Peak Child - Peak capitalism?

The ideal family is no longer big

World population continues to grow, but the number of children in the world has now reached its peak. In 1960 we were 1 billion children below 15 years of age and we were 35% of the world population. Now there are 1,9 billion children in the world, but they are but 27% of world population. In 2050 there will still be an estimated 1.9 billion kids. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp

The good news is that populations are actually stabilizing. We doubled global population between 1960-1990 – but this will most likely never happen again.


In all major rich countries – with the USA as a remarkable exception – population is stabilized or would even fall were it not for immigration. In many other countries birth rates have plummeted. Remains a number of poor countries with still very rapid rates – just come home from East Africa which is one of the regions with still increasing population. It is worth noting that population growth rates in Africa are still not as rapid as they have been in Asia.

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_2.htm

The era of colonization of the globe of human kind is rapidly coming to a close, with nature resources sucked up and population now filling space after space. With this closing, our economic system is also bound to change. 

Capitalism as we know it can’t manage a steady-state economy and it has also big problems to work with a stable population as things look like. After all, growth is the lifeblood of economic system and in that sense it probably doesn’t matter much if the growth is from increased consumption per capita or by increased population.

Perhaps "Peak child", "Peak oil" and "Peak soil" don't spell the end of capitalism, but they at least form "Peak capitalism". 

To respect nature is to respect ourselves

Spider web at Torfolk Gård 2007

Nothing human beings do can compete with a piece of nature in complexity. A square metre of land contains so many organisms with so complicated and complex relationships that one can’t understand them. A gramme of forest soil may contain over a million bacteria colonies. It is estimated that several million individual animals and over a thousand different species may reside beneath a square metre of soil surface (Perry 1994); all of them are constituted by many, many cells and there is interaction between them, an exchange of energy and nutrients. Most likely, a square metre of nature is more complex and contains more information than the whole Internet.

Apart from the direct and indirect services obtained from nature, nature also has great aesthetical and cultural value. It gives another perspective, many reference points; it is an unprecedented piece of art. Natural environments have, for centuries, been known for their healing properties for people in spiritual need or mental stress. It is good to have respect for nature. The respect should be based on what it is; for its beauty and for its value, both apparent values and those not discovered. This respect should of course also include ourselves. A level of development has been reached where we are already managing most of the terrestrial ecosystems. This gives human beings unique powers among the creatures on the planet and unique responsibility too. We can’t pretend that we don’t have that power or that responsibility; both have to be exercised with due diligence, humbly realizing that there are so many things we don’t know.

Whose nature?
It should be kept in mind that exploitation of nature is also a question of whose nature. Different groups are affected by destruction of nature in different ways, and normally the nature of the weaker group is destroyed while the nature of the rich is preserved. This leads some to believe that the rich ‘care more’ for the environment or that only when there is a certain wealth that human beings ‘can afford’ to care about nature, but this mixes up cause and effect to a large extent. The rich can exploit the nature of the poor and even export their waste to the nature of the poor, whereas the poor has no other option than the exploitation of nature, be it in the form or natural resources or in the form of their own labour. To some extent, the whole trick of modern civilization is about exploitation of nature; exploitation of historical production, of which fossil fuel is the primary example; exploitation of the future nature, by dumping waste. But it is also the history of a few people exploiting many other people. At the centre, apart from nature and energy, are technology and society.

Society has four big challenges regarding the use of natural resources; well perhaps using the term ‘challenges’ is an understatement, ‘system errors’ is perhaps a more suitable term. First, humankind uses already too much of the planet’s resources; the capital is being consumed and it is not a question of whether society will go bankrupt[1] but when it will do so. Second, the distribution of these resources is extremely inequitable, between countries and within countries; rich countries and rich people use a totally disproportionate share of the resources (and rich people in rich countries are apparently the worst). Third, economic growth is continuing and seems to be hard-wired into society, which means that resource use will also continue to grow. Fourth, the world’s population is primed to grow for at least 40 more years, perhaps longer. We can’t negotiate with nature and no less can we expect that the poor will, or should, accept that common assets are wasted.

