The Planet's Population Explosion, and What to Do About It

Living Within Limits has a simple message: There are too many of us and too many more are born every year. If we do nothing to control population growth, disease and famine will control it for us.

Professor Hardin covers well-trodden ground to make his case, but he does it elegantly and well-nigh irrefutably — though not optimistically. Corrective action depends not only on a human characteristic always in short supply — foresight — but also on rejection of the socialist sentimentality that dominates public policy and discourse. Prof. Hardin will have a hard enough time just calling attention to the problem; we can forgive him for being coy about solutions.

Otherwise, his book is a charming introduction to what people like Condorcet, Malthus, William Goodwin, John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Franklin, and Aristotle had to say about population, and why so much more nonsense than wisdom is said on the subject today.

There are now well over five billion people on the planet and our numbers are growing by more than a quarter of a million every day. The growth in world population has been recent and explosive; something like the graph on this page. For example, the increase during a single generation in the last half of the 20th century was greater than the entire world population at the time the Second World War began.

Past population forecasts for the planet have been hilarious underestimates....

The United States is overpopulated. Campers must make reservations in national parks, and streets that were uncrowded 20 years ago are jammed with cars. If our population had not increased since 1950, we would not have to import a single barrel of oil. Yet government and media scarcely breathe a word about population. They act as if space and resources can expand infinitely to accommodate ever more people...

At our current growth rate of 1.7 percent, people would be standing shoulder to shoulder on every bit of land on the planet in 686 years. Obviously, that will never happen. The average American needs the equivalent of at least 9 acres of productive land when all the crop land, pasture land and forest required for his upkeep are added together. The rate of human increase will therefore drop. Prof. Hardin hopes that it will fall because of wise human intervention rather than because of catastrophe....

We have all the oil and coal we need for the time being, but Prof. Hardin argues that the era of plenty cannot last. Fossil fuels are not replaced, and we burn more of them every year. No matter how cleverly one juggles reserves and resources, it will eventually take more energy to extract coal and oil than can be had from burning them. It is not a question of if but when....

One of Professor Hardin’s central themes, therefore, is carrying capacity. There is a limit to the number of mouths that can suckle at nature’s teat. If, as Prof. Hardin argues, inexpensive fossil fuels cannot be replaced by something equally inexpensive, the earth’s carrying capacity is much lower than the five billion people it now supports. He argues that it is no coincidence that the population curve has climbed in parallel with that of the consumption of coal and oil. When the consumption curve turns down so will the population curve — suddenly and disagreeably. In Prof. Hardin’s view, it is foolish to refuse to face this possibility....

"Growth" swells profits, even if it means fewer forests, crowded highways, and millions of hungry Africans saved from one famine only to make the next one worse. Reduction of demand requires prudence, temperance, and self-restraint, none of which is popular or profitable....

Today, the people who worry most about “saving the planet” are intelligent white people. Most of them are socialist dreamers who never think about population, but eventually they will heed Prof. Hardin’s message. Although they will go to any extreme to save Spotted Owls or Snail Darters, they are blind to the necessity of preserving human diversity. They are perfectly prepared to let Europeans be displaced by North Africans, and white Americans by blacks and Hispanics. Thus, in the absence of coercion, it will be whites who gamely curtail their reproduction only to be replaced by Africans and Hispanics, who are the ones reproducing at rates that threaten the planet....

Whites will do their ecological duty even if it means their replacement by others. Of course, their sacrifice will have been in vain, since the peoples who supplant them will not scruple to plunder the planet.

Indeed, the issue of coercion must be faced, and the sooner the better.