FOOD SECURITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
- David R. Montgomery
- April 21, 2015
- Forum Papers
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FOOD SECURITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
An NPG Forum Paper
by David R. Montgomery
April 2015
I am not Catholic, but I find many things to like about Pope Francis. The most recent was his disarmingly blunt delivery of the opinion that people have a responsibility to care for creation and not “breed like rabbits.” This refreshingly impolitic papal admonition shines a bright light on the long neglected issue of human population growth.
Few facts stand as starkly obvious and routinely ignored – we are at the point where we don’t really need a lot more people on the planet. In a world stretched to its ecological limits, having seven or eight children can no longer be considered virtuous. We’ve been quite fruitful and multiplied quite enough. Sorry folks, even the Pope apparently thinks the planet’s full.
This is not to be construed as saying that peopleare bad, or to be in any way seen as advocating coercive population control. For I reject both views, as I suspect does Francis. What it is intended to say is that if even the spiritual head of one of the world’s longest running anti-birth-control lobbies is talking about the wisdom of voluntary population control, then maybe it’s high time for society at large to re-engage on the question of how to reduce global population growth in the coming decades. Doing so sure would make it a lot easier to feed the world a century from now, which to a geologist like myself sounds a lot like tomorrow morning.
It should sound obvious that negative population growth would be a positive influence on all of the major environmental challenges humanity faces in the 21st century. From climate change, to biodiversity loss, the growing scarcity of fresh water, and the ongoing degradation of the world’s agricultural soils, a smaller human population would help keep regional crises from blossoming into global disasters…
David R. Montgomery is author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (2007), The Rock’s Don’t Lie (2012), and the forthcoming book The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health (2015).