[1] The term is a bit unfortunate, the repercussions of an exhaustion of the natural capital is a lot more dramatic than a financial bankruptcy, which in essence only means a redistribution of money. The terms for bankruptcy with nature can’t be negotiated. There is no bailout.

The text is an extract from Garden Earth

Aging populations will end growth

Those that thinks that our society will continue along the same path forget that the Western European countries just have undergone a “once-in-the-millennium” demographic transition, which will never happen again, and that the USA are still in this transition and China has reached there as well. Throughout history of mankind, a relatively stable population has been normal and the rapid population growth of the last 200 years is the abnormal. The end to population growth is perhaps a bigger challenge for the capitalist project than the population explosion; after all, the population explosion had gone hand in hand with the capitalist expansion. A country like Japan has completed its transition and there has been virtually no growth for twenty ears and a constant "crisis". 

The changing population pyramid will change society. Many manufacturers, service providers and retailers are adapting their offers to be more appealing to rapidly growing groups of elderly, who are also used to be active consumers (earlier generations of old people were still not raised as “consumers”). Politically, the care for the elderly was earlier mainly a question of relief for the working generation, and it was their perspective that dominated; the elderly were “objects” rather than subjects. Today it is the old people themselves that shape how care of them is developed with a combination of political action and letting their considerable wealth speak. Less observed, but equally important, is the shift in values that will come.

The demographic transition shape societies. The big cohorts of young people that characterized the youth of capitalism and industrialism is the demographic reflection of the expansion and pioneership. Like with so many other things one can also turn this on the head and say that it was this demographic structure that drove capitalism in its early stages. It is not only economic growth that is propelled by a big share of young people; it is also the values typical for the young such as rejection of traditions, rebellion, glorification of strength, risk taking and body culture. Our current society's glorification of youth stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of earlier cultures. 

Society, but also many old themselves has a kind of youth obsession. Old people are expected to behave as “old youth” in a similar way as children were treated as “small adults” some hundred years ago. Eighty year olds engage in mountaineering, speed dating, wind surfing or parachuting: 

Former President George H.W. Bush marked his 85th birthday on Friday the same way he did his 75th and 80th birthdays: He leaped from a plane and zoomed downward at more than 100 mph in free fall before parachuting safely to a spot near his ocean front home.[...] He told reporters that he jumped Friday for two reasons: to experience the exhilaration of free-falling and to show that seniors can remain active and do fun things." Just because you're an old guy, you don't have to sit around drooling in the corner," Bush said  (AP 2009).

 This is about to change. Other properties, other characteristics of being human, will be in higher esteem for elderly people. Properties like maturity and reflection and even slowness (e.g. Slow Food) itself. Add to that, values such as care, spirituality and safety, opposition to risk-taking. Care for things close and interest in the beauty of and satisfaction by the small things in life are also typical for age, in contrast to youth's taste of exploration, expansion and novelties. The values of the old are better adapted to the values needed in a sustainable society. The combined effect of the shift in values and the effect on growth, caused by an aging population will be a strong determining factor the coming century. 

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7 Billion and Peak Child

The population follows our production system

 

7 Billion and Peak Child

These days we reach 7 billion people on the planet (Huffpost,Chicago Tribune, bbc, In Swedish SvD, AB,  Ekot, ). And we hear forecasts for some 9 billion at 2050. Still, at the same time we appear to have reached Peak Child, that is, the number of children has peaked, and the growth of population the years to come is mainly an effect of people leaving longer and longer. Also in developing countries, populations are ageing.


