While we can hope and pray that's possible, almost no planning is readying people for petrocollapse -- it will be like a Katrina hitting the supermarkets and their sources of food and energy.

Culture Change (successor to the Alliance as well as the Auto-Free Times) incorporated the population factor into our work soon after our founding. I was engaged to review Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades for Virginia Abernethy and the journal she edited, Population and Environment. It immediately became clear to me that petroleum is feeding people and will let them down shortly. The coming crisis is rooted in our denial that our whole way of life and the course of civilization have been gravely mistaken. But there are practical reasons for high U.S. population growth and the denial that we are overpopulated:

Growth: the economy’s addiction

The United States has faster population growth than any other industrial country, and is the only such nation growing besides Britain. The source for the most of the growth in both countries is immigration and immigrants’ higher birth rate. In the U.S. the number of legal immigrants is about as large as the number of illegal immigrants, about three million per year total for the two varieties. Between January 2000 and March 2005, 7.9 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) settled in the country, making it the highest five-year period of immigration in the nation’s history.

Immigrant women have more births than those who remain in their country of origin. Once in the United States, Mexican women, for example, average approximately 3.5 children after arriving here, compared to slightly over 2 births per woman among the native-born. As per capita petroleum consumption is highest in the U.S., perceived wealth and economic opportunity ("growth") contribute to a sense of being able to care for additional children, according to Virginia Abernethy in her book Population Politics.

If more American consumers are bad news for the planet, and social services and the physical infrastructure are being stretched too thin by growth, why does legal immigration go on and on for the last quarter century at historically very high levels?

The reasons are (1) powerful corporations want an ever-expanding labor pool so as to keep workers’ wages down, and (2) an expanding consumer base means more widgets and gizmos will be sold whether they are needed or not. The major low-wage employers thus enjoy not just high legal immigration levels but much illegal immigration as well.

The big corporations and extremely rich donors and their lobbyists run Congressional priorities far more than the citizenry does. Consumer spending is acknowledged as the largest part of the economy. This spending is being kept going nowadays solely by smoke and mirrors, as debt is used to buy more stuff for the American home than income is used. Borrowed money is therefore fueling the current extension of economic growth. For anyone to crow that this is good, or that the economy is strong, means he or she is a lying politician or a Wall Street flack.

Economics drives politics, so reformers of politics are up against a current of what now is a mighty river out of control.

We must change our culture by rejecting growth as dangerous. The Earth is finite, and we have already gone way down the path of mega-extinctions of species. However, many conscious activists are convinced that there is no overpopulation problem. They believe that the distribution of wealth is where the whole problem lies. It is true that the world would be a different and more fair place if billions of dollars were allocated to the poor instead of for war on the poor. It’s shocking that for the 2006 tax cuts for the top 5% of the U.S.’s wealthy citizens, about 20 million people could be provided with health care and 17 million students given university scholarships. Despite the truth of what money could buy if spent wisely, it is vital that more people question the wealth to be redistributed, as Richard Register does when he points out that "a piece of the pie" may mean something negative if it’s an arsenic pie.

There is indeed a lot of food grown and wasted, but it must be remembered it is all via petroleum. Grain crops are also petroleum intensive, and almost all top soil is being lost at an alarming rate. It is too late to simply change some policies in land-use in order to feed everyone indefinitely. It is alarming that even a solar-powered tractor and organic farming use more energy than can be produced renewably on site, according to Wes Jackson’s research at The Land Institute.

Industrial agriculture has vast consequences beyond the bad treatment of animals and the diminishing topsoil. A modern example links survival of native species that are traditional food supplies to subsidized ranching and what author Daniel Quinn calls totalitarian agriculture:

"The sagebrush of Nevada's Great Basin ecosystem is drought tolerant and the preferred food of pronghorn antelope. Pronghorn antelope have evolved the ability to digest and gain nutrients from the sagebrush leaves. Cattle, sheep and other domesticated range animals are unable to glean any nutritional value from sagebrush. As a result, the ranchers clear out sagebrush and attempt to plant alfalfa, something cattle can eat. Since alfalfa needs more water than the desert can provide, the inland draining rivers of Nevada (Humboldt, Walker, etc..) are diverted from their streambed and used to irrigate the alfalfa fields (along with pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer runoff). These rivers would normally reach their final destination of several large inland lakes/wetlands (Walker Lake, Humboldt Sink, Pyramid Lake, etc..) all part of the former inland ocean called Lake Lahontan. Some ancient fish (cui-cui, Lahontan cutthroat) survived from Lake Lahontan and continue to migrate and spawn in these rivers. The result of rivers' being drained is increased salinity and drought, threatening the survival of these ancient fishes." -- moth

Even if the world were made up of benevolent vegans who did not even step on an ant, there are two stumbling blocks for high population: ecological carrying capacity and the web of life. Not only vegans but countless social-justice advocates believe there is no problem with population size. Fortunately, when it is pointed out to them that we cannot take over the whole planet for human beings because we depend on other species thriving as well, this usually gives them pause. Still it is hard for most people to question official projections of 10 or 12 billion humans this century. But once this impossibility is questioned, one can logically back off from believing 6.5 billion is a sustainable number. The world may be able to sustain one billion people (if the ecosystem is not too degraded already), according to some studies (David Pimentel, Cornell University).

