LATimes | It's easy to grasp that in a national park, balance must be
maintained between predators and prey, lest the ecosystem crash. But
when we're talking about our own species, it gets harder. The notion
that there are limits to how much humanity this parkland called Earth
can bear doesn't sit easy with us.
The "nature" part of
human nature includes making more copies of ourselves, to ensure our
genetic and cultural survival. As that instinct comes in handy for
building mighty nations and dominant religions, we've set about filling
the Earth, rarely worrying that it might one day overfill. Even after
population quadrupled in the 20th century, placing unprecedented stress
on the planet, it's hard for some to accept that there might be too many
of us for our own good.
A recent essay
in the New York Times by University of Maryland geographer Erle C.
Ellis, argued that population growth is actually the mother of
invention, that it inspires new technologies to sustain ever more humans
and to coax more from the land. And as Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his
2009 encyclical "Caritas in Veritate," "On this Earth there is room for
everyone … through hard work and creativity."
In 2011, I visited the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
which had warned in 1994 that it was "unthinkable to sustain
indefinitely a birthrate beyond 2.3 children per couple…. The contrary
demographic consequences would be unsustainable to the point of
absurdity." Nevertheless, the church still encouraged population growth.
With a billion humans already malnourished, I asked the academy's
director where would we get food for nearly 10 billion by midcentury?
Clearing more forests for farming would be disastrous. Beset by floods
and erosion, China alone has been spending $40 billion to put trees
back. And force-feeding crops with chemistry has backfired on us, with
nitrogen runoff that fouls rivers, deadens New Jersey-sized chunks of
the oceans and emits large quantities of two greenhouse gases: carbon
dioxide and nitrous oxide.
The answer, I was told, would be through increased yields using new
genetically modified crops from the centers of the Green Revolution: the
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Texcoco, Mexico,
and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
The Green Revolution's high-yield, genetically selected strains more
than doubled grain harvests during the 1960s. It is often cited as
having triumphed over dire predictions of famines caused by population
growth outpacing food production, which were famously made by economist
Thomas Robert Malthus in "An Essay on the Principle of Population" and echoed by his latter-day analogues, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, who wrote "The Population Bomb."
However, when I went to the maize center in Texcoco and to the rice
institute in the Philippines, I found no food scientists who agreed with
that triumphalist scenario. Instead, I learned, Green Revolution
founder Norman Borlaug had warned in his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that his work essentially had only bought the world time to resolve overpopulation.
"There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger
until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those
that fight for population control unite in a common effort," Borlaug
said.
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