A decade is a long time in ecology
Those who know me in real life, and those who have read my first novel, will know that I have a longstanding interest in the question of human overpopulation, and what to do about it. With all that has been happening – Artificial Intelligence dominating humanity, genocide in West Asia, World War III, Travis and Taylor’s Wedding – the topic seems to have taken a backseat. It’s fair to ask, does human overpopulation still matter? After all, climate alarmism has cooled off to such an extent that it feels safe to refire up some good old-fashioned coal power plants.
First, let’s take a look at the latest numbers. When I first started writing about human overpopulation in the early 2010s, the best estimates had the number of humans at a rounding error over 8 billion. Now that number has jumped to closer to 8.3 billion – even despite the horrible pandemic that was supposed to have claimed oh-so-many lives. While it is true that – almost everywhere – fertility rates are declining ( and quite steeply in the West), we are still on track for 10.3 billion eating, shitting and farting homo sapiens by the year 2080. In short, if there was ever a reason to be concerned in 2010, that reason is still with us in 2026.
If in doubt, draw some graphs
But was overpopulation ever really a problem? Or was it just another “Current Thing” onto which postmodern postgrads like me could project their anomie-induced angst? As always, it helps to be dispassionate. Step back and consider this graph of human population over time:
This graph shows the population of humans based on the Population Reference Bureau’s historical benchmarks, from the dawn of humanity in 190,000 BC, up to 2080, the year the UN predicts population to peak. In a way, the graph is quite hard to read without resorting to tricks like logarithmic scale, because the population growth since the dawn of the industrial age has been so extreme that the blue line merely clings to the X-axis for most of human history, then shoots up vertically. In other words, the explosion of population is so great, you can’t even visualise it. The inset graph helps a little bit, showing just the most recent years of the homo sapien’s stellar rise – but of course that loses the longer-term perspective and tends to hide just how anomalistic the current era really is. Short story: what has happened to our species’ population in the past ‘blink of an eye’ is completely unprecedented and literally off the charts.
This planet’s resources were promised to us 3,000 years ago
‘So what?’, you might say. ‘We have the ability to make food, build machines; to house and clothe this many humans and more. And we have the right to, because we are special, because we are human.’ This is certainly the line being pushed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. But is it true? Are we the breakout species that no longer needs to worry about ecological balance?
Consider a different metric. Let’s list the 150 largest land animals by average adult body weight, from the heaviest (African bush elephant – 5,500kg) down to the Antilopine kangaroo (40kg). Conveniently, humans clock in at exactly 100th place, with an average adult body weight of 62kg (I refuse to say how far over this average I am, beyond noting that I am going to the gym as soon as I complete this blogpost).
Now let’s multiply that average by the total estimated population of that species to give us a Total Species Mass (TSM). For example, there are 450,000 bush elephants, yielding a TSM of about 2.5 billion kg. In other words, the Earth needs to provide resources to sustain 2.5 billion kg of elephant flesh, fat and bone. For the antilopine kangaroo, with its smaller population of 100,000 and body weight of only 40kg, the species has a much smaller TSM of only 4 million kg.
But what about us? Well, our TSM is about 509 billion kg, or roughly 141 times the TSM of the next most resource-intensive animal (the wild boar). Once again, scale problems make this hard to chart, but here goes nothing:
The red line with the arrow needs to continue about another metre to the right of your computer screen, to give you a relative sense of human TSM. Once again, we are literally off the charts.
Oh reason not the need! Our basest beggars are in their poorest things superfluous
Of course, the TSM is only a very crude measure of resource-intensity: it fails to account for caloric efficiency or symbiosis effects. But these factors are likely to only make the contrast between us and other land animals more stark. For one thing, our nearest (but still distant) peers like the elephants, the deer, the kangaroos and the wild boar are all ecologically-conscious herbivores, whose calories require no resource-intensive ultraprocessing. Additionally, with the exception of the few species we have domesticated, we are the only ones who consume tooth brushes; synthetic textiles; video game consoles; artificially heated/cooled environments for our maximum comfort, etc, etc. Now add the fact that we even embalm our bodies after death to deprive the soil of the nutrients we have extracted from it, and the ‘human overpopulation’ begins to look much more like a ‘human infestation’.
So is overpopulation a big enough ecological problem, for us to divert our attention from pressing issues like a closed Strait of Hormuz, or an OpenAI? I’ll leave that for others to decide. In the meantime, go buy my book.
