The Monbiot Hammer Factor: Valued, but Wrong
Having a George Monbiot (http://www.monbiot.com) hammer at population growth critics and global warming scientists is a good thing. Science needs, not just tolerates, criticism. We all need his analytical hammer, if only to hone the arguments against which he rails.
Two recent topics are instructive: population growth, and global warming. George Monbiot has criticized those who argue that human population is the central environmental issue. He claims that this argument necessarily incorporates blaming the poor. He’s wrong.
Environmental degradation reflects two fundamental human processes of change: scalar as well as technological. Yes, industrial technology is responsible for vast chemical and physical destruction of the planet, but also the sheer increase in the number of people to feed in addition to the increased frequency of low-tech activities of greater numbers is also a major factor.
Historically, some relatively low-tech, pre-industrial-revolution cultures have destroyed the very environments upon which their survival was dependent. One person chopping down a tree with a stone axe, compounded by many thousands doing the same, is a scalar path to environmental and cultural self-destruction. Ten people, okay. 10,000 not okay. The buzz word sustainability doesn’t ask how the environment is destroyed. All cultures function within a context of fixed available resources. A hand axe in the hands of many can surely be as ruinous as a modern bulldozer.
Monbiot’s claim that to focus on population growth is to blame the poor. Asserting that population growth is the central environmental factor is too much, but population growth is central to the problem. If we ignore it, no amount of so-called green technology will save us from our own inescapable resource footprint. That said, is not to dismiss the dire need to move in the direction of attacking corporate capitalism as the premier obstacle to the necessary socio-economic change required to survive the next century or two. Indeed, one could claim that global warming is the greatest failure of capitalists–the rich–because capitalism isn’t an abstraction but rather the actions of individual wealth acting in their own, narrow, self-interest.
As for the dynamics of over-population, and population growth, let’s recall that only a hundred years ago, the rich as well as the poor had large families. Infant mortality struck the rich as well as the poor. The differential observed today in birth rates between rich and poor is one of a differential in access to education and access to sufficient individual income. With the mass shift from agriculture to industry and services, poor have less access to contraception technologies and less access to education. Educated women plotted against birthrates shows a linear relationship: the more education, the fewer births per woman. If anyone is to blame, the rich have exercised unprecedented power to deprive citizens of modest incomes access to healthcare, and access to a living wage. These conditions are particularly sharp in such Third World countries as the Philippines. Access to contraception is very difficult, with the national government bowing to elitist Catholic insistence on criminalizing abortion and sale of contraceptives, and the failure of the state to provide adequate education, and failure to provide economic conditions that would provide a living wage to citizens. Large families among the poor in the Philippines is a direct consequence of what is nothing less than government coercion to have large families. Reducing infant mortality rates without providing available technologies to reduce birth rates is state violence perpetrated by the rich, against the poor.
Global overpopulation is as real today, as it ever was within former narrower human cultural contexts. It’s real and it’s not blaming the poor. Too many, is too many. Understanding the cultural, socio-economic factors is important. If the consensus is that reducing infant mortality through introducing clean water systems, clean sanitation, and vaccination against deadly diseases, then we cannot escape the consequences on the other end of the population balance sheet. The rich are blocking humane and just resolution of this end of the challenge. When the poor demand democracy and the end of global plutocracy, we will observe the end of the population problem.
I’ll take up the issue of Monbiot’s criticism of Phil Jones and the climate-change research in a coming blog.
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