Few people would argue with the idea of sustainable growth. Among them is David Attenborough, who has called it an oxymoron. Now Attenborough is usually to be seen speaking in hushed tones near a pair of displaying birds of paradise. Of late, however, he has tended to speak out on the human population explosion.

No surprise there, because one of the major threats to birds of paradise – and fish, and forests, and clean air, and so on – is in fact overpopulation. Put simply, the idea that more and more people can consume more and more on a finite planet, and do so sustainably, is nuts.

We were recently told that in 2017 the Maltese population registered the lowest fertility rate in the EU. For various demographic reasons that include but are not limited to migration, that doesn’t mean that the population is decreasing as yet. Still, the news made my day and, I imagined, that of very many.

I was wrong. One of the first to wave the red flag was a ‘sociologist of the family’, who told journalists that parents ought to get busy having two or three children on average. The main reason, he said, was the sustainability of pensions.

I’ll let Attenborough do the honours: “The notion of ever more people needing ever more young people who in turn will grow old and need ever more young people, and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.”

A Ponzi scheme, because there is no outside source of income. The planet is what it is, and they don’t make it anymore. There are of course ways in which things could be more sustainable in the short term. But there’s no escaping the fact that more and more people will take up more and more space and consume more and more resources. 

Take fish. I was reading the other day that the once-immense fish stocks in the waters off West Africa are fast approaching a total collapse. Overpopulation is only one of the many reasons. The others include exploitation, indiscriminate methods, discarded bycatch, and so on.

A society of perpetual growth is a recipe for ecological disaster

Ultimately, however, and even if all of these problems were solved, there would be only so much fish in the world. And if we all became vegetarian, we’d run out of agricultural land. Large populations are one thing, populations that grow without any limit whatsoever quite another. There will come a point at which growth becomes impoverishment, and I’m trying not to use the word ‘Malthus’.

Last week, a crowd of schoolchildren marched to Valletta to demand action on climate change. Not a bad idea to address climate change, but I was surprised that population control was not among their slogans. In fact, environmentalists generally tend to steer clear of the topic.

There are many reasons why they do so. First, population control comes with a historical baggage of abhorrent experiments that caused much suffering to the poor and ended up not doing very much to curb population growth. China’s one-child policy is the best known, a close second being Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilisation campaign in India.

Second, it is easy to lapse from ‘too many’ to ‘too many of the wrong kind’ arguments. Because it is only undesirables that are said to breed like rabbits, population control raises the spectre of eugenics. In that sense, it belongs in the ideological dustbin of the early 20th century.

Third, there’s something vaguely grumpy and misanthropic about it. Environmentalists in particular tend to be very wary of that sort of thing, and for good reason. They’ve been called tree huggers, and tree huggers are the ultimate fetishists and misanthropes who will hug objects sooner than they will other people.

Except population control needn’t be about any of these three. For example, education and the emancipation of women are clearly much more effective control agents than forced abortion or sterilisation. Population control can and does coexist with the freedom to have as many children as you please. Maltese parents are free to have 10 or 20 children. Curiously, it’s a freedom very few choose to enjoy.

Equally, the association with eugenics is one that population control can live happily without. In fact, a cast of undesirables is the last thing it needs. The moment kinds of people are singled out would be its end, and I would gladly contribute to see it go.

As for tree hugging and such, I don’t think it’s terribly misanthropic to wish humanity a better future. It is, on the other hand, unbearably nasty to leave a 15 billion people of the future to deal with dwindling resources.

A society of perpetual growth is a recipe for ecological disaster. Politician-prophets and their unwitting agents all over the world tell people that more and more people are needed for economies to grow. It is only population growth, they say, that can overcome the obstacles of labour shortage, unsustainable pensions, and such.

It is rather the case, I think, that, while the principle is right (we would all like to have more resources), the direction is both completely wrong and ultimately suicidal. How about ‘sustainable stability’ for a substitute that is not an oxymoron?

I mean by that a world population that is under control in full respect of individual freedoms and rights, but that nonetheless manages to sustain a high standard of living. Then, and only then, would there be enough fish off West Africa.          

mafalzon@hotmail.com

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

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