Below is an Extract from Garden Earth, about population:

The population follows our production system

Humans, like any other species that conquers a new habitat, shows an exponential population growth. What is unique for us is that we have been able to radically expand our ability to tame nature and other organisms and direct their production to our stomachs and our bodies. Instead of following a typical S-curve of growth, we have two times restarted population growth. The first time was with the introduction of agriculture, the so called Neolithic or agrarian revolution. Before that, our population grew mainly through expansion into larger and larger areas and into more and more ecological niches. Our role was more or less the same, we lived on the surpluses from other species, which we collected, hunted or fished depending on niche. Population growth was very low, perhaps just 0.001 percent per year (to be compared with 1.8 percent 1990). 12,000 years ago, we were probably less than ten million on the planet, and most likely, the ecological limits for further growth were reached. With the transition to agriculture, many more could be fed from a defined area, but not everywhere, as some parts of the world are not suitable for farming. A period of rapid growth ensued. In ten thousand years, the population grew 250 times. At the time of the industrial revolution, the population had reached the new ecological limits in many places in the world. Not so densely exploited areas were rapidly filling up with settlers from Europe, representing one third of the annual population growth of Europe. Through the deployment of huge amounts of fossil fuel, first coal followed by oil, we got the possibility to, once again, take a giant leap to new levels (Chapman and Reiss 1995, Livi-Bacci 1992).

Numbers are stabilizing

Forty-three countries, including Japan, Russia, Germany and Italy have populations that are stagnant or even decreasing. A larger group of countries, including China and the USA, has reached the stage where new families will be smaller. When next generation reaches fertile age, population will stabilize. The third group will have doubled its population from now to 2050. This group includes many of the African countries, such as Ethiopia, Congo and Uganda. The predictions of the UN have three alternatives for 2050, 10.8 billion, 9.2 billion or just below 8 billion. Most seem to bet on the middle alternative. That Malthus’ horror scenario of mass starvation has kept its appeal over two hundred years coincides with the start of the demographic transition of England following an unprecedented population explosion. And that pattern has been repeated in country after country, so in the same way as Ireland was the frightening example hundred-fifty years ago, Nigeria or Ethiopia are now. Studies of the demographic transition in the high income countries show a strikingly similar pattern in most countries. First death rates decline rapidly - and it is not primarily the old that live longer but more children that survive. This leads to very big cohorts of youth, reaching 35 percent to 40 percent of the population. When birth rates go down after a while, a big wave of people will reach the stages of young adults, mature adults and old people.

Why is population stabilizing?

It is perhaps a strange question, but it is much more remarkable that the demographic transition has taken place and that populations are not growing, than that there has been a population explosion. After all, we have been taught that the strongest driver of them all is to reproduce, to spread our genes. And why are populations stabilizing now and not hundred years earlier or hundred years later? Why is it not stabilizing in the countries where population is still growing? Is the reason technical, such as contraceptives; economic, such as increased wealth; human, such as improved education of women or is it social, perhaps a result of shift in values? It is interesting to understand what drivers which make individuals change their reproduction. There are actually very few reasons for why a European woman (or her possible partner) today only wants two children, while she wanted four some hundred years ago. It appears to completely contradict the socio-biological ideas that humans only act with the purpose to spread her genes. If that were the case, voluntary birth control would never occur. It is more a process of culture and values. For a long period, it was well known that smoking causes cancer and other diseases. Still it was a long and slow process until this insight led to a changed view on smoking and subsequent regulations. It is interesting that the view on smoking is now changing in all countries, also in countries where smoking is perhaps not a primary health problem (because people don’t live long enough to die from cancer). In the same way it appears that the regulation of populations have little to do with if the country is overpopulated or not. Sweden and the Netherlands stabilized their population more or less at the same time despite that the actual population density is very different, large tracts of Sweden are rather "underpopulated" if there is such a thing. So called soft factors, values and education, seem to play a big role here. At the same time, on a global level, it is hardly a coincidence that populations level off at the same time that we see more and more limits to growth.

