Tag: Environment

Can We Avoid a Population Collapse Without Throwing Women Under the Bus?

by James Wallace Harris

Most countries around the world are worried about a population collapse that will destroy their economies and social systems. I’ve been worried about overpopulation since the 1960s, but now economists are warning us that capitalism is doomed if we don’t have more babies. Every country’s economic wellbeing depends on GDP growth. That might be impossible if birthrates continue to shrink.

The replacement birthrate to keep the population the same is around 2.1 children per woman, or 2,100 children per 1,000 women. In the U.S., we had 1,626 births per 1,000 women in 2024. At that rate, if we exclude immigration, the United States will fade away. Here are the U.S. population number by decade for the next 400 years.

YearPopulation (in millions)
2025341.7
2035330.5
2045319.8
2055309.5
2065299.6
2075290.0
2085280.8
2095271.9
2105263.3
2115255.0
2125247.0
2135239.3
2145231.8
2155224.6
2165217.6
2175210.9
2185204.4
2195198.1
2205192.0
2215186.0
2225180.2
2235174.6
2245169.1
2255163.8
2265158.6
2275153.5
2285148.6
2295143.8
2305139.1
2315134.5
2325130.0
2335125.6
2345121.3
2355117.1
2365113.0
2375109.0
2385105.1
2395101.3
240597.5

If we follow the trends of other countries that have even lower replacement birthrates, we’d shrink even faster. If we became like South Korea, we’d shrink to half our population by 2100.

At some point, we’d reach zero population. From an ecological point of view, I’d think the Earth would be better off without so many people. However, capitalism, and our support systems like Social Security depend on growth.

To solve this problem requires women having more babies. Because some women can’t have children, most women would need to have three children. That’s quite burden to put on women. Countries around the world with declining birthrates are trying various incentives to get women to have more children, but so far, those incentives aren’t working.

Can We Have Capitalism Without Growth?

What if it’s time to think about shrinking the population? What would be a sustainable population regarding the environment? Let’s just say the world would be much better without only one billion people. Could we come up with an economic system that didn’t depend on growth?

Humanoid robots are enterting the workforce. Could they take up the GDP slack for fewer people? Are there other methods to generate economic growth without people? The U.S. economy depends on consumerism. Can we create an environmental steady-state economic system that creates abundance?

How Many People Do We Need?

If we allowed ourselves to shrink the population to one billion humans, to keep from continuing to shrink, we’d be back to needing women having 2,100 children per 1,000 women. That means every woman needs to have two children, and one in ten needs to have three.

Since the second wave of feminism and the creation of the birth control pill, women have chosen to have fewer children. We have to assume that’s what they want as individuals. Then is it fair to put the burden of reproduction on one gender? What if we had a society where every individual is responsible for raising their replacement? How would we force males into having kids?

Conservatives and some women are now proposing that women go back to being full-time mothers. What if most women don’t want to become mothers? Could we create a Brave New World type society where children are grown in test tubes and vats? That would allow males to have children.

This is a great idea for science fiction, but I’m not sure if it will ever happen.

What If Some Women Were Willing to Have Lots of Children?

Some women do like having children. If half of women were willing to have four or five children, and maybe a quarter of them have one child, that would allow one quarter of women to have no children.

Curently, in the U.S. 57% of all adults under 50 choose not to have children. That means we wouldn’t have enough women wanting children. Current incentive programs for woman to have more children are failing. Is there anything governments could do to convince women to have more children?

Universal guaranteed incomes are often discussed nowadays because of growing automation. What if women were guaranteed a significant income for having children? Say $75,000 a year for each child.

There is a meme going around where pretty women claim they are too beautiful to work. I don’t know how big this movement is, but it seems some women have decided that careers are not fun and they’d rather be stay-at-home moms. But as critics have pointed out, this plan only works with Mr. Right who makes a lot of money. How many women would choose a career of raising babies if they made $225,000 a year by raising three children, or $450,000 a year for raising six?

Think about how this would change our society? I have no idea if this is a good idea, but it sounds like it could make a fun science fiction story. How would this change society for males? It might make marriage more appealing. However, it would shift the power to women, and males might not like that.

However, with robots taking over everyone’s jobs, raising babies might become a new growth industry.

I’m just speculating here. If population collapse is a real problem, then we need to think of solutions. Conservatives are hell bent to bring back the large traditional family, but I doubt that will fly anymore. I think it’s obvious that many women don’t want to be moms to large broods.

How far are conservatives willing to go to recreate large families? Would they back $75,000 per child incentive? How many men would be willing to stay at home and raise children and let their wives have careers? How many people of either gender want careers? Would such an incentive balance out the responsibility of child raising if the incentive is paid to females and males? Do child raisers need to be married?

I suppose there could be new kinds of marriages, like limited partnerships. Conservatives would probably propose the incentives be payable only to married couples. Would they allow gay couples? What about two older people who are just friends and need to make some money? Maybe we need to redefine marriage as a legal bond to raise children.

Because robots and AIs are taking over everyone’s jobs, raising babies is one job they can’t have. Or could they? I suppose we could create robotic mothers and fathers to raise human babies that have been conceived in test tubes and gestated in vats.

There’s lots to think about.

I’ve thought of one other thing. What if humans are choosing not to have babies but raise robots instead? What if robots are our evolutionary replacements? If that’s the case, then population decline is right on time.

