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Sun 27 Aug, 2006 08:16 am
Aug. 27, 2006, 12:31AM
AN OVERPOPULATED EARTH?
Dr. Doom speaks his mind
Even threats don't quiet apocalyptic view of humanity's path
By LISA SANDBERG
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
AUSTIN - When classes resume at the University of Texas at Austin this week, 90 impressionable undergrads will file into an ecology class taught by a chatty zoology professor known ?- not always out of earshot ?- as Dr. Doom.
His real name is Eric Pianka, and students enrolled in his Ecology, Evolution and Society course will hear a sad synopsis of Earth's vanishing species and habitats ?- coupled with an apocalyptic warning about humans racing obliviously toward the edge of a high cliff.
If he models his lectures on previous ones, Pianka may remark that the planet would be better off without 90 percent of the humans who now populate it ?- no offense to anyone in particular.
"We should have done something about our population 25 or 30 years ago," the Denton A. Cooley Centennial Professor of Zoology said during a recent interview at his university office.
"Now we're going to have to go into a collapse. It's going to be very painful. The death rate is going to have to exceed the birth rate, we're going to have famines, civilizations are going to fall apart."
Such views have turned Pianka, a 67-year-old lizard expert, into one of UT's biggest public relations headaches.
Terror risk, death threats
It started last spring, when Pianka gave two academic audiences the same doomsday speech he's been delivering for years. Only this time, a reporter happened to be present and turned Pianka's remarks into a story in the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise.
News services picked it up, the blog world went crazy, and pretty soon, Pianka was being reported to the FBI as a terror threat. The FBI saw no need to launch a formal investigation, but agents did meet with the professor to discuss the death threats that poured in.
Unflattering op-ed pieces and news stories appeared nationwide. The Boston Globe likened him to a "zealot in scientific garb."
Loved or hated, Pianka is a scientist with stellar credentials who uses his podium to advance ideas that can challenge, enlighten, frighten and offend ?- sometimes all at once.
In March, just before the headlines erupted, the Texas Academy of Science named him its Distinguished Scientist for 2006; now the organization won't comment on his selection or any aspect of the controversy, said its president, David Marsh.
Pianka's employer has stood behind him. In a sense, Pianka states what many scientists have been saying for decades: Exploding human populations, particularly in developing countries, coupled with voracious consumption patterns in developed ones, put great strain on Earth and its resources, which in turn create conditions ripe for wars, famines and environmental catastrophes.
Pianka might be more blunt than others, said his boss, Robert Jansen, UT's chairman of Integrative Biology, who called Pianka one of the department's "most senior faculty members with a long and distinguished career in both research and teaching."
'Not politically correct'
It's Pianka's willingness to attack all manner of subjects, including organized religion and babies, that lands him in so much trouble.
He believes in population limits, lauds China for its one-child policy and says the U.S. government has it all wrong: It should be taxing people for having children, not rewarding them with tax breaks.
Pianka insists he doesn't advocate the mass killing of people; it's merely an inevitability.
But, as he writes in The Vanishing Book of Life on Earth, conditions "are going to get better after the collapse because humans won't be able to decimate the Earth so much."
"And I actually think the world will be much better off when only 10 percent or 20 percent of us are left. It would give wildlife a chance to recover ?- we won't need conservation biologists anymore. Things are going to get better for the denizens of Earth as they deteriorate for humans."
As an unabashed, unapologetic nature lover, Pianka argues humans should be stewards of the Earth, not conquerors. He takes the biblical book of Genesis to task for encouraging the idea that humans should multiply and have dominion over the land.
In his most cynical moment while interviewed, he described people as "wicked" but quickly added, "Oh, that's going to get me in trouble."
"This is not politically correct stuff," he acknowledged, sitting in the cluttered university office he has worked in for 38 years.
'It's all disappearing'
Family members have urged him to just stick to the facts, with no editorials, to separate the science from the philosophy. Pianka's response: "I can't separate it."
"Humans are at the pinnacle of evolution," he continued. "We're at the top of the food chain. We're able to do anything we want. We can knock down trees, level mountains, distill seawater. A puny man can take a chain saw and cut down a redwood or harpoon a whale. Nothing is inviolate. ... It's all disappearing before our eyes."
Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University who in 1968 wrote The Population Bomb, a best-seller that warned of ?- some say exaggerated ?- the threats posed by the growth of human numbers, urged Pianka to hang in there.
Ehrlich, too, received his share of nasty letters, harassing phone calls and protests when his book was published. But that year the human population stood at 3.5 billion. With nearly 6.5 billion people now on the planet, the problem is infinitely more relevant, he said.
