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Too many people: what is the optimum population of the U.S.? The world?

Article Excerpt
Overpopulation long mattered to me. A high schooler when the Club of Rome issued The Limits to Growth, I had already embraced its agenda. (1) If too many people burdened the planet, I would add no more. I resolved not to father children, and remain child-free to this day.

In 1981, even my decision to move to Buffalo, New York--which eventually led me to FREE INQUIRY--reflected my concern about what we then called "popullution." Human numbers had been too high for decades; I dreamed that in my lifetime society might set out to roll them back. A massive controlled demographic contraction would be required to retreat from however many fearsome billions we would then have become. A hard-hit Rust Belt city, Buffalo faced decades of real shrinkage; it was undergoing involuntarily the dwindling I hoped the world would one day purposely embrace. I wondered how Buffalo's political and social institutions would cope with demographic decline. (The answer: really badly.)

I was a little out of step, still worrying about overpopulation in 1981; it was already a fading cause. Several simplistic Malthusian "crash points" predicted by The Limits to Growth or Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (2) had been exceeded, and we hadn't run out of food, water, oil, copper, or whatever commodity one cared to name. After decades, some activists burned out. Overpopulation lost its grip on the zeilgeist. (3)

Yet the crisis continued. Human numbers are still rising in many countries. California's population is growing faster than India's; Americans born today will retire in a nation with more than half a billion inhabitants. (4) This is frightening, given that even the present human population consumes 40 percent of Earth's biological productivity. (5) Moreover, indications suggest that Ehrlich and the Club of Rome had merely centered their doomsday predictions on the wrong Malthusian crash points. Their logic was sound; today new, unanticipated crash points loom before us:

* In parts of the American West and elsewhere, specialists predict the possible complete exhaustion of water resources?

* As third world economies grow, millions--soon enough, billions--will start doing their level best to consume like Americans. Beijing, with about a thousand cars in 1985, now has more than two million. (7) China uses 8 percent of world oil but drove 37 percent of world oil consumption growth since 2000. (8) The situation is similar ht India. Worldwide, 1.7 billion people now belong to the consumer class, with all that this implies from energy use to the health toll of sedentary lifestyles. (9)

* The exploited and underemployed swell third-world megacities. More people live in cities today than lived on Earth in 1960. Sometime in the coming year "the urban population ... will outnumber the rural" for the first time in history. With dismal economic prospects but nowhere else to go, megacity slum dwellers struggle to subsist, "the fastest growing, and most unprecedented, social class on earth ... rushing backward to the age of Dickens." (10)

* Economic stagnation looms at home,...