JWH

We Need a New Frontier Because the Final Frontier is a Bust

by James Wallace Harris, Monday, September 10, 2018

Are you jaded with science fiction on television? Have you stopped seeing every new Sci-Fi flick at the theater? I have. On Wall Street, investors always assume a bull market won’t last. I’m wondering when the current science fiction bubble will burst?

During the pulp era, there were more western titles than any other genre. In the 1950s, there were more westerns on television than other types of shows. Then the genre all but disappeared. Could that happen to science fiction?

Westerns disappeared as western frontiers faded, and science fiction replaced westerns in popularity because it offered new frontiers.

Mars

If this observation is true, then science fiction won’t go away until a new genre offers an alternative frontier. Today, science fiction is often dystopian. The final frontier is tarnished by the reality of science. A few million still hope to run off to Mars to escape the looming apocalypses on Earth, but most know the Martian frontier is a destination only robots could love.

Science fiction has failed at convincing Earthlings to colonize other worlds. Instead, we stayed home and trashed the only sustainable planet for our species. Are there any frontiers left to offer new hope? Back when the Space Age was dawning, science fiction also envisioned colonizing the oceans. That idea never caught on and we’ve only sent our plastics to dwell there instead.

Oceans

Are there any frontiers left for our dreams? We need a new genre that inspires us to clean up the Earth. We need stories where a sustainable ecology/economy is the new frontier. We need fiction that depicts healing of the Earth. We need optimistic tales that aren’t fantasy. We need practical utopias.

And, this is very important, we need to stop using fiction to escape. Hasn’t fiction become the frontier that’s replaced science fiction? Aren’t we all trying to live in the imaginary worlds of books, movies, television shows, comics, computer games, and virtual reality? I have to wonder if we don’t all believe we’re passengers on the Titanic and fiction is our heroin.

JWH

Wilderness Destruction and The Seven Deadly Sins

By James Wallace Harris, Monday, February 16, 2015

I’m a bookworm who spends most of my day indoors reading and watching documentaries on TV. My only exposure to nature is looking out the window behind my monitor to watch the squirrels and birds at play in my backyard, and my daily walk in the neighborhood. So why should I worry about the amount of wilderness left in the world?

My first response would be to say guilt. I feel bad that my species is hogging the Earth and killing off other species so fast that we’re causing the 6th great extinction event.

My second response would be a love of nature at a distance – mainly from nature documentaries. I love that the Earth is filled with biodiversity. If the planet was paved completely with urban sprawl, McDonalds, Best Buys and Exxon stations it would be quite dreary.

My third response, is fear for the future. Most people think of climate change as flooding cities and extreme weather. They seldom contemplate the acidification of the ocean which will destroy most aquatic life, or how climate change is killing off other species. Not only are we fucking up the world for ourselves, but we’re forcing a good percentage of life on Earth to go down the  evolutionary drain.

This Sunday’s New York Times reported “Leaving Only Footsteps? Thing Again” by Christopher Solomon. Solomon says 99 percent of the protected land in North America we’ve set aside for wilderness has various forms of recreation allowed in them that disrupt the wildlife. We’ve loving nature to death.

Even though I’m not a religious person, I like to think about The Seven Deadly Sins and judge humanity by that yardstick. Our treatment of the Earth as a resource for human consumption shows extreme examples of gluttony, greed, sloth and pride, and we can tie overpopulation to lust, war with wrath and consumerism with envy. Which makes a clean sweep of the all the cardinal sins. If seen from a distance, a giant superior being examining our world under a microscope, humanity would appear like a cancer eating the planet.

As individuals we think of ourselves as pretty good people, and rationalize that we’re only struggling to stay alive. We focus on our own little campfires failing to see we’re part of one giant forest fire burning down our own world.

Since I’m using religious metaphors, let’s go back to The Book of Genesis, and The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit they learned about sin, and acquired free will. I’ve always imagined the author of this story as understanding that humans once lived in nature, being one with the wildlife, and saw the change we underwent when we switch to agriculture and living in cities. This is when that author also said in Genesis 1:26

Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

If the author of Genesis was alive today and writing, I think he or she would write something much different. I think it’s pretty obvious that we never acquired the finer distinctions of our sins. The above passage might be true when the human population density was what it was three thousand years ago, but not today.

There is a new series on PBS called Earth: The New Wild which I can’t recommend too highly. The host, Dr. M. Sanjayan makes a case for how we should live with nature and not dominate. This is going to be very hard.

But if humans do have free will, we have the power to decide how much wilderness belongs to all the other species on this planet, and how much is our fair share. We are the gods that decide the fate of all the other species on Earth. I’m not sure we’re doing it with free will or unconscious evil. Maybe some people have free will, but not the majority. We still live by our animal instincts, and the seven deadly sins describes our major survival traits.

Many of my friends worry I’m depressed because I write about such depressing subjects. Many of my friends refuse to contemplate what I do because it makes them depressed. They ask why dwell on the inevitable. I see our problems as an intellectual challenge. Theoretically we’re smart enough to recognize our sins. And there is no forgiveness for destroying the world.

There’s a book title I’ve always loved, “What If Our World Is Their Heaven?” What if Earth is our Heaven and we’re turning it into our Hell?

I find it fascinating why we don’t see our own self-destruction and the evil we do to the other species of Earth. I often feel like I sitting in a deckchair on the Titanic and I see the iceberg. I’m not the only one, but most people refuse to look. The tragic thing is the captain and the crew do see it, but refuse to change course.

JWH