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The Depopulation Imperative. How many people can earth support?

29 January 2022
Paul Collins

My sixteenth book The Depopulation Imperative was published in late November 2021 by Australian Scholarly in Melbourne. Population, or more accurately overpopulation, has worried me for many years because every environmental problem that the earth faces eventually comes back to humans and their impact on the world. With 7.9 billion people already using an earth and a half of resources every year and with an expected population of 8.5 billion by 2030, we are already facing a massive crisis.

There’s really only one solution: putting earth first. We have to shift the ethical focus from ourselves and our needs, desires and demands, to care primarily for nature and biodiversity and to tackle global warming. We need a new morality: one that puts the integrity of earth first.

There is a sense in which we’ve been very lucky with Covid-19. Sure, it didn’t seem ‘lucky’ to its victims, or as we struggled through lockdowns, but the virus so far has, in historical terms, been relatively mild and we’ve been fortunate to develop effective vaccines.

The Depopulation Imperative shows that throughout evolution pandemics have been nature’s way of limiting human numbers when we overload a given environment or landscape. With a 2022 world population of 7.9 billion people, we are already well beyond the earth’s ability to support us. Global warming, biodiversity loss and resource depletion are all symptoms of the problem of human numbers and excessive consumption.

There’s nothing new in the human tendency to exploit resources beyond their limits but, as Depopulation argues, the problem now is that there are so many of us that even pandemics aren’t able to keep human growth rates within sustainable bounds.

While human numbers have been increasing for all of human history, the present population boom began around 1800 with the Industrial Revolution and the new technologies linked to it. Until 1800 human numbers grew in fits and starts. World population in 1800 was 899 million. By 1900 it was 1.62 billion. In the last 122 years it has increased to 7.9 billion. Numbers like this demand so much from the earth that we chew up one and a half years' worth of resources annually.  It’s estimated that in 2050, just 28 years from now, the population will be 9.74 billion. Such numbers are simply unsustainable. Depopulation explains how we got to this impasse.

However, population is not an easy topic to discuss and many avoid talking about it. We do this precisely because it’s an issue that touches us all intimately, yet seems insoluble. It throws up moral and religious conundrums about family size and the right to have children while confronting us with the role of the community and state in determining the number of children that couples have. It touches on deeply-held spiritual convictions, on basic issues of social justice and the massive inequalities in distribution between the poor and the rich, both within Western societies themselves and between the developed and developing worlds.

Above all, it impacts on our deeply held anthropocentrism, our conviction that humankind constitutes the essential purpose and meaning of the world, re-enforcing the assumption that we come first before every other species. The underlying, usually unconscious presumption is that we must prioritize the needs of humanity over all other species and the natural world. The extraordinary irony is that given we humans make up just 0.01% of all living things and that homo sapiens has been on earth for 300,000 years while the earth is 4.5 billion years old, the notion that we somehow constitute the entire meaning of the world is extraordinarily presumptuous. And that’s not counting the 13.7 billion years since the origin of the cosmos.

Overpopulation is also one of those realities that just doesn’t fit into the individualistic, post-modern zeitgeist. We seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to face up to widescale and complex issues like this. Nevertheless, this is precisely what Depopulation attempts to do. The book argues that we have to shift from an emphasis on anthropocentrism to an entirely new foundational moral principle to guide us, one that prioritizes the earth and biodiversity. Depopulation says unequivocally that the natural world and the survival of other species takes priority over absolutely everything else, including the desires, needs and even the welfare of individual human persons and communities. There is no middle position here, no compromise to make this principle more palatable.

The principle of earth first is profoundly subversive because it directly undermines the individualistic anthropocentrism which unconsciously dominates our presuppositions and decisions. 

Depopulation argues that even for human survival itself the shift to the priority of the earth and biodiversity must be accepted as normative for all moral and ethical action. Otherwise, the future is going to be very bleak for our children, let alone our grandchildren. Here we confront the moral issue of inter-generational rights; what are our moral responsibilities if we consume resources and degrade the earth to the extent that the quality of life of future generations including our immediate descendants is deeply compromised?

To make these numbers real, Depopulation looks at two countries, Niger in West Africa and Kiribati in the Central Pacific Ocean, where overpopulation, resource depletion and global warming are already making a massive impact and are fast leading to disaster. The fact is we don’t have until 2030, let alone until 2050 to tackle these numbers.

After looking at all the practical issues surrounding the population debate, particularly the human tendency to deny it, or to pass it off as someone else’s problem, Depopulation looks at ways that have already provided practical solutions to population limitation, especially through the education and liberation of women and girls.

But the problem is that education takes time and at 7.9 billion we are already facing a totally unsustainable situation. The book argues that basic to achieving any reduction in numbers we need a profound moral change and shift in priorities from an emphasis on the centrality of the needs of humankind to the moral principle that puts the earth first.
While ‘earth first’ is at the core of this book, it also examines the role of technology, faith and the great religious traditions in helping to deal with overpopulation and the destruction of nature. It asks, are there any grounds for hope, or are we facing the kind of dystopia described in many contemporary novels and films?

Depopulation’s conclusion is that ‘we are in a truly unique situation.’ We’ve never been here before as homo sapiens. Solving overpopulation, the book argues, will ‘call for all our creative resources…all of the imaginative power that went into constructing all that is best in our culture, and then some.’

The Depopulation Imperative. How many people can earth support? Melbourne, Australian Scholarly, November 2021. Pages: xiv and 176. RRP: $16.95.   Buy now

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