The population follows our production system

"On a global level, it is hardly a coincidence that populations level off at the same time that we see more and more limits to growth. " 

Source: after Chapman and Reiss 1995

 

Humans, like any other species that conquers a new habitat, shows an exponential population growth. What is unique for us is that we have been able to radically expand our ability to tame nature and other organisms and direct their production to our stomachs and our bodies. Instead of following a typical S-curve of growth, we have two times restarted population growth. The first time was with the introduction of agriculture, the so called Neolithic or agrarian revolution. Before that, our population grew mainly through expansion into larger and larger areas and into more and more ecological niches. Our role was more or less the same, we lived on the surpluses from other species, which we collected, hunted or fished depending on niche. Population growth was very low, perhaps just 0.001 percent per year (to be compared with 1.8 percent 1990). 12,000 years ago, we were probably less than ten million on the planet, and most likely, the ecological limits for further growth were reached. With the transition to agriculture, many more could be fed from a defined area, but not everywhere, as some parts of the world are not suitable for farming. A period of rapid growth ensued. In ten thousand years, the population grew 250 times. At the time of the industrial revolution, the population had reached the new ecological limits in many places in the world. Not so densely exploited areas were rapidly filling up with settlers from Europe, representing one third of the annual population growth of Europe. Through the deployment of huge amounts of fossil fuel, first coal followed by oil, we got the possibility to, once again, take a giant leap to new levels (Chapman and Reiss 1995, Livi-Bacci 1992).

Improvement in technology, could in each kind of society lead to some possibilities for expansion, e.g. spears and digging tools could allow hunter and gatherers to harvest a larger share of the surplus of their habitat; the introduction of crop rotations and other improved agriculture method could perhaps double or triple the yields, but it was only through employment of industrial technology that yields could increase tenfold. In the same way, improvements in technology has constantly expanded our ability to feed more and more people on the planet also during this industrial phase, but limits are now occurring from all sides. It is hard to see what could be a similar radical change of conditions which would allow us the make another giant leap in population. The options seem to be expansion to new planets; or the introduction of a totally managed planet, with abundant energy sources (e.g. solar or nuclear) and the production of synthetic food on a large scale. Failing any of those, we have to make the best out of what we know and have. Part of that is keeping the population on reasonable levels.

Too few is also not always good

While we can agree than the size of the population is a problem, there are many examples of how high population density forces a more sustainable use of the landscape than a sparse population. e.g. In Germany, Japan and Sweden it was first the exhaustion of, or the threat of exhaustion of, forest resources that compelled people to manage the forests properly and it was the increasing population that made farmers abandon the extractive practice of sod cutting to fertilise their soil (Radkau 2008). Similarly, regardless of how much environmentalists and foresters condemn swiddening agriculture, it will continue to be the norm until population density reaches a certain level, simply because it is the most comfortable, and secure, and also sustainable, way of getting a good return on  labour input. It is pointless to try to make poor farmers switch to other cultivation system before the productivity of the agro-ecosystems is threatened. Already the Egyptians, who operated a limited, but fertile land resource knew that it was beneficial to alternate cereals and fodder crops such as clover or alfa alfa (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006), but it was only under the pressure of population that crop rotations that integrated fodder production and grains became wide-spread in Europe. Similarly, it is the population density of China over a long period that made the Chinese utilise human excreta in an efficient way, while in sparsely populated Africa it was not in use. So while a big population in general is problematic, there are situation where it is not that bad, or at least where we have not managed well with low population.

Some of the ecosystems we have created are dependent on humans, and that with continued urbanization, we actually get more and more areas that are depopulated. Because we have not planned how these depopulated landscapes shall look like and work, societies end up paying farmer or entrepreneurs to ”maintain” the landscapes or preserve the ”cultural heritage”. And it is not only in high income countries this is a problem. Some areas with traditional rice paddies experience labour shortages to maintain the infrastructure. In 2007, I visited traditional farms in Bali and their main problem was that youth preferred to work in the tourism industry over farming. In that way the truly amazing landscape and culture was no longer sustainable as people voted with their feet for another life. If the terraces are not maintained, they will collapse from erosion, with potential devastating landslides as side effect.

