Environmental Problems and Population Growth

Basic causes of environmental problems are population growth, wasteful and unsustainable resource use, poverty, avoidance of full-cost pricing, increasing isolation from nature, and different environmental worldviews 

Our environmental worldviews play a key role in determining whether we live unsustainably or more sustainably. 

To deal with the environmental problems we face must understand their causes. According to a significant number of environmental and social scientists, the major causes of today's environmental problems are: 

• population growth 

• wasteful and unsustainable resource use 

• poverty

• omission of the harmful environmental and health costs in market prices

• increasing isolation from nature 

• competing environmental worldviews

The lifestyles of the world's expanding population of consumers are built on growing affluence, or resource consumption per person, as more people earn higher incomes. As total resource consumption and average resource consumption per person increase, so does environmental degradation, wastes, and pollution from the increase in environmental footprints. 

The effects can be dramatic. The WWF and the Global Footprint Network estimate that the United States, with only 4.3% of the world population, is responsible for 23% of the global environmental footprint. The average American consumes about 30 times the amount of resources that the average Indian consumes and 100 times the amount consumed by the average person in the world's poorest countries. The WWF has projected that we would need five planet earths if everyone used renewable resources at the same rate as the average American did in 2012. The earlier number of earths involved the world's average per capita use of renewable resources. This one assumes that everyone if the world has the same use of renewable resources as the average American had in 2012. 

On the other hand, affluence can allow for widespread and better education that can lead people to become more concerned about environmental quality. Affluence also makes more money available for developing technologies to reduce pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste along with ways to increase our beneficial enviornmental impacts. 

Poverty is a condition in which people lack enough money to fulfill their basic needs for food, water, shelter, health care, and education. Bad News: According to the World Bank, about one of every three people, or 2.6 billion people, struggled to live on less than $3.10 a day in 2015. In addition, 1 billion people living in in extreme poverty struggled to live on the equivalent of less than $1.30 a day- less than what many people spend for a bottle of water or a cup of coffee. Could you do this? 

The daily lives of the world's poorest people center on getting enough food, water, and cooking and heating fuel to survive. Typically, these individuals are too desperate for short-term survival to worry about long-term environmental quality or sustainability. Thus, they may be forced to degrade forests, topsoil, and grasslands, and deplete fisheries and wildlife population to stay alive. 

Poverty does not always lead to environmental degradation. Some of the poor increase their beneficial environmental impact by planting and nurturing trees and conserving the solid that they depend on as a part of their long-term survival strategy. 

Consider this, Poverty and Population Growth

To many people , having more children is a matter of survival. Their children help them gather firewood, haul water, and tend crops and livestock. The children also help take care of their aging parents, most of whom do not have social security, health care, and retirement funds. This daily struggle for survival is largely why populations in some fo the poorest countries continue to grow at high rates. 

Environmental degradation can have severe health effects on the poor. One problem is life-threatening malnutrition, a lack of protein and other nutrients needed for good health. Another effect is illness caused by limited access to adequate sanitation facilities and clean drinking water. As a result, about one of every nine of the world's people get water for drinking, washing, and cooking from sources polluted by human and animal feces. 

The world Health Organization (WHO) estimates that these factors-mostly related to poverty-cause premature death for about 7 million children under age of 5 each year. Some hopeful news is that this number of annual deaths is down from about 10 million in 1990. Even so, every day an average of at least 19,000 young children die prematurely from these causes. This is equivalent to 95 fully loaded 200-passenger airliners crashing every day with no survivors. The news media rarely cover this ongoing human tragedy. 

Ways to reduce poverty include: 

• Reducing malnutrition and infectious diseases that kill millions of people 

• Providing universal primary school education for all children and for the world's nearly 800 million illiterate adults

• Reducing populations growth, by elevating the social and economic status of women, reducing poverty, and providing access to family planning

• Making small, low-interest loans (microloans) to poor people who want to increase their income

Some see the rapid population growth in less-developed countries as the primary cause of our environmental problems. Others say that the high rate of resource use per person in more-developed countries is a more important factor. Which factor do you think is more important? Why? 

Exponential Growth and Doubling Time: The Rule of 70

One important characteristic of a population is change in population size. Scientists analyze fluctuating populations in order to understand the relationship between a population and its environment. When environmental conditions are favorable, a population can grow very rapidly. 

Doubling time is the amount of time it takes for a population to double in size. When a population grows at its maximum rate, it demonstrates exponential growth.

FRQ Application 

Changes to population size are the result of the number of births minus the numer of deaths within a population per year. This is called the percent annual natural increase. Imagine that within a population of humans, there were 28 births per 1000 people (called the crude birth rate) and 17 deaths per 1000 people (called the crude death rate). 

The percent annual natural increase for this population would be calculated as 

28-17 deaths / 1000 x 100= 1.8% 

The doubling time of this population or of any exponentially growing quantity can be calculated by using the rule of 70. 

Doubling time in years= 70/ percent annual natural increase

Using what we calculated for the above population, doubling time for this population would be: 

Doubling time in years = 70/1.8=39 years 

The world's population is growing at about 1.2% per year. At this rate how long would it take to double the number of humans on earth? 

