20120426_GN
Source: The Guardian
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/audio/2012/apr/26/paul-ehrlich-depopulation-audio
Date: 26/04/2012
Event: Paul Ehrlich on depopulation - "We're going to go over the top"
People:
- Dr Paul R Ehrlich: Ecologist, biologist and Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University
- John Vidal: Environment Editor, The Guardian
John Vidal: Since you wrote your books 20, 30 years ago -
Paul Ehrlich: 40 years ago.
John Vidal: - since you wrote your books 40 years ago, population has increased almost as much as you predicted. Have the environmental problems followed exactly what you thought?
Paul Ehrlich: Nothing follows exactly what you think. No scientist ever, 40 years later, would think the same thing that they thought 40 years before, in an act of science. But basically, most of the things have gotten worse. The book that I wrote was accurate on what happened to population. It was inaccurate in some other areas, but you got to remember at that time, for example, I wrote about climate change, but we thought that - we didn't know whether it was going to be warming or cooling, and we thought it was going to be a problem for the end of this century. Now we know it's warming, and it's a problem for the beginning of the century. We didn't know about ozone depletion, we didn't know about the loss of biodiversity, so... The things that have been coming up have been much worse than we predicted, and that's what's got the scientific community scared.
John Vidal: Are you predicting more things like this to come up in the next 20 years?
Paul Ehrlich: Ah. If we don’t change our ways rapidly, then we’re going to have much more, I think, in the next 20 years, certainly in the next 40 years. We’re already seeing semi-catastrophic effects of climate change, already.
John Vidal: You’re talking about extremes of heat and cold…
Paul Ehrlich: And tornadoes and floods and droughts, all of which are very serious for agriculture. Gotta remember, all this is tied into our most important activity, which is growing food for ourselves - not trivial.
John Vidal: At the moment, do you see any way that the world can provide enough food - the carrying capacity of the world can provide enough food for the nine billion which they're expecting?
Paul Ehrlich: Well, I'd say the first thing we ought to do is provide enough for the seven billion. We grow enough, but the way we distribute it means that we have about a billion people hungry. And so we're going to add two and a half billion to that. They're going to have to be fed from more marginal land, with water that's transported further or purified more. In other words, we're going to have disproportionate impacts on how we can feed people from the increase in population itself.
John Vidal: Is that why you're saying the next two and a half billion people will be more of a problem, in a way, than the last two and a half billion people.
Paul Ehrlich: Oh yeah. It's always disproportionate, because human beings are smart, we pick the low-hanging fruit first. We didn't start farming in marginal land and move to the river valleys, we did it the other way around - built cities in the river valleys, and are now using more and more marginal land.
John Vidal: But we then come back to the next two and a half billion people will be mostly born in very poor countries. Are you saying that the problem is, in fact, the poor?
Paul Ehrlich: Well, part of the problem is the way we divide up nations. You know, are borders really moral? We have very uneven distribution of resources over the planet, we've got to reorganise ourselves as a species, as homo sapiens, and stop this poor world/rich world, so on, thing. In the United States, for instance, people can live in quite natural areas and still have the benefits of products from industrial society. We could run the world that way, too - we just don't.
John Vidal: So... you’re not in the business of predictions, but if we go on at this pace, and in this direction, what’s going to happen?
Paul Ehrlich: There’s going to be various forms of disaster. They may be slow-motion disasters, like just more and more people getting hungry. They may be catastrophic because the more people you have, the greater the chances of some weird virus transferring from an animal population into the human population, we got vast die-offs there. We could have tremendous famines - again, it’s going to depend a lot on the climate and what we do or don’t do about it, and how prepared we are for it. But I certainly have a grim view of what’s likely to happen to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
John Vidal: But these are ecological statements - you're not making political statements. What you're saying is that it is inevitable that these - this sort of event - these extremes will happen from now on.
Paul Ehrlich: Well, I think that's now extremely likely. You gotta remember that politicians, for instance, can instantly change the financial mess the world is in - that's something they have total control over. Who's in debt to whom. But they don't have total control over the systems of the planet that provide us our food, that provide us our welfare in general. And those are deteriorating, and it's going to take a long time to turn it around, if we start now. We haven't started yet, so it's very hard to think of anything that's going to, in some how, pop up and save us. I hope something does. But it would really be a, you know, a miracle.
John Vidal: In Britain and Europe, and, I guess, in America as well, there's a lot of arguments to say that population is not a problem, it's really a problem of consumption. How do you respond to that?
Paul Ehrlich: Well, that's easy. That is, you no more can say that the problem is population or consumption, that you can say that the area of a rectangle is the side divided - excuse me, that you can say that the area of a rectangle is a result of its length or its width. They multiply together. You have to deal with both of them. We have much too much consumption among the rich and much too little among the poor, and that implies that terrible thing that we're going to have to do, and that is, somehow redistribute access to resources somewhat away from the rich and towards the poor. But in the United States, for instance, we've been doing the opposite. We have a redistribution - the Republican Party is wildly in favour of more redistribution that they've done very effectively over the last 30 years, of taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.
John Vidal: What do you think is the proper carrying capacity of the Earth, for humans?
Paul Ehrlich: Well, when we looked at the issue of what would be an optimal population size, we came up with one and a half to two billion people. And the reason was, how many people you can support depends on lifestyle, and what they want to do, and so on and so forth. We know from history that one and a half to two billion people - you're going to have big, active cities, with all the things like operas and so on, that would be the things that London is beautiful for, and yet if you wanted to live in wilderness, you could still find wilderness. So it was optimising options. If you want to have a battery-chicken world, where everybody has minimum space, minimum food, just kept alive, then you might be able to support, in the long term, four or five billion people. But we've already got seven. So the issue is very clear. What we've got to do is humanely, as rapidly as possible, move to population shrinkage, and we can argue, while it's gradually shrinking - over many decades, maybe a century - over what the best place to stop is, and we'll have more information as time goes on, so we'll be able to come up with better decisions.
John Vidal: But you're saying this will take at least 50 years just to get to the point where we can start reducing.
Paul Ehrlich: The big issue, which the scientists looking at this have all been concerned about, is - we're going to go over the top. We're going to continue to grow for a while, until a disaster hits, and the issue is: can we actually go over the top and begin shrinking without a disaster.
John Vidal: When you say "disaster", what do you mean?
Paul Ehrlich: A world-wide plague that kills off three or four billion people. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan, which would do the same. Something like that, we want to avoid.