, and I think we're in the majority, actually. Joao, your view on this.
00:47:48How much weight should we put in thinking about creating sustainable societies?
00:47:53How much weight should we put on sharing the landscape justly or generously with other species?
00:48:00So this is a very debatable and controversial as well topic.
00:48:04So there have been some attempts to quantify what would be a sustainable population, human population.
00:48:11I think the estimates range from 300 million to 4.3 billion.
00:48:19So and this all depends on what type of life and how much room we want to leave for other species on the planet.
00:48:27So it would be certain that 300 million would live probably with higher affluence levels and live a better quality of life than 4.3 billion.
00:48:39And they would have to be put together probably to leave half of the planet, for example, as suggested for wildlife.
00:48:50But this also takes me to one recurrent point, which is, can we even see humanity as ever achieving sustainability?
00:48:59Because if we think that even in the Neolithic, just hunters, men and women equipped with spears and just large brains,
00:49:09and they were probably able to drive a lot of species to extinction, including the mammoth, including also climate changes at the time.
00:49:18But we were talking about much smaller populations and with much less impact, even per capita.
00:49:27So we would have to, even if we want to talk about sustainability, we would have to account for some acceptable rate of extinction.
00:49:40If we wanted to drive this argument forward, one of my suggestions would probably be to try and keep it below the background extinction rate,
00:49:50the historical one of the planet, so the natural one with the processes of mass extinction.
00:49:56But when we look at the at the rates of extinction in mammals and birds and insects today,
00:50:03it's just so far from the background extinction rate that we would need a complete changeover.
00:50:12At the moment, I don't know how to make this possible, or even if it would be possible with the smaller range of 300 million living with higher degrees of ethnics.
00:50:23I don't know if it's possible or not, but it's worth a try to reduce the population because it's a multiplier for everything else.
00:50:30If we are less, we would make less impact and we would allow for other species to thrive on the planet.
00:50:38So really, no matter how optimistic we are about genuine sustainability, our ability to achieve that,
00:50:47and no matter whether we're more on the anthropocentric or the biocentric side of things,
00:50:55probably there's a good argument that 7.8 billion people is too many and that we'd be better off with a much smaller global population.
00:51:10So both of you have made arguments to that effect.
00:51:14For me, as an old guy, I've got to say it's great seeing smart, young, passionate people who are talking about this.
00:51:29Even beyond whether I agree with you about X, Y, or Z, just to be having these conversations seems so important.
00:51:38In the remaining few minutes that we have here, let me ask you to talk a little bit about your work as activists and scholars,
00:51:49and how your focus on population issues has been received by your peers.
00:51:55Karen, why don't you go first?
00:52:00My work is challenging one element of the hierarchical census, which is the belief that there is a virtually absolute human right
00:52:09to have as many children as you feel like, no matter the circumstances, no matter the situation,
00:52:16and that that is the reason why governments shouldn't try to incentivize people to have fewer children or discourage them from having more.
00:52:27It would be a violation of human rights.
00:52:29You can't do anything, you must have your hands tied and just watch.
00:52:32Basically, that's the hierarchical census.
00:52:34I've sought to challenge this here.
00:52:37When it comes to challenging the idea of a fairly absolute right to create rights holders,
00:52:44it involves basically creating a whole other person, completely innocent, didn't have a say in the matter,
00:52:51and creationist person creates obligations on others, which, again, we don't have a say on this.
00:52:57It's not that difficult for people to say, oh, that doesn't follow.
00:53:02You know, it's not difficult, especially in an academic context where people are accustomed to this kind of thinking.
00:53:09Outside of an environment of academic inquiry, I still find a lot of people are very disturbed by population growth
00:53:19and just don't know quite how to put it in words and don't know quite how to articulate it in a way that doesn't sound bad.
00:53:28It's so easy to say the wrong thing when you're concerned about population because people might think, oh, you just don't like people,
00:53:33you don't like babies or you don't like people with a certain background.
00:53:37And it's so easy to go wrong when people really mean well and are just genuinely concerned.
00:53:43So that's what I found in my more activist side of things.
00:53:46I think we can get really frustrated because they just see this relentless trajectory towards an impoverishment of our planet.
00:53:58And it's just we're painting ourselves into a corner.
00:54:02And a lot of them are older, so I have seen a lot of change in their lifetimes.
