Population Crises and Population Cycles

The modern population crisis is unique in being universal. In the past, crises and relief periods have been staggered between major regions (Table 1), and even within them, as we saw in the sixth paper in the case of Bohemia. This time every country in the world is simultaneously in crisis. The population explosion is not confined to North-Western Europe and its overseas extensions, but has occurred everywhere, producing an unprecedented rise in the world population to nearly six billions.

The population explosion has everywhere been made possible, just as in North-Western Europe, by two great increases in food supply, one unrepeatable and the other unsustainable. By the l960s, virtually every country in the world was importing grain from Canada and the United States, ‘the granary of the world’ (Paddock and Paddock, 1968). But by 1973 the enormous stocks of surplus grain had all been used up, and the Americans began to plough up their reserve cropland. The populations continued to rise, however, because H.E.I. (high-energy-input) crop agriculture was diffused to the poorer countries of the world, often with massive irrigation projects. But H.E.I. agriculture has reached the point of diminishing returns. Global production of root crops has actually declined since 1984. In a world of recurrent famines, in which at least a billion people must be chronically seriously under-nourished, world food production per head increased by less than 5% between 1989 and 1996. And this small increase was at the cost of all the long-term damage done by H.E.I. agriculture and over-irrigation to the soil and (through pollution by agricultural chemicals) to the supply of drinkable water. A survey in 1990 by the World Health Organization suggested that 25 million agricultural workers are acutely poisoned by pesticides every year, and that 20,000 die as a result, mainly in the poorer countries. This is not counting possible long-term carcinogenic effects.

The world population crisis is showing all the usual economic and social effects. Everywhere there is evidence of inflation, unemployment, gross inequality and desperate poverty. Amnesty International reports violations of human rights in virtually every sizeable nation - 152 countries in 1993. The two World Wars and incessant local national and civil wars have been more destructive to civilians (including women and children) than any since the seventeenth-century crisis in North-Western Europe. Against this background, violent crime has steadily increased, and since the defeat of the Nazis there has been a resurgence of Fascism (totally criminal parties and governments) in many places. Like the Nazis, the pseudo-Islamic states seek to export Fascism: the Saudi and Pakistan governments promoted it in Afghanistan, and the Iranian Ayatollahs support European Fascist gangs. Fascism is a prominent feature of the world population crisis, specially linked to unemployment (Figure 1). The number of multiple murders in the United States has increased markedly since the 1950s. These ‘private’ murders cannot compare in scale with those of multiple murderers in control of criminal governments. In the first three years alone after the Fascist counter-revolution in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini murdered 20,000 women and girls.

We saw in the first paper that dominance and violence towards females and young are characteristic of both animal and human population crises. While Fascist Iran represents the criminal extreme, there is enough dominance and violence towards women around the world to justify the title of Marilyn French’s book on the subject (1993) - The War against Women. A recent survey team in the London Borough of Hackney interviewed 129 women in doctors’ surgeries. In the past year, 26 had been punched or slapped by their male partners, and 14 ‘had suffered more serious physical abuse’ (The Independent, 24 January, 1998). ‘In the United States, a man beats a woman every twelve seconds, and every day four of these beatings’ are lethal (French, 1993).

As for children, the industry catering for paederasts has reached a scale that is probably without precedent. It has been estimated that there are a million child slave prostitutes (both sexes), and that another million are bought or kidnapped for use in pornographic films or videos, in which they may be abused, tortured, and (as some evidence suggests) even killed - the so-called snuff movies. The annual income ‘from child trafficking and exploitation’ is estimated at five billion dollars. A horrific new crime of the 1990s, of unknown but probably considerable scale, is the purchase or kidnapping of children to supply organ transplants for prolonging the lives of wealthy criminals.

Deterioration of language is yet another effect of the population crisis. ‘But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’ (George Orwell, 1961). It is therefore not just a trivial solecism, but a dangerous confusion symptomatic of the crisis, with its reversal of behaviour towards females and young, that the press (in more than one language) habitually refers to paederasty (lust for children) as paedophilia (love of children).

