Is overpopulation a problem?

The environmentalist movement has inherited the agenda of the old conservative movement. While in the 19th century, it was the monarchists and neo-monarchist American conservatives who lamented the rise of cities and the horrific offenses against the environment committed by industrialists, today, the so-called liberal environmentalists have taken up these complaints.

"The world can't hold any more people!" they exclaim. They claim that if industrial growth continues at the current rate, mass starvation, environmental degradation, poverty and chaos will ensue. According to the overpopulationists, the world will soon resemble the portrait of the Earth depicted in the movie Soilent Green, starring Charleton Heston (great movie), in which there is universal poverty and the only thing left to eat is little square pieces of processed human beings.

I open my Environmental Science textbook, and at the beginning of its eighth chapter, entitled Human Population, there is printed a quote by the Senior Editor of the libertarian Cato institute, Sheldon Richman: "There is no population problem". This quote is displayed most likely in order to parody libertarian economists who refuse to buy environmentalist myths about population growth. Then, the authors of the textbook proceed to depict the Chinese dictatorship's one-child policy sympathetically, and follow this by describing the impending doom that faces the human race if we continue to breed.

So, is overpopulation really a problem, as the monarchists and their successors, the environmentalists claim? Demographic and scientific evidence suggests otherwise.

Physical space certainly is not a limiting factor: the entire population of the world could fit in Jacksonville Florida, with standing room for everybody.
Furthermore, there is little evidence to suggest that we will run out of natural resources as our population grows. Actually the term "natural resources" is misleading; nature doesn't provide us with resources, but only with the material for humans to manipulate in order to produce resources. As our methods of producing resources become more advanced and efficient, the number of human beings the Earth can support and the quality of life of Earth's citizens increases. In addition to being the result of increased productivity, population growth is also the cause of further increases is productivity, as the more humans there are, the more producers there are.

For these reasons, between 1776 and 1975, the world population increased by 6 times, while the gross world product multiplied by 80 times. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, world food production has outpaced population growth since 1948. Food prices are falling rapidly, and food costs about 1/3 of what it did 50 years ago. Human life expectancy in the developing world has increased from 31 to 65 in recent years, and the percentage of malnourished poor on Earth has decreased from 35% to 18%. Famine, poverty, and disease are in decline, and quality of life and life expectancy are on the rise. Despite 200 years of heavy industry, 80% of the world's forests remain.

Is it true that if humans continue at their current pace of production, catastrophe will result? Not at all. Trends show increasing food production and life expectancy, and declining pollution and poverty, and there is no evidence that this trend will reverse in the foreseeable future. The highly esteemed scientist and scholar Roger Revelle, who was one of the first people to study global warming, estimates that just by using water more efficiently, Asia, Latin America, and Africa could feed 35-40 billion people. The current world population is around 6 billion.

Recent history has shown us that the leading causes of the kind of human suffering the environmentalists warn us of are political, and not natural. For example, the African countries that currently suffer the most from famine are Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, some of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. They suffer from famine not because those countries don't have enough natural resources to sustain life, but because civil war prevents productive economic activity.

Russia hasn't suffered tremendous humanitarian catastrophes (poverty, starvation, disease) because of its shortage of natural resources, but rather because of the incompetence and obtrusiveness of the totalitarian Russian state and its irrational economic policies. During the 20th century, the Russian government led a campaign to prevent any productive private development of Russia's land.



Today, we could greatly increase world productivity by eliminating farm subsidies. Farm lobbies around the world lobby their governments to hold food supplies down and food prices up. Currently, Western governments are forcing Latin American economies to serve Western corporations, but have forbidden Latin Americans from selling their products in the West. If Washington were to put an end to subsidies and protectionism in US agribusiness and remove restrictions on Latin American imports, not only would much more food be produced, but Latin American agribusiness would be likely to out-compete North American agribusiness, significantly enriching the poor of Central and South America (provided that Latin American dictators don't keep the extra wealth for themselves).

As former Greenpeace activist turned skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg notes in describing the environmentalist shtick, "We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring...[yet]it does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."

Beware of the environmentalist shtick, for it is a disguise for statist ambitions. Just us the early champions of liberty and industrial progress had to combat their conservative political opponents, who used pro-environment rhetoric to push for the imposition of crippling restrictions on the market and for increases the power of political elites, modern champions of liberty, of whom the most fervent are the anarchists, must combat environmentalist nonsense.