Is Overpopulation a Problem?

There are those who want to think that a decline in the birth rates in some countries means that we don't have to worry about overpopulation any more. "That's just a left-wing idea." If Bernie Sanders said it was raining outside, would that make "It's raining outside" a left-wing statement? A book called The Population Bomb was written by a left-winger. Other facts about the population situation, however, are non-partisan. 

In the 1990s, in a book called All the Trouble in the World, P.J. O'Rourke took a position that appealed to some right-wing types: Right, so our cities are overpopulated--congested. There's still a lot of land on Earth that has relatively low human populations. Mind you, this land has low human populations for reasons, but when people get desperate enough they'll probably find ways to live in the Gobi Desert or on the Canadian Shield...oh right.

During the present century, of course, it's come to seem odd to blame the left wing for any current worries about overpopulation, because left-wingers have not been screaming about the perils of overpopulation. Their latest craze has been reviving the polluted, abandoned cores of inner cities. This would not have been a bad idea if left-wingers hadn't made it into a sort of test of faith in the socialist revolution. It's not enough for Lefty McLeftbehind to open a nice restaurant in the old Greyhound bus station like a sensible person. He has to clamor for Big Government to give him a captive market by packing a thousand families into the rest of the block. Better pull down that old warehouse that used to face the Greyhound bus station, put in a forty-storey apartment block, pack in a lot of miserable working families, and make sure they'll stay there by burdening private home owners with so many stupid "environmental" restrictions that only those who've paid massive bribes to the local government officials will dare to own houses.

Which will be...not "walkable," no, because people don't actually walk in crowded areas. They will be slums. They will generate tons of smog and raw sewage. The left wing have already decided that a few of the most human-friendly places on earth, such as Philadelphia, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, should be designated "sacrifice areas," and the next generation of technoplutocrats who will own all the money should be the ones entrusted to own all the green space. Quality of life for ordinary people is not a priority for the left wing. Some humans survived in Hong Kong, therefore some will survive in the congestion zones they want to pack people into. Tell'em they don't want to be "hoarders" who own more than one or two books, more than one or two changes of clothes. Tell'em that if they could bond with dogs, they could bond with cockroaches, which may or may not have any capacity for the emotion of affection but are known to enjoy fitting into snug spaces and can be trained to like being clutched in a human hand. Tell'em they don't need privacy, they don't need quiet, they don't need children of their own...and they don't need to live seventy or eighty years; in the kind of environment the New Left like to plan, twenty-five years would undoubtedly feel like a long hard life.

Responsible land ownership, which includes not having more children than you can leave land to, has never been a left-wing thing, which is one valid reason to say no to any plans that would transfer land management into the hands of the new "globalist" left-wingers.

How do we know when having more than One Child Or None has become a possibly public-spirited choice? Same way we know whether to take out an umbrella. We don't consult a political agenda; we look outside.

Here are some indications that it might be a public-spirited choice for some people to have more than one child or none:

* Unemployment: Rate below 2%.

* Standard of living: High, but not grandiose. People can afford to have and do more when they're not overburdened by dependent children. People feel less of a craving to have and do more than their neighbors have because they seldom actually see their neighbors. Humans finally enjoy the utopian conditions our great-grandparents hopes technology would bring.

* Work: Most people work as independent contractors, either from their homes or from separate workshop buildings on their own property. Most factory work is done by robