Many of the problems facing mankind can be traced to one major problem: the world is getting full. Worse, it’s not getting filled with elegant life forms, like trees, or adorable life forms like dogs and dolphins; it’s getting filled with people, and people suck.
Population projections are notoriously inaccurate, and future estimates range widely. One common figure is the UN estimate of 9 billion people by 2050.
Most of this growth will take place in the developing world. Even limited population growth in rich countries can be a problem, since richer countries use up more resources per capita. In fact, falling birth rates in developing nations may even increase in the future.
There is some debate over the effects of Earth’s population growth (you can see two very different takes here and here).
Will food production increase enough to provide everyone with adequate nutrition? Will there be enough clean water? Will overpopulation increase the rate of environmental destruction through deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, and decreased soil fertilit? Will an increased standard of living for growing economies result in increased levels of carbon dioxide and other pollutants?
My general answer is no to the first two and yes to the second two, but I’m a pessimist. These questions are debated elsewhere. Instead, this will illustrate some of the less obvious costs of overpopulation.
The World is Full of Noise
This was one of the sadder articles I read recently. One man trekked through America and Europe looking for natural silence:
As audio ecologist Gordon Hempton defines it, silence is “the complete absence of all audible mechanical vibrations, leaving only the sounds of nature at her most natural. Silence is the presence of everything, undisturbed.”
In other words, good old fashioned peace and quiet. It turns out that peace and quiet is increasingly hard to find in the developed world. Even serene national parks were disrupted by the sound of airplanes flying over.
Another woman had to go to the Highlands of Scotland to escape the din of the modern world.
In the Middle Ages, Christian scholars believed that Satan did not want human beings to be alone with God, or with each other, fully alert and listening. This is why British author Sara Maitland believes the mobile phone is a “major breakthrough for the powers of hell.”
As Earth’s population grows, places of serene retreat will become rarer and harder to find, until they disappear.
The World is Full of People
This section isn’t about statistics; it’s about elbow room. As a Midwesterner, I find it distincly unpleasant to be part of a crowd (exception: football games). I don’t like to be jostled, I don’t like to be compressed, and I don’t like people in my personal space.
(Quick aside: Here’s a quick way to judge if someone is in your personal space. Extend your elbows out 90 degrees from your shoulders. Rotate your body 360 degrees. If anyone is within this radius, they have invaded your personal space, and you are allowed to punch them.)
One quick way to estimate how much space each person has before they run into another person is population density. The total world population density is 118 people per square mile. This doesn’t mean much, since large swaths of land are uninhabitable (deserts, mountains, arctic) or devoted to agriculture.
Further, some countries have much higher population density, and some much lower. You can view the whole chart here, but here are a few excerpts to give you an idea of how much crowding the numbers indicate. The cities of Hong Kong (16,000 per) and Singapore (18,000 per) are among the most crowded places in the world. India, despite being a large country, has a population density of over 900 people per square mile. Countries like United Kingdom (650) and Germany (600) are only 2/3 as dense, and still considered crowded.
The United States comes in at a very respectable 83 people per square mile. Countries like Canada (8), Australia (7) and Mongolia (4) make up some of the least crowded places on Earth.
Yet even the low density numbers for the US can be misleading, because people (inexplicably) tend to congregate in large cities. America has several places where the population density is over 10,000 people per square mile, with parts of New York City at greater than 50,000 people per square mile. That’s as crowded as anywhere in the world.
So what is a comfortable population density? Tolerance for human contact varies by person and culture, but as a man (and misanthrope) who values open spaces, privacy, peace and quiet, and personal space, I would estimate that between 40-80 people per square mile is ideal.
I base my estimate on this list of states and their population densities. Places like Colorado (47) and Arizona (55) have enough population to accommodate major cities, while still leaving room for nature and agriculture.
Solutions
There aren’t any. The (my) ideal population density of between 40-80 people per square mile is much less than the average world density of 118.
While there is still some room to spread out in Central Asia, Siberia and Canada (and those places might be quiet pleasant if global warming continues), most of the habitable places on Earth are settled.
Sadly, going to space just won’t work with current technology.
Exporting 5.7 million people would cost $257 trillion, roughly ten times the world’s annual economic product. Your mass migration would bankrupt the remaining Earthlings, who would still be saddled with a population that doubled every 50 years.
The same goes for settling the oceans, with a lesser cost, but the same high technological barriers.
One solution is to reduce the birth rate and let populations decline naturally. Women with access to education, contraception and employment delay having children, and have fewer when they do. This can help slow the growth rate, but it doesn’t help the world become any less full now. And, it tacks against human nature. At last report, people were still having sex, with and without contraception, and they show no signs of stopping anytime soon.
