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By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.
May we recognize the Spirit
in each of us, and the Spirit
in all of us.
-- Ram Dass
Since the dawn of modern environmentalism in the 1970s, population issues have often been blamed for environmental problems. Many organizations exist that tell us we cannot change our downward spiral of environmental degradation until population growth decreases.
With the recent birth of my son, I am reminded that this analysis is much too simplistic. The way people choose to live their lives and their consumption patterns may be a much more important factor than the sheer number of people on Earth.
Paul Ehrlich, author of the groundbreaking 1990 book "The Population Explosion," was among the first to draw the connection between population and environmental degradation. He focused on the concept of carrying capacity as the primary factor that should be used in determining whether or not an area is overpopulated. Carrying capacity means that if a population exceeds the ability of the land to sustain it, then there are too many people.
A few years after the publication of his book, at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, Ehrlich refined the analysis in a talk entitled, "Too Many Rich People." Ehrlich said, "The impact of humanity on Earth's life support systems is not just determined by the number of people alive on the planet. It also depends on how those people behave. When this is considered, an entirely different picture emerges: the main population problem is in wealthy countries. There are, in fact, too many rich people."
This analysis adds a critical dimension to the population discussion. The amount of resources an individual consumes may be much more important than the number of people in a region.
In any major city in the world, there will be areas where affluent people settle and places where people of dramatically lesser means reside. In Los Angeles, where I lived for many years, I knew some of the people who occupied 10,000 square foot homes. Two people living in such a home in Beverly Hills were consuming resources - energy, fuel, and food - many, many times that consumed by people living in ten square blocks in a poorer part of town.
Yet by the simplistic form of population analysis still practiced by many, the poorer part of town would be considered to be overpopulated while the block in Beverly Hills would not.
The analysis used by Ehrlich in his 1994 talk is still relevant today. In the early 1990s, each person in the United States, on average, uses twice as much as energy as the average Japanese person, and more than three times as much as the average Spaniard. Those figures are much higher today, but the proportions are similar.
Compared to the average citizen of India, a citizen in the United States uses 50 times more steel, 56 times more energy, 170 times more synthetic rubber and newsprint, 250 times more motor fuel, and 300 times more plastic.
The United States, with less than five percent of the world's population, uses over a fourth of the world's resources and generates over a fourth of the world's waste. The relatively small number of rich people in the world create over two-thirds of the global environmental destruction.
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2001/2001L-05-25g.html |