Doubling time in years= 70/1.2= 58 years 

Another basic cause of environmental problems has to do with how the marketplace prices goods and services. Companies providing goods for consumers generally are not required to pay for most of the harmful environmental and health costs of supplying such goods. For example, timber companies pay the cost of clear-cutting forests but do not pay for the resulting environmental degradation and loss of wildlife habitat. 

The primary goal of a company is to maximize profits for its owners or stockholders, so it is not inclined to add these costs to its prices voluntarily. Because the prices of goods and services do not include most of their harmful environmental and health costs, consumers have no effective way to know the harm caused by what they buy. This lack of information is a major reason for why we are degrading key components of our life-support system. 

For example, producing and using gasoline results in air pollution and other problems that damage the environment and people's health. Scientists and economists have estimated that the price of gasoline to US consumers would rise by $3.18 per liter ($12 per gallon) if estimated short and long-term harmful environmental and health costs were included in its pump price. Thus, when gas costs $2 per gallon, US consumers are really paying about $14 per gallon. Consumers pay these hidden environmental and health costs, but not at the gas pump. 

Today, more than half of the world's people and three out of four people in more-developed countries live in urban areas. This shift from rural to urban living is continuing at a rapid pace. Urban environments and the increasing use of cell phones, computers, and other electronic devices are isolating people, especially children, from the natural world. Some argue that this has led to phenomenon known as nature deficit disorder. 

Children and adults can gain many benefits from outdoor activities. Research indicates that experiencing nature can lead to better health, reduced stress, improved mental abilities, and increased imagination and creativity. It also can provide a sense of wonder and connection to the earth's life support system that keeps us alive and supports our economies. 

One of the reasons why environmental problems persist is that people differ over the nature and seriousness of the world's environmental problems as well as how to solve them. These conflicts arise mostly because of differing environmental worldviews. 

Your environmental worldview is the assumptions and beliefs that you have about how the natural world works and how you think you should interact with the environment. Your environmental worldview is determined partly by your environmental ethics- what you believe about what is right and what is wrong in your behavior toward the environment. For example, here are some important ethical questions relating to the environment: 

• Why should we care about the environment? 

• Are we the most important species on the planet or are we just another one of the earth's millions of forms of life? 

• Do we have an obligation to see that our activitiesdo not cause the extinction of other species? If so, should we try to protect all species or only some? How do we decide which to protect? 

• Do we have an ethical obligation to pass the natural world on to future generations in a condition that is as good as or better than what we inherited? 

• Should every person be entitled to equal protection from environmental hazards regardless of race, gender, age, national origin, income, social class, or any other factor? 

• Should we seek to live more sustainably, and if so, how? 

Aldo Leopold- wildlife manager, professor, writer, and conservationist-laid the groundwork for the field of environmental ethics through his writings, especially his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac. He argued that the role of the huaman species should be to protect nature, not conquer it. 

People with different environmental worldviews can study the same data, be logically consistent in their analysis of those data, and arrive at quite different answers to such questions. This happens because they begin with different assumptions and values. 

The collapse of the Atlantic cod fishing industry in Newfoundland, Canada illustrates one of the causes of enviornmental problems. A growing population increases the consumption of fish, which puts pressure on the fishing industry to harvest increasingly larger fish catches. Rising affluence leads to increased resource use per person, whcih also promotes lareger fish harvests. The resulting increas is industrialized commercial fishing can deplete populations of cod and other fish that some of the poor catch and eat in order to survive. The market prices of Atlantic cod and other fish do not include the harmful environmental and health effects of the industrialized fishing industry that uses large amounts of energy to catch and process fish, which adds pollutants to the air and water. Driving their Atlantic cod to commercial extinction also disrupts the aquatic ecosystem where it is found and affects other species that feed on the cod. 

Because people are increasingly isolated from nature, they do not understand how the earth's life-support systems works and how it keeps them alive and supports the economies that provide them with goods and services, including Atlantic cod and to other commercial fisheries by establishing sustainable harvest levels for each species. 

One way to deal with difficult problem of the tragedy of the commons is to use a shared or open-access renewable resource at a rate well below its estimated sustainable yield. Many coastal fishing communities have developed allotment and enforcement systems for controlling fish catches in which each fisher gets a share of the total allowable catch. This cooperative approach has sustained fisheries and fishing jobs in many communities for thousands of years. However, the rise of interanational idustrialized fishing fleets has reduced the effectiveness of this approach. Today, some coastal fishing communities and the governemnt work together to manage fishieries to prevent overfishing. Another approach is to convert open-access renewable resources to private ownership. The reasoning is that if you own something, you are more likely to protect your investment. However, history shows that this does not necessarily happen. In addition, this approach is not possible for open-access resources such as the atmosphere, ocean fisheries, and our global life-support system, which cannot be divided up and sold as private property. 

Checkpoint for Understanding: Be able to explain why increasing population growth is an underlying factor for many environmental problems.