Should we have more children? This is a heavy question for a Sunday morning, but one we must ask in our present times.
In 2009, climate scientist Johan Rockström, along with 28 renowned scientists, introduced the idea of planetary boundaries, which act as a kind of master health check for the Earth. They defined limits as “safe limits to human pressure on nine critical processes that together maintain a stable and resilient Earth.”
In 2009, we exceeded recommended limits on at least two of these. By 2023, we will have crossed six thresholds, including climate change, novel entities (microplastics, endocrine disruptors and their ilk), land-use change (think deforestation), freshwater changes, biochemical fluxes, (phosphorus and nitrogen) and biosphere integrity (we are in the sixth mass extinction; the last extinction occurred when the dinosaurs disappeared).
How much of this situation is due to the fact that there are “too many” of us?
According to the History Database of Global Environments (HYDE), a population land-use model, there were an estimated 19 million people on Earth 7,000 years ago, of whom 2.5 million lived on the land that is currently India.
The creator of the database, Kees Klein Goldewijk of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told me that the estimate was derived from subsequent population estimates, using the available literature. This was a comprehensive step, not intended to be precise at the regional level, but capable of helping us understand how land use, population and climate may interact.
Comparing the database’s estimated carbon-dioxide concentrations at that time with CO2 concentration data from ice cores shows that, if anything, HYDE’s estimates are conservative.
This was a time when the strong Indian monsoon allowed the rivers to overflow, making floodplain agriculture more productive. This probably helped India support a larger population: over the next 3,000 years, the population would grow nearly eightfold, to 20 million.
In fact, between 4000 and 2000 BCE, India probably had the fastest growing population in the world, thanks, in part, to the agricultural wonders of the Harappan civilization.
These farmers took control of their local waters, not by trying to control it, but by shaping their cities and their diets, supported by the local land and climate. Technology is, after all, merely the handmaiden of philosophy. When the philosophy was “adaptation”, there was water management and diet. And so, when water was abundant, people ate wheat, but in drought, they made do with foxtail millet, as archaeological evidence shows.
Today, we are dazzled by shiny technology, ignoring the “winner-takes-all” or “negative-external” philosophy at work behind many of them, and forgetting that philosophy, like climate, Always comes to settle in the house.
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A study of snail shells from a lake at a Harappan-era settlement, about 4,000 years ago, revealed that the monsoon, our monsoon, remained weak not for one or two years, but for two centuries. This, along with other factors, is believed to have led to the decline, or deurbanization, of the civilization that once flourished here.
Two millennia later, climate change may have played a role in the fall of the Roman Empire. Closer to home, the interplay of climate and population appears to have shaped many of Delhi’s cities, acting like a pendulum, swinging it from river to mountain and back again.
For example, Iltutmish established his city in the safe Lal Kot, away from the Yamuna. But as the population increased, people needed water, and so they built a tank called Hauz-e-Shamsi in 1231. When this proved inadequate, the city began to grow closer to the river.
As the Mamluks submitted to the Khiljis, the weak monsoon pushed the city closer to the river, prompting Alauddin Khilji to build another tank, the Hauz Khas, to harness the rain. Even that was not enough.
As soon as the Khiljis submitted to Tughlaq, the drought intensified, thousands of people died from the famine. “Rumours of cannibalism were prevalent,” writes historian Irfan Habib in his 2001 book Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500.
One geological blink later, India was colonized. Between 1600 and 1700, forests rapidly changed to fields. For colonists motivated by the philosophy of maximizing revenue, it was free land. As we shall see, the bill for that “free” gift arrived much later.
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In 18th-century England, the economist Thomas Malthus wrote that “the power of population is infinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man”.
In later life, he taught young men who came to India as part of the East India Company that famine was the result of rapidly growing population. Did that special instruction make colonial leaders less concerned about their role in famine relief?
Famine killed millions of people in the 19th century. Deforestation, a fixed, cash tax, and the Raj’s forest and market policies made dry stream flows less reliable, and led farmers to grow inedible or climate-unsuitable crops. Did all this, coupled with the export of grain while the masses were starving, cause death, or was it the Malthusian monster of overpopulating?
India gained independence in the next century, after which the crude death rate (the number of deaths per 1,000 in a given year) began to decline. It fell from 27 in 1941 to 15 in 1971, 10 in 1991 and 7 in 2011. India, concerned about its population, started its National Family Planning Program in 1952, the first country in the world to do so. And yet, while India’s birth rate fell, the population continued to boom.
Last year our country became the most populous country in the world. Well, this is not a bad thing. In fact, there are advantages to a larger population: a Bengaluru is bigger than an Israel; One in Delhi, one much bigger than Singapore. These small nations have made money from their weaknesses and so can we if we play our cards right, especially education and local policy.
However, according to UN data, our number is expected to increase to 100 million by 2030 – just as the climate is changing again, asking us to greener land use, allowing us to grow more crops. Or getting less space to build.
Where will these 100 million be kept when our cities and towns are losing green spaces and water bodies? Where will the land come from to graze the animals and grow the crops they need? Where will the cotton be grown for their discarded cotton?
Both population and climate limit the strategic choices we can make. With a small population and a friendly climate, we could take our water for granted. Now doing so is tantamount to ritual suicide. Being blasé about food waste is a luxury we no longer have.
We may never face famine again (and I pray we never do), but feeding so many people means that even the slightest interruption in supplies (a heat wave here or Flood there) will increase prices.
This is especially true as we have doubled down on crops that are not suited to their local climates, extracting so much groundwater to support rice and sugarcane and myriad others that we changed the tilt of the Earth’s axis. Is.
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It is much more than food: we churn out cement, steel, cobalt, plastic, cotton and chemicals to give concreteness to our short-term desires. The average Indian consumes only 1/10th the energy and meat consumed by an American, but for some time the average Indian has been consuming more.
If this trend continues, Houston, or rather Sriharikota, has a problem for us.
This is the crucial compromise for this generation: children or philosophy, something has to be given.
A decade ago, Samuel L. Jackson, playing the eccentric villain Valentine in the Kingsman movie, said: “When you get a virus, you get a fever. That is, the human body is increasing its core temperature to kill the virus. Planet Earth works the same way. Global warming is the fever, mankind is the virus. We are making our planet sick. Murder is our only hope. If we don’t reduce our own population, this can only happen one of two ways: the host kills the virus, or the virus kills the host.
I don’t agree. Both the host and the “virus” have a way to survive: we learn to co-exist. We are evolving to become less lethal (as COVID-19 variants did), and use our resources more thoughtfully, in a philosophy that accepts that the environment matters.
However, looking at the mist around me, I wonder if it will happen that fast.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watersheds. She can be reached at tradeoffs@climateaction.net)