We have seen that the stresses of population crises upset the immune system and cause high mortality from epidemics in both animals and man; individuals low in the social hierarchies are generally the worst affected. The modern crisis is marked by the appearance of AIDS, specifically a disease of the immune system, and the resurgence of tuberculosis. These two interconnected diseases are specially lethal among ‘the socially and economically disadvantaged’, who suffer most from stress, malnutrition and generally weakened health (Sabatier, 1988). As a venereal disease, AIDS recalls the syphilis pandemic of the sixteenth century. The two different forms of this disease in the Old and New Worlds were exchanged after Columbus, but as usual the high mortality in Europe was due at least as much to the stresses of the population crisis as to lack of specific immunity. AIDS and tuberculosis have not yet caused death rates on the scale of previous crisis pandemics, but health authorities are already predicting tens of millions of deaths from the two diseases in a few years’ time.

As on Easter Island, the world crisis response has not averted harm to the environment. Besides rapid depletion of minerals and fossil fuels, and pollution of land, air, fresh waters and oceans, there is direct damage to the land environment - deforestation, overgrazing, overcropping, over-irrigation, and the resulting erosion, silting, laterization, waterlogging, salinisation and desertification. As we have seen, these effects have been produced by earlier crises in climatically vulnerable regions. By 1864, when the American diplomat George Perkins Marsh published the first general book on the subject, the whole Earth was beginning to be affected, and by now world environmental damage has attained frightening proportions. In India there is serious wind or water erosion on 1.5 million square kilometres of land, and about the same area in China. According to a United Nations report, ‘one-third of the world land surface is threatened by desertification’ (Caldwell and Caldwell, 1994). Several estimates agree that about 130,000 square kilometres of forest are lost every year, an area roughly equivalent to that of England or New York State. This amount of forest loss can have serious repercussions on the world water cycle and atmospheric circulation, and the past few years have already seen unusual climate and weather conditions, which have caused, for instance, changes in ocean currents that have ruined a fishery off Peru, and the disastrous spread of deliberately set forest fires in Indonesia.

The remedy for all these horrors was succinctly stated in 1830 by Robert Malthus (1766-1834). He realised that the two crucial measurements of population are those of ‘crude’ birth rate and death rate, usually reckoned as numbers being born or dying per cent or per thousand of the population per year. If the birth rate exceeds the death rate, the population grows, in his words, ‘in a geometric ratio, that is, by multiplication’ - in short by compound interest, because the more people there are the more they can breed. A calculation has been made by P.C. Putnam which shows the fantastic implications of this. If mankind had sprung from a single couple living about 12,000 years ago, shortly before the coming of agriculture, and if (after the population reached a few hundreds) there had been one more birth than deaths per hundred per year (a modest 1% annual increase), then today ‘the world population would form a sphere of living flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity … many times faster than light’ (Cipolla, 1962). ‘In real life, as opposed to the wonderland of mathematics, nothing of the kind can happen’ (Russell and Russell, 1968). So in real life, when a population increases even at this apparently modest rate, sooner or later one of two things must happen - either the birth rate comes down or the death rate goes up (the population crisis response), and the increase is checked. This was Malthus’ greatest discovery, and he had the supreme genius to realise that unlike animals we can choose which.

The modern methods of birth control provide ample means for exercising the Malthusian choice - that is, for shunting out the population crisis, with all its horrors, by reducing the birth rate instead. Fortunately, birth control campaigns ‘pay for themselves almost at once, and very soon begin to increase the prosperity of the region’ (Russell and Russell, 1980). Teen-age pregnancy ‘costs American taxpayers an estimated twenty billion dollars yearly’ (Goldfarb, 1997), and a study in Sweden showed that unwanted children cost a society more than wanted ones, more often growing up to be criminal, educationally sub-normal or in need of psychiatric care. The ratio of immediate benefit to the cost of a birth control programme has been estimated as five to one in Barbados and ten to one in Britain. A birth-control programme in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, saved a quarter of a million dollars within three years - twenty times the operating costs of the programme. It would therefore be extremely easy to mount a massive world programme of voluntary birth control, and how welcome this would be is shown by the fact that desperately poor women in Calcutta have been known to spend 10% of their minuscule incomes on contraceptives. We may thus hope to reduce the world population of nearly six billions to the billion or so who could probably live a good life even in our already depleted Earth environment. It may then take time to eliminate the stress culture resulting from past crises, but we could make population crises and population cycles a thing of the past, and usher in a permanent renaissance.