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HUMANITARIAN work enthusiasts normally start looking the other way when you talk to them about population explosion. Despite this moralistic interdiction, specialists dare to come up now and then with grim warnings about the catastrophe our future generations are heading towards. The result of the most recent of these researches conducted by an international team including UN experts appeared in the magazine Science on Sept 18.
The inquest headed by Prof Adrian Raftery of the University of Washington, Dr Simon Ross of the think tank Population Matters, Sir David Attenborough and Dr James Lovelock, a British scientist and environmentalist, has made some stunning revelations.
The world population will grow from seven billion today to 11 billion in 2100, posing severe challenges to food supplies, health care and social cohesion. Sub-Saharan Africa, by the way, remains the most threatened region with its population figure rocketing from one billion to five billion by the turn of the century.
“All previous estimates were based on judgements of future trends made by researchers employing a somewhat blurred and subjective approach,” says Prof Raftery. “They repeatedly envisioned population explosion on a range so vague that people mostly failed to grasp its significance, hence ignoring it; but our assessment is immensely pointed, allowing us to be confident about its certainty.”
The report also takes into account populations of elderly people, especially in prosperous countries who have been successful in providing medical assistance and better living conditions to senior citizens, but at the same time offering effective birth control possibilities to the young. In most poor countries authorities have no grip over galloping birth rates.
China is likely to be surpassed by India which in the next 15 years will become the most populous single country in the world, its demographic figure shooting past 1.5 billion.
“It’s no doubt very commendable,” says Prof Jean-Marc Doinneau, a population studies expert, “for humanitarian organisations to go to southern America, Asia and Africa to help affected populations whom Mother Nature had otherwise marked, in its own crude and impersonal way, to eliminate; but then, this method of saving lives should be accompanied with effective ways of containing birth rates.”
What the scientists are asserting today with statistical arguments, many people with strong artistic imaginations have been advancing for long through their science fiction books and horror movies. When, during Hollywood’s golden era, Jack Arnold released Tarantula in 1955, it was an immediate box-office success but for exactly the wrong reason.
Arnold had meant his giant spider to be the symbol of the population explosion threat that he foresaw the world was going to face in the coming years; but his sinister premonition was overlooked and his work was hurriedly pushed into the genre of sci-fi thrillers by critics and there it has remained for the past more than half a century now.
Unlike the stereotypical mad scientist who wants to dominate the world, in Tarantula Prof Gerald Deemer uses nuclear technology to invent a special nutrient that would cause cows and sheep to grow many times their normal sizes. At one point in the movie Prof Deemer says global demography would swell to three-and-a-quarter billion by the year 2000. How wrong was his prediction!
The population of the world had already reached the dreaded three-billion figure in 1960, just five years after the release of the film; it would swell to six billion by 1999, a year ahead of the professor’s threshold. Unobserved by him, one evening a tiny spider helps itself to the experimental nuclear food and creeps out of the laboratory. In a few days it grows to the size of an elephant, devouring cattle and horses in a nearby farm. It menacingly advances to annihilate the nearest town. A machine-gun assault by the soldiers proves ineffective and the US Air Force is called in. The monster is finally destroyed.
The happy end that Jack Arnold’s film encounters does not seem to await our future generations. Prof Doinneau says to house expanding populations we have already started building more and more cities, using cement and tarmac to increasingly cover land so far used for growing crops.
“In my opinion the only solution left to us will be to extend human settlements to the moon and to Mars but will we be ready for that?” says Prof Doinneau.
“It is astonishing that despite all these irrefutable arguments many people still ask me to present solid proofs of human overpopulation and to explain its consequences on the planet. I answer them: Can’t you see oil prices going up ceaselessly because of increasing demands and food prices higher than river and political unrest growing as a consequence? Air and rivers being polluted, flora and fauna disappearing? You want more proofs?”
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, September 28th , 2014