Veganism is not a cure for overpopulation. If all the Bangladeshis and Indians went vegan overnight, this would not remove the many intense problems these poor nations grapple with. Granted, the high rate of veganism already in the Subcontinent is better than a low rate. The U.S. uses 300 times as many resources as Bangladeshis, for the nearly 300 million Americans (over)eating and consuming their way to global hell. Clearly, more U.S. consumers, of whatever color of skin, are bad news for the planet.

Commentator Alexander Cockburn cares much for the environment and is an excellent critic of the government on various issues. But he believes (last we knew) that anyone concerned about overpopulation must be a racist elitist – simply because, as he wrote, "Malthus was a capitalist pig." The corporate media are delighted to expose "racism" in tainting anyone concerned about excessive immigration by claiming it is the color of skin that disturbs. Corporations including oil companies are behind a few immigrant-rights nonprofit organizations. There is nothing wrong with immigrants having all the rights that anyone else has, but does the whole population (native born and foreign born) have the right or reasonable basis to consume and consume and consume?

To stabilize our numbers from immigration is to focus on the legal immigration, as it is so much easier to control. As for security, the 9-11 highjackers were all here legally and were even visible, so there should not be a huge push to put up the border fence with Mexico as has been approved by a U.S. judge in San Diego this week. There is a need for a Mexican to become a refugee when U.S. policies have hurt farmers in Mexico. But there could be U.S. refugees flocking to Mexico soon: People will just be pushing the fences down from the U.S. side when petrocollapse and/or climate change hit.

It is said there is no leadership in this country, but be assured that there is leadership that makes sure the population keeps growing. Once here, everyone’s rights can be stomped on in the police state or a FEMA-emergency event. The War on Terror (of Terror?) was promised by Vice President Cheney to not end in our lifetime. Thanks to population growth and the violent effects of crowding, the police state (from the Patriot Act, Republican Supreme Court decisions, etc.) will also never expire; the regime will attempt to get stronger as the system strains prior to the probable downfall of the U.S. come petrocollapse.

As Jared Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs and Steel, any population size larger than a village starts to need laws and regulations so that random violence can be minimized and strangers can settle disputes. Conversely, in a band or tribe any dispute is dealt with quickly by people known to the disputants.

Overpopulation has personal costs

My anecdote of the Amtrak vegan-enforcers reflects a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic system. It would not happen if we were not so numerous as to need guidelines and pre-answers to consumer needs. Consumerism would not exist without high population.

We see examples of overpopulation each day, but none dare call it that. When the line is too long at the post office or bank, why not call it overpopulation? When the area code is split into two, or there’s a new zip code for more people, is it overpopulation? Not strictly, but it is due to growth of population and perhaps overcrowding.

When we face senseless urban violence, and feel no one will come to our aid so as to remain uninvolved and more secure, chalk it up to overcrowding and growth. What we need is community and familiarity with our neighbors. This means relatively small community size.

Once in Los Angeles’s Coliseum in 1972, for a concert of Sly and the Family Stone and the Bee Gees (no disco then!), I was getting my seat way up on the bleachers and a young man belligerently pushed me almost down the stairs. Without thinking I looked at him and said "I’m sorry." I immediately realized that I had done nothing wrong, and by his expression it seemed he had done this because I was of a different color of skin, that of the oppressor. Crowds in huge cities are a powder keg waiting to happen, and the spark will be severe petroleum shortage.

In Yellow Springs, Ohio, site of Antioch College and national peak oil conferences, there are only 5,000 people living in the whole place, with a large ecological preserve adjacent. I was in the tiny downtown one nice afternoon and saw what might be an eight-year old girl on her bike alone on the sidewalk. I was jarred by the uncommon sight that used to be completely common everywhere in the U.S. If another thousand people move to Yellow Springs, maybe the parents of little solo bike riders will start feeling they must clamp down on their children’s freedom.

Conclusion:

While veganism and other good causes are vital both for personal fulfillment and teaching others to live more lightly and compassionately on the Earth, such movements may serve primarily as a "remembered practice" when the survivors of petrocollapse are picking up the pieces and trying to live sustainably. The Earth cannot sustain today’s population of humans, and there is no sign of a concerted size-reduction except perhaps through the worst kinds of crimes and policies that may reduce further the carrying capacity of the planet for humans and most other life.

It is conceivable that a backlash against a major instance of nuclear weapon/waste mismanagement could result in a complete replacement of today’s rulers, resulting in saner policies and more humane, planned population reduction. However, we all may have run out of time for that. So perhaps the best hope is that petrocollapse -- and the advent of a more nature-respecting culture that would follow -- will bring about stable population size. Meanwhile, the housing bubble will burst soon, most likely in the context of massive socioeconomic upheaval due to severe energy shortage.

* * * * *