Numbers are stabilizing

Forty-three countries, including Japan, Russia, Germany and Italy have populations that are stagnant or even decreasing. A larger group of countries, including China and the USA, has reached the stage where new families will be smaller. When next generation reaches fertile age, population will stabilize. The third group will have doubled its population from now to 2050. This group includes many of the African countries, such as Ethiopia, Congo and Uganda. The predictions of the UN have three alternatives for 2050, 10.8 billion, 9.2 billion or just below 8 billion. Most seem to bet on the middle alternative. That Malthus’ horror scenario of mass starvation has kept its appeal over two hundred years coincides with the start of the demographic transition of England following an unprecedented population explosion. And that pattern has been repeated in country after country, so in the same way as Ireland was the frightening example hundred-fifty years ago, Nigeria or Ethiopia are now. Studies of the demographic transition in the high income countries show a strikingly similar pattern in most countries. First death rates decline rapidly - and it is not primarily the old that live longer but more children that survive. This leads to very big cohorts of youth, reaching 35 percent to 40 percent of the population. When birth rates go down after a while, a big wave of people will reach the stages of young adults, mature adults and old people.

Why is population stabilizing?

It is perhaps a strange question, but it is much more remarkable that the demographic transition has taken place and that populations are not growing, than that there has been a population explosion. After all, we have been taught that the strongest driver of them all is to reproduce, to spread our genes. And why are populations stabilizing now and not hundred years earlier or hundred years later? Why is it not stabilizing in the countries where population is still growing? Is the reason technical, such as contraceptives; economic, such as increased wealth; human, such as improved education of women or is it social, perhaps a result of shift in values? It is interesting to understand what drivers which make individuals change their reproduction. There are actually very few reasons for why a European woman (or her possible partner) today only wants two children, while she wanted four some hundred years ago. It appears to completely contradict the socio-biological ideas that humans only act with the purpose to spread her genes. If that were the case, voluntary birth control would never occur. It is more a process of culture and values. For a long period, it was well known that smoking causes cancer and other diseases. Still it was a long and slow process until this insight led to a changed view on smoking and subsequent regulations. It is interesting that the view on smoking is now changing in all countries, also in countries where smoking is perhaps not a primary health problem (because people don’t live long enough to die from cancer). In the same way it appears that the regulation of populations have little to do with if the country is overpopulated or not. Sweden and the Netherlands stabilized their population more or less at the same time despite that the actual population density is very different, large tracts of Sweden are rather "underpopulated" if there is such a thing. So called soft factors, values and education, seem to play a big role here. At the same time, on a global level, it is hardly a coincidence that populations level off at the same time that we see more and more limits to growth. 

Extract from Garden Earth

The Magic washing machine

Hans' presentation shows the link between poverty and energy and the challenges involved in a very easy to grasp way.



What I often miss in Hans' presentations is the link to economic and political forces, which both helps to explain WHY things are like they are and also have the solutions. Nevertheless, he does a great job, and you can find much more on Gapminder

Use a stopper - save a hoppper!

I am not sure that humor can save the world, but it certainly helps.

The Center for Biological Diversity distributed 350,000 free Endangered Species Condoms in all 50 states — as well as Canada, Puerto Rico, and Mexico — to highlight how unsustainable human population growth is driving species extinct at a cataclysmic rate. Good initiative, and also good that it sees poupulation growht as a problem also in rich countries. After all an American is likely to waste a lot more resources than an Indian or a Sudanese. They write:

• The United States has by far the highest fertility rate of any developed nation, with a population that has already surpassed 300 million and could reach 450 million by 2050.
• The combination of rapid population growth and extremely high levels of consumption makes the United States a key factor in the overpopulation equation.