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Some years ago the ‘population explosion’ was the fashionable issue but fashions change. While the problem has not gone away and still gets some media exposure it is now presented as just one of several issues including global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, air and water pollution, and rain forest destruction, competing for our attention. We get the bad, and even the very rare good, news about these issues as isolated items, almost as if there is no possible connection between them. Yet surely the basic cause is that there are too many of us living on the planet?
In 1915 the estimated world population was 1.9 billion. By 1990 it had reached 5.3 billion and, if we go on as we are doing, by 2020 there will be 8 billion people trying to live on Earth. By then most of the world’s oil wells will be dry except for some in Latin America and the Middle East. In the past 20 years we have used more of the world’s mineral resources than in all former ages yet today it is estimated that about one in five of the world’s population is malnourished. Politicians talk about creating a peaceful, stable world but this can be no more than a pipe dream, a short-term view to get a few votes, if in a generation’s time we will have a much larger population and fewer resources.
An American geneticist, James V. Neel, as put forward a modest proposal intended to bring about the much-needed reduction in the world’s population. It is an internationally agreed goal of a two-child family. He estimates that in practice this would result in average realised families of about 1.8 children. Even if implemented now this would not immediately halt the population growth but it would lead to a peak of 6.7 billion in 2030 and thereafter a steady fall to about 4 billion by 2100.
Since the United States and most European nations are already at or near replacement levels what is being suggested is that the rest of the world follow their example. The proposal appears to have some merit. It will seem fair in that everyone is asked to limit their family, not just those living in the developing nations. It would also, from a geneticist’s point of view, have the advantage of preserving the human gene-pool.
The problems in implementing it are, however, immense. It requires international agreement, and adherence to that agreement, on a scale never before achieved. Some religious groups will never agree to it. Neel is concerned to point out that his proposal is not, in his understanding of the word, eugenic. There is a danger, however, that it could become dysgenic if the two child family is not achieved (or enforced?) across the whole population. Neel’s proposal may be too modest to achieve his aim, he admits that two children per family may be too generous, but at least he is one of the few who have seen the problem and tried to find a solution.
In some ways the greatest danger is complacency. People who today have a pleasant life in what they regard as a relatively safe environment are unlikely to be much concerned about the threat posed by the rising world population. War and famine, the most effective ‘natural’ controls of population growth, happen in distant lands, making interesting television. Perhaps we should learn the lesson of the former Yugoslavia where people thought that they were safer than most Europeans being on the sidelines of the Cold War. On an overcrowded planet with declining resources there are no sidelines or safe havens.
John Timson
Reference: Neel, J.V. American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 65, p. 538, 1995.