I know that lots of people think that I'm kind of a crazy old crank for going on and on about overpopulation. That was supposed to be a problem in the 1960s, not the 21st Century. Didn't new methods of farming produce more food and make a fool of Malthus? And, besides, facing overpopulation creates a host of ethical problems: Who gets to reproduce? What does society do about people who ignore the rules and overproduce; forced abortion, take a child from its parents at birth and allow childless couples to adopt? It creates political problems, as well: since Americans overpollute and overconsume relative to the rest of the world, should they be forced to reproduce at a lower rate? If one country controls its population but it's neighbor doesn't, what stops the teeming hordes from next door from flooding across the border, armed or not, in search of more land, water, etc.? What will we do about the fundies who are, even now, trying to criminalize all forms of birth control, not just abortion? Are there ways to avoid China's practice of allowing couples to make sure that their one child is a boy, thereby creating a generation of men who can't find wives? With so many problems, it's been easier for decades to ignore overpopulation and regard those who bellyache about it as slightly batty.
The problem's getting lots harder to ignore. Turns out that growing more food doesn't solve the overpopulation crisis, after all. Which is not too surprising, when you think about it, as food isn't the only thing that people need. They need land. They need air to breathe and to emit gases into. And, they need water.
The NYT has run a series of articles concerning the growing water crisis in India, one of the world's largest, and most populous, atomic powers. Earlier articles have skirted the overpopulation issue, but today's begins to address it more clearly. With the population soaring past one billion and with a driving need to boost agricultural production, Indians are tapping their groundwater faster than nature can replenish it, so fast that they are hitting deposits formed at the time of the dinosaurs. . . . Electric pumps have accelerated the problem, enabling farmers and others to squeeze out far more groundwater than they had been able to draw by hand for hundreds of years.
This isn't an abstract problem. Here's what it means for the people involved: The growing water shortage has transformed life in Peeplee Ka Bas. Its men left long ago to seek work elsewhere. The women remain to spend the blistering summer mornings digging ponds in the barren earth, hoping to catch monsoon rains.
Where farming once provided a livelihood, now digging puts food on the table. For a day’s labor, under this public works program intended to help the poorest families, each woman is paid the equivalent of 40 cents, along with 24 pounds of wheat.
It was not always this way. Once farming made sense. Many of the women digging on a recent morning remembered growing their own food — peas, tomatoes, chili peppers, watermelons — and selling it, too, at the nearest town market.
Year by year, the wells began to run dry. And there were several years of little to no rain.
Meera, a mother of three who uses only one name, who is lucky enough to come from a landowning family, still watched her husband leave the village to find work in a cement factory.
There were times, she acknowledged, when it became difficult to feed the children. Now she finds herself digging ponds for a bag of wheat. And praying for rain. "Our life is not life," Meera said. "“Only when it rains, there's life."
I'm harping on India because I believe that it's a canary in the mine. The key words in the article are: "With a soaring population". India has too many people and not enough water for them to drink and use to grow food. They're digging more and more wells and are digging them deeper and deeper and they're using technology to pump and transport the water longer and longer distances and it isn't working. They are literally running out of water. As earlier articles have pointed out, global climate change will make that problem worse every year.
At some point, oh in say the next five minutes, India's going to begin looking around at nearby lands that do have water. They probably won't say: "Hey, [Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma]! We're invading you for your water." They'll create or exploit some political dispute and use it as an excuse to invade. I'm not picking on India, which has generally been a pretty non-aggressive state. They won't be able to help it. People dying from lack of food and water get restive and their politicians have to do something. They can't create more groundwater, so they'll have to steal it from their neighbors and then, sadly, engage in wildly inefficient programs to move water long distances from the conquered country to India and move Indians into the conquered country. And if this problem were only going to occur in Asia, it would be too bad, but possibly tolerable. But water shortages, and, therefore, water wars are going to occur all over the Earth as global climate change continues. Of course, one of the main drivers of global climate change is -- overpopulation.
There are ways to control overpopulation. You can pay people, particularly women, not to reproduce; you can pay even more if they'll (especialy men) become sterile. You can, and, yes, this unfairly favors the wealthy unless you make it pretty regressive, tax people who reproduce, charging more for each child above the first. You can make free, safe contraception available to all and you can pair that with serious sex education. And, one of the THE most effective ways to limit population is to simply educate girls. Teach them to read, write, do math. If there's only enough money to educate one sex, educate the girls. Of, we can continue to do nothing, in which case the overpopulation problem will likely solve itself in a few generations -- but in ways that will be far less palatable than even the most "icky" abortion ever was.
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