(Ironically, Ancient Egyptians used to risk their lives to harvest crocodile dung because it was thought to have contraceptive effects. For thousands of years, humans have wished for some method to control reproduction. Now we have several of those methods, and people don’t use them.)
We may find the technological means to overcome the shortages of food and water and prevent environmental damage, but there is no science that can replace the loss of space and silence.
I am one of those who don’t like crowds or running into people.
A couple of thoughts come to mind..
I remember when I was a teenager living in NM and being told that there were less people in the state than in Phoenix.
I often think of the couple that spends thousands of dollars and goes to great extremes to have a child in this crowded world. It goes to show that emotions rule over intelligence most of the time.
I don’t understand why you think space and silence are important to our species as a whole. It almost seems that you feel the values you hold dear, based on your quiet Midwest upbringing, should hold for all of humanity?
If silence were important to our species, why would we have evolved an oral language and not one based on movement or facial expressions, like sign language? Why would we have evolved an enjoyment of music? If we loved silence as a species, wouldn’t we abhor complex sounds like a symphony of instruments playing Mozart? But no, we actually derive pleasure from the noise.
As far as personal space goes, our species evolved as a tribal/communal group. We are the most adaptable complex species (ignoring bacterium) in the history of this planet. Why does an agrarian culture have to be the ideal? Is there any reason to think the crowded city-world of Coruscant isn’t actually a plausible and not-unhealthy future for humanity, and that we’ll simply adapt to increased density, as we have been for millennia?
You may lament the loss of silent spaces, and the inability to have a soccer field all to yourself…but most of the rest of humanity is fine with it.
Alex,
You bring up a number of points, and I will try to respond in order so we don’t wander off on tangents.
First, natural silence, or more broadly, peace and quiet, has been a source of inspiration for many people across history, from Zen Buddhists in the Himalayas, to the monks of Europe, to Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. For many people, inner peace and outer peace are closely related.
Notice I’m not talking about natural silence as an absence of sound; putting on headphones doesn’t count. Instead, it refers to finding solitude and tranquility in nature.
Clearly, this is an aesthetic value. Some people find calm in nature; for others, being crushed on a subway everyday is the hilite of their day. I’m not arguing that nature must be the value for everyone; simply that it is and has been an important value for many people.
In your second paragraph, I think you are conflating several notions. Again, natural silence is not the absence of sound (using the terminology from the article) but it is a kind of aesthetic. Similarly, speech and music have aesthetic qualities. Noise, almost by definition, does not. Trying to say that because we appreciate music we must also love noise/ abhor silence doesn’t make sense.
For your third paragraph: I will not argue that humanity is ’supposed to’ live a certain way. There are advantages and disadvantages to living as a hunter gatherer, or in an agrarian society, or in a city, or any other environment we have devised. Humans certainly can survive in harsh environments- people live in Siberia after all- but that doesn’t mean that those environments are ideal for human flourishing.
As I said above, for some people, cities are great. I certainly enjoy them. But, for many people, it is important to have a balance. Cities have their benefits, but so does unspoiled nature. Living in a group has its benefits, but so does solitude. As population increases, cities grow, nature shrinks. The aesthetic benefits that have inspired us for generations are slowly lost.
Sure, we can adapt to life in megapoli. We can survive without peace and quiet, just as we could survive without music or art or religion. But surviving is not the same as flourishing, and for many people, the tranquility of nature is essential to tranquility of the soul.
I just hope I’m dead or off-planet by the time it’s all gone.
Thomas,
I have been to NM briefly. It was quite gorgeous.
I’m concerned about population density too, but I’m always a little surprised and embarrassed when somebody knows the bold statistics showing that education and social opportunity dramatically reduce birth rate, and yet maintain a fatalistic mindset due to some meme like, “Well, yes, but it goes against human nature, duddn’t it?”
I know it’s not quite that simple, but isn’t there a bright streak of hope in there?
The noise of civilization robs us of much of our humanity. Not only does it not allow us to “relax” in a phsiologically literal sense, but it masks much of what is going on in our sensory apparatus. You have to experience the kind of quite only found in deep rural areas or wilderness to understand. We have an exquisite response to sounds of all types, but you need to experience these as they arise from silence to recieve the full flavor. Sounds, and shapes, too, these take on a more visceral meaning in and from silence.
I don’t want to present the following as an unmitigated good. There are probably a lot of tragic personal stories and injustices buried in the data.
But go here:
http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=Fertility&d=SOWC&f=inID:127
Click “Select Pivot Column” and select “Year”.
It’s pretty compelling.