Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population?

By Kelpie Wilson, AlterNet. Posted April 10, 2009.

As a progressive, I want to believe that humanity can control our destiny. But as an ecologist, I have to accept the Law of Population. Is there no way out? Yes there is. But it requires us to embrace what Malthus called "vice."

Malthus saw three ways to control population growth: abstinence, misery and vice. Abstinence was too challenging for most. Misery included starvation, disease and death. That left vice: a category that included prostitution, abortion and infanticide, but also "promiscuous intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed and improper arts to conceal the consequence of irregular connexions."

Blinders imposed by the church and centuries of violent repression of women healers and midwives had so deeply branded contraception as an "improper art" that even a revolutionary like Godwin could not advocate it. He could only insist that redistribution of wealth would result in more "moral restraint." Malthus found this laughable:

"I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food. But Mr. Godwin has conjectured that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished ... the best arguments for the perfectibility of man are drawn from a contemplation of the great progress that he has already made from the savage state and the difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever has hitherto been made."

When the radical Francis Place publicly advocated birth control in the 1820s, he was condemned for promoting vice by church, state and even his fellow working men in the labor unions he helped to found. Nearly a century later, Margaret Sanger finally opened her first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y., and contraception was only fully legalized in the United States in 1965. The definition of "vice" evolved very slowly.

Malthus' list of vices included infanticide, which today stands well apart from birth control, abortion, prostitution and homosexuality. And yet, throughout history and prehistory, infanticide was probably the most widely used method of curtailing population growth, mostly because the contraception and abortion methods of the past were either ineffective or dangerous to women.

Before the fossil fuel era, the need to prevent famine often dictated infanticide, especially female infanticide, which relieved population pressure by reducing the number of breeding females. It is good to know this bit of history, because it gives us the proper context for updating the definition of "vice."

Still, there are conservatives who would prefer to see famine and misery rather than condone contraceptives, abortion, women's rights and homosexuality. Among them is Pope Benedict, leader of the world's largest religious organization, who has just condemned untold numbers of Africans to death by opposing condoms for prevention of AIDS, because it might lead to "vice."

There are also still progressives who insist that population growth is not a problem. They should go back and read Engels, who hated Malthus and thought the idea of population outstripping resources was ludicrous, but still said this:

"There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty ... it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ to the purpose."

We are those people, and many of us now understand that the real vices are found in war, injustice and repression. Increasingly, we realize that we must work together for humane and liberating solutions to the problem of human overpopulation, as we build a new, non-growth, steady-state economy that provides for all.

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Kelpie Wilson is a freelance writer covering energy and environmental issues. She is a contributing editor for Yoga Plus magazine and author of Primal Tears, a novel. An archive of her past articles is on her Web site.

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