Opinions on causes differ
C. Herb Ward, who teaches in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University, said there is widespread agreement in the scientific community that humans have placed great stress on the natural environment.
"Man hasn't helped the ecology," he said. "I think most ecologists would say the world is overpopulated."
But the conclusions one draws from that assessment ?- whether and how to reduce population growth, who's to blame for the current state of affairs ?- are value judgments, Ward said.
They are value judgments Pianka is quite comfortable making.
"I think we're going to be cavemen again because we're too stupid to head it off," he said.
And his are value judgments some are quite comfortable attacking. One critic who attended one of his speeches was quoted in a blog saying it reminded him of a "futuristic science fiction movie with a crazed scientist planning the death of humanity."
Father Dave Farnum, a priest at the on-campus University Catholic Center, said Pianka's views don't mesh with Catholicism, but Farnum wasn't holding it against him.
"This is a secular university, and God bless America for him being able to speak his mind," Farnum said.
Not following own advice
For a guy with gloomy views, Pianka is quite pleasant to be around. He is garrulous, quick to offer iced tea to a visitor and eager to show off the 18 bison he keeps as pets on his 184-acre property near Dripping Springs, where he lives alone in a simple stone cottage he built.
He has white hair, a full white beard and walks with a slight limp after being gored last spring by one of his buffaloes.
For the record, he's not advocating people kill themselves for the sake of the planet. And no, he's not offering his own life, either, as some of his harsher critics have demanded.
"That's nonsense. I'm just saying the tidal wave is coming," Pianka said.
One thing about Pianka: He's no purist. He makes $110,000 a year in his tenured position but donates little or none of it to environmental causes, saying the money would probably be misused.
His two adult daughters, whom he adores, are proof that he did not have himself sterilized as a youth. He drives 70 miles a day back and forth to work, though he does so in a Toyota Prius. He's got air conditioning throughout his house.
He says he tries to reduce his imprint on the Earth, but not as much as some of his friends, who've replaced their cars with bikes. In the end, Pianka said, it doesn't really matter.
"In truth, it backfires. It's kind of like crews cleaning up the highways. All it does is encourage people to toss their (trash) out. When you walk or ride a bike or drive a Prius, all you do is encourage some (expletive) out there to drive a Hummer or an Excursion."
Pianka grew up in Yreka, Calif., in the foothills of Mount Shasta, a few miles south of Oregon. His father worked in the surrounding gold mines and lumber mills. Pianka said he spent every minute he could outside, observing nature and watching the environment deteriorate.
Today, he mourns the disappearance of animals in the Hill Country, where real estate development is rapid. He used to count 18 species of snakes when he bought his property in 1978. He now counts four. Even the rattlesnakes are gone. Lizard species have similarly vanished.
In a third-floor science lecture hall this week, he will share with first- and second-year students a little of what's been lost. He might tell them humans could have been godlike but instead turned greedy and trampled what they should have left alone. He believes it.
I've mentioned on other threads that author, Phillip Wylie, wrote that population density ought to be 50 square miles per family. He might have settled for forty or even thirty; I don't know.
Sounds like my kind of guy.
He may be wrong, he may be right. But I'm not sure what he's saying that should piss people off. We don't expect other species to be able to continually increase in numbers without disastrous consequences -- why should humans be any different?
When i was born (1950), the population of the earth was reasonably estimated to have been less than two billion. When i was still just a lad, and the population had reached two billion, we were told that by 2050, the population of the earth would have reached five billion, and the consequence would be mass starvation, social collapse and global warfare. We now have over six billion people, and we're only slightly more than half way through that century from 1950 to 2050. I continue to be rather more optimistic than pessimistic about the fate of the human race.
The Population Bomb
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The Population Bomb (1968) is a book written by Paul R. Ehrlich. A best-selling work, it predicted disaster for humanity due to overpopulation and the "population explosion". The book predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death", that nothing can be done to avoid mass famine greater than any in the history, and radical action is needed to limit the overpopulation.
The book is primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument, that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. It assumes that the population is going to raise exponentially, on the other hand the resources, in particular food, are already at their limits.
Unlike Malthus, Ehrlich predicted that not only the overpopulation will hit in some indefinite future, but it is certain to lead to a massive disaster in the next few years. Also unlike Malthus, Ehrlich didn't see any means of avoiding the catastrophe, and the solutions for limiting its scope he proposed were much more radical, including starving whole countries that refused to implement population control measures.
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."
The book deals not only with food shortage, but also with other kinds of crises caused by rapid population growth, expressing the possibility of disaster in broader terms. A "population bomb", as defined in the book, requires only three things:
A rapid rate of change
A limit of some sort
Delays in perceiving the limit
Also worth noting is Ehrlich's introduction of the Impact formula:
I = PAT (where I=Impact, PAT = Population x Affluence x Technology)
Hence, Ehrlich argues, affluent technological nations have a greater per capita impact than poorer nations.
