Population Growth: A Systems Approach

Yep. This month we crossed into 7,000,000,000 people inhabiting the earth. Imagine that.

During the "beginning" of human existence on Earth (around 200,000 years ago) our population was doubling about every 19,000 years. This is glacially slow. But around the time of our "Agricultural Revolution" 10,000 years ago, our population doubled within 5,000 years. 2,000 years ago, our population was doubled within 1,600 years. Now, these days, our population is doubling every 33 years.

Quotes here from "The Atavist" blog. Highly recommended read.

"The massive leap in our food supply that began just after the Civil War caused our planet's population to go from just over one billion humans around the time of the discovery of oil to two billion in 1930". As time goes on, we grow even more. Hartman states that: "While it had taken us 200,000 years to produce our first billion people, and 130 years to produce our second billion, the third billion took just 30 years. In 1960, world human population hit three billion...It took just fourteen years, from 1960 to 1974, for us to grow to four billion humans worldwide...We added another billion in just thirteen years, hitting five billion in 1987, and our next billion took only twelve years, as the worlds human population hit six billion in 1999."

The food supply was able to have such a massive leap after the Civil War because what came after the Civil War was our precious Industrial Revolution. We had a revolution in the volume and frequency that we were able to produce food. It's also interesting to note that thanks to this "second agricultural revolution" of sorts, fruits and vegetables as we know them today are some 50% less abundant in vitamins and minerals, and hence some 50% less nutritious than they were 50-100 years ago. At this point someone might (ignorantly) suggest that the solution would be to produce more food, to counteract the nutrient deficiency we've already caused.

We need to not only halt population growth but gradually decrease it over time. How do we do this? As strange and unreasonable as it may sound we need to stop producing a surplus amount of food. We need to only produce enough food for the current population not creating more and more and more! We cannot continue to grow exponentially and expect to support ourselves. We must change our ways. One may argue that this seems cruel, that if we really had a surplus of food then people wouldn't be starving across the world. But you would be wrong. We have enough food to feed the world. But why are people starving? Because the starving population that lives on the land that does not produce any more food is not being supported by their immediate environment because they have "exhausted" all of their "resources". Any time an animal or insect population in nature begins to grow in numbers and consume, all the available food around them the food becomes less available, competition increases, and the population drops off to a supportable number for what is available nutritionally.

Here it is interesting to note that as I just mentioned our modern fruits and vegetables are considerably less nutritional than the fruits and veggies our grandfathers ate. This is firstly caused by agriculture's effect of depleting the soils of their minerals, and not restoring those minerals in quantity or quality. Secondly, this diminished nutrition in foods is connected to many a conspiracy theory in which "Big Agro" (Big agriculture) companies like Monsanto are involved. Why, if we have so much ample food, are people starving? Simply because the food is not getting to them. This is home to many other conspiracy theories about racial genocide.

As Daniel Quinn so eloquently describes in "Story of B":

All food energy originates in plants and nowhere else. Energy in plants are passed on through the organisms that consume them. All the community of life is flying food, swimming food, crawling food, and sitting there and growing food.

This includes us humans: Our behavior as a biological population is indistinguishable from the behavior of any other biological population.To the naysayers, I say this: The ebb and flow of all populations is a function of food availability. A reduction in food availability means decline, always. When your thermostat conveys that your house is too cold, the heater comes on. When your thermostat conveys that it is then too hot, the furnace is turned off. This is the same principle. As the food population is ample, the feeder population will consume all that is available. This reduction in food will ALWAYS cause the feeder population to decline.

How could it not? We are what we eat. Our bodies are dependent on food to survive. Our bodies are made of the food fuel we provide it, and thus a person cannot give birth to a child that is not made from food. There is no species that dwindles in the midst of abundance, no species that thrives on nothing. This process is called negative feedback.
What is positive feedback? Positive feedback is when your thermostat reads the room to be too hot, the thermostat turns the furnace on instead of off. Negative feedback checks an increasing effect and positive feedback reinforces an increasing effect. Our population is in the bad habit of positive feedback. We see our population increase, and we supply more food.

The fact that our population grows year after year is proof that we're producing more food year after year. Until people start showing up who are made of shadows or metal filings or gravel - when that happens, then I'll have to back off this point.

What does this all mean?

Daniel Quinn says it best in his book "The Story of B". PLEASE READ THIS BOOK.
As soon as our "agricultural revolution" began, the process of division began, between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, masters and slaves. What inspired this revolution? : Man losing his "connection" with his gods. Tribal and ancient peoples placed their gods within themselves, and within the plants and animals of Earth. They worshiped the Earth, most of all. Somewhere along the way, a bad seed was planted, and man started externalizing his gods. Gods now reside extra-terrestrially from Earth. They are found in the heavens, in a cloud, or Mt. Olympus. This implied that the gods left the Earth for mankind to "inherit". (Very interesting to note the stories of the peoples of Sumer. Sumer is considered the "birthplace of civilization" and is highly related to the agricultural revolution. Provided via Zecharia Sitchin, we learn that the people of Sumer walked among their gods who they knew to be aliens from another planet who were called the Annunaki. At some point, the Annunaki left Earth)

"The Earth was made for us and we can do with it what we will". We do not realize what the repercussions of phrases such as this: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground" (Genesis:1:26).

Yeah, unfortunately, two trends coincided in the ancient world that we are still grappling with today.

1. Ladies were deprived of the means and eventually of the knowledge whereby they could govern their own fertility.

2. Some asshat stumbled on the idea of out-breeding the competition (be fruitful, and grab the other guy's land).

Agriculture only facilitates these two deadly cultural fallacies. There's a tendency to make it the whipping boy, when in reality, the two factors above are the major underlying causes of overpopulation.