Michael Balter’s article on “The Baby Deficit” focuses on the personnel needs of expanding national economies, but excludes consideration of resources that are equally essential. This is the kind of one-sided view that we have come to expect from politicians; scientists should be held to a higher standard of objectivity.
The year has seen a global surge in the prices of energy, lumber and all the minerals that are essential to building economic infrastructures. We are approaching an age in which material shortages, rather than personnel shortages, limit economic growth.
An expanding global population also faces issues of waste disposal. We are conducting a vast, uncontrolled experiment in the impact of the human race on our home planet. Carbon dioxide, long considered to be the inert (and benign) endpoint of organic waste degradation, is already affecting global climate in ominous ways. Species diversity is declining at an alarming rate. The ecology of the oceans is immeasurably poorer than it was just a few decades ago.
Credible estimates of the Earth’s long-term carrying capacity range from less than 1 billion to 20 or 30 billion at the high end. But students of population ecology know that expanding animal populations seldom approach their carrying capacity smoothly or asymptotically; more typical is a population overshoot, followed by a corrective period in which a large fraction of the population dies off.
Human ecology needs visionary global managers. Politicians blinded by a myth of perpetual economic growth imagine that a surge in the fertility rate may fuel economic growth for one further generation; but the policies they are choosing may well be sealing our children’s future in a world of shortages, climate-induced dislocation, and global resource wars.
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