The predictions not only did not come true, the world developed in a direction completely opposite to the one predicted by Ehrlich, without implementing any of his proposed measures. The world food production grows exponentially at a rate much higher than the population growth, in both developed and developing countries, partially due to the efforts of Norman Borlaug's "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, and the food per capita level is the highest in the history. On the other hand population growth rates significantly slowed down, especially in the developed world [1]. The famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause is political instability, not global food shortage [2]. On the other hand, in the 1980s and 1990s in a number of countries (first of all in Tropical Africa) population growth rates still exceeded the economic growth ones, and on quite a few occasions political instability was caused just by food shortages (see, for example, Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends in Africa by Andrey Korotayev and Daria Khaltourina).
Although Ehrlich's theory influenced 1960's and 1970's public policy, a post-analysis by Keith Greiner (1994) observed that Ehrlich's projections could not possibly have held the scrutiny of time because Ehrlich applied the financial compound interest formula to population growth. Using two sets of assumptions based on the Ehrlich theory, it was shown that the theorized growth in population and subsequent scarcity of resources could not have occurred on Ehrlich's time schedule. The historical US population growth was more linear than exponential. Nevertheless The Population Bomb sold many copies and raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues. Early 21st century analyses of the age distribution of the US population show that growth in population declined after "the pill" was approved for widespread use (though the population continues to grow at a rate of 0.91% per annum [3]). That approval was likely influenced by Ehrlich's work. (Reference: Greiner, K. (1994, Winter). The baby boom generation and How they Grew, Chance: A Magazine of the American Statistical Association.)
There has been much criticism of the book from demographers today (chiefly Phillip Longman in his 2004 The Empty Cradle) who argue that the "baby boom" of the 1950s was an aberration unlikely to be repeated and that population decline in an urbanized society is by nature hard to prevent because of the economic liability children become. Paleoconservatives have been especially critical of the ideas of the book: The Population Bomb made the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century in 2003 and was #11 ("honorable" mention) in Human Events' Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
For years, environmentalists and social activists have been handing out dire warnings about a looming "overpopulation crisis". They famously warned that we would run out of copper by 1980 and start running out of oil by 2000, but that it wouldn't matter because we would all be dead by 1985, having inevitably run out of food and water due to overpopulation. One environmentalist predicted that India would starve, the United States would have food riots in the 1980s, and that America's population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999 because of our use of pesticides. Our population is now approaching 300 million. Instead of starving, India is now an exporter of food.
Now Phillip Longman and others are warning about the opposite problem: depopulation. Global fertility rates are half of what they were in 1972. Fertility rates are not only decreasing in Europe and Japan, where fertility rates are far below replacement levels, but also in regions where overpopulation has been a threat, including Africa, China, the Middle East and Mexico. As their population ages, more and more of each nation's resources will have to be devoted to social services, health care, and pensions, while the income tax base of productive taxpayers continually decreases. Longman argues that this will cause widespread poverty. The competition between "guns and canes" will also cause military weakness, which could lead to political instability and war. Is this a real danger or more doom-mongering?
http://brneurosci.org/reviews/emptycradle.html
patiodog wrote:He may be wrong, he may be right. But I'm not sure what he's saying that should piss people off. We don't expect other species to be able to continually increase in numbers without disastrous consequences -- why should humans be any different?
I agree, nothing here should piss people off. I remember when I first heard all the outcry about what he was saying, what really got them worked up was that he said that we need a huge decrease in population, like fifty percent or something.
So people twisted that into him saying he
wanted to kill fifty percent of the world's population-- people were acting like if you gave him weapons and half a chance, he'd personally kill your family.
I mean, the way I interpret what he's saying is not that he wishes half the people he meets would die, but that he's simply saying ideally there would be half the # of people there are now. To me, those are two different things.
I think he seems like a neat guy, I'd like to meet him.
I hope 'Dr Doom' is making some sort of an impact, but humans are stubborn and selfish when it comes to the changes required to ease our collective footprint.
Ecological apocalysts like Eric "Dr. Doom" Pianka have a long and dismal record of mispredictions. According to Adam Smith, they already had a century-old record of failure in 1776, when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations". Because predictions of doom tend to captivate audiences, I'm sure Mr. Pianka won't be the last of his kind. Indeed, let me offer my own prediction for the next 50 years: We won't see a collapse of our population, but there will always be an abundance of esteemed ecologists who predict such a collapse for Real Soon Now (TM).
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