00:54:07You can see younger people perhaps more concerned about issues of identity and not really paying much attention to environmental issues.
00:54:14So they often feel very frustrated and they lack the vocabulary and sometimes say things the wrong way, but they mean well by and large.
00:54:24So I'm curious, you're writing or have written your dissertation, your PhD dissertation on this.
00:54:32Did your academic advisors try to warn you off the topic?
00:54:38No, but I could not find a program that would have an existing program where I could have done my research,
00:54:50and in a few discussions with fellow PhD students, it struck me how my topic is very broad relative to what a lot of other people,
00:55:06especially in the realm of normativity where you're talking about legal or moral rights.
00:55:13People often take a very narrow topic and are focused on differences of opinion between two authors, maybe,
00:55:19and take this big, chunky, assumed human right that people prefer not to talk about.
00:55:25And I'm saying, that's just wrong. That's not justifiable.
00:55:29We have at best preconditioned and limited the right to have children.
00:55:36So it's a very meaty topic, and other topics just seem like very nuanced.
00:55:42And when people are asked in my group to explain their work, they take many lines to explain what they're trying to do.
00:55:51And I can just say, my topic is about overpopulation.
00:55:58Your topic is about securing people's rights in the real world where there are ecological limits.
00:56:04I don't know how many words you want. I can give you a very good idea where I'm at with one word.
00:56:12Well, Karen, I'm very glad that you persisted in that work.
00:56:16João, talk a little bit about your academic work and your activist work, if you'd like.
00:56:24So my work in academia started with my master's.
00:56:29Where I attempted to include human overpopulation was by following a course of ecology,
00:56:36because that's what I found that would be more palatable to digest this topic of human overpopulation.
00:56:43As Karen just mentioned, there is no course just focused on population.
00:56:48I went, and it was a struggle.
00:56:52I faced a lot of resistance in my university, which they ultimately scaled down their attacks because it was fierce.
00:57:06But my first presentation of the work, it was very, very difficult.
00:57:12It brought accusations of Nazism and racism and fascism, all of that stuff.
00:57:19With a room filled with people, it was like an embarrassment to the university.
00:57:25So they did a scientific committee and they told, OK, we need to follow intellectual honesty
00:57:32and we need to have freedom of expression in the university.
00:57:35This cannot happen again. It's just ridiculous.
00:57:38If a student wants to pursue this topic, he should be free to do it.
00:57:44There should not be professors in the university just standing and facing so much resistance for the students
00:57:51that try to bring their own topics of research, which is so rare already,
00:57:57because most students just follow what other labs are doing and other professors are doing the research.
00:58:04And I didn't do that. So in my master's, I just tried to see where human overpopulation was connected to.
00:58:11This was my topic. I tried to see where our numbers were multiplying everything else.
00:58:18And this was basically what I did in my master's.
00:58:22And now in my PhD, I'm trying to continue to do work on population and overshoot
00:58:29and trying to show that environmental determinism and this overshoot in the past of complex societies was important.
00:58:38And it's now more important than ever because it had a small impact, magnitude, severity and intensity in the past.
00:58:45But it's now much larger today. So the picture has changed tremendously.
00:58:50And I try to continue to incorporate it. My activism.
00:58:54I wouldn't describe myself. I would describe myself as a quiet activist.
00:58:59I'm more of the type of I write and I don't usually go to the streets.
00:59:04I did it once last year in Lisbon. I went to a climate, one of those climate, not parades, but I'm missing the word,
00:59:13but it was just to experience what would be that, that to feel the people and what their, their, their common cause.
00:59:23But I'm more of the type of talking about things,
00:59:26just coming into talking with you, Professor and Karen on shows like this and writing articles in my blog.
00:59:35That's the way that I think that I can help in this and just raising consciousness and the awareness of the issue and trying to articulate it in the most eloquent way I can.
00:59:49Well, I'm very grateful that you've stuck with the effort and I'm grateful to your university as well for backing you up.
00:59:56It sounds like at a crucial period. For those of you who've enjoyed our discussion today with Karen and Joao,
01:00:05there are links, there will be links on our website to their work.
01:00:10And I really encourage you to to check it out because it's very interesting.
01:00:18Karen, Joao, thank you so much for taking the time today to speak with us on the population factor.
01:00:24I appreciate it. And I really hope we can have you back again sometime soon.
01:00:30That would be great. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having me.