IN SUPPORT OF A REVOLUTION…

• Lindsey Grant
• December 1, 1997
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
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IN SUPPORT OF A REVOLUTION…
An NPG Forum Paper
by Lindsey Grant
December 1997

In 1995, Dr. J. Kenneth Smail wrote an NPG Forum essay entitled “Confronting the 21st Century’s Hidden Crisis: Reducing Human Numbers by 80%.” The article was picked up by other journals, and an expanded version was published in the September 1997 issue of the journal Politics and the Life Sciences under the title “Beyond Population Stabilization: The Case for Dramatically Reducing Global Human Numbers.” Concurrently, the editors of the journal asked me to comment on the article. That commentary —. which is in reality a presentation of concrete examples supporting Dr. Smail’s thesis — is the basis for this Forum.

Very few writers seem to recognize that growth cannot continue forever in a limited space, and that mathematical truism applies to the real world, today. Dr. Smail is one of those few who do. Moreover, he suggests that human numbers have already passed the long-term capacity of the Earth to sustain us and that an optimum world population lies perhaps in the range of 2-3 billion. So short is memory that the proposal sounds revolutionary — almost blasphemous — to most ears. Humans’ ability to accommodate to change is both our strength and our peril. People have learned to consider six billion “normal,” and presumably they will try to adjust to 10 or 12 billion, desperate as their situation may be by that time. More public concern is being expressed at the prospect that Europe and Japan (two of the most crowded regions on Earth) may experience a population decline than that most other regions on Earth are drawing us into a nightmare born of population growth. Yet Dr. Smail’s target is a population that was “normal” in 1950.

I agree with Dr. Smail and have no problem with his argument or with most of his assumptions. Rather than doing an exegesis on them, let me offer some brief examples of specific ways in which the interactions of demography and the environment are presently driving the human condition in precisely the wrong direction. They will, I believe, corroborate his thesis that a population turnaround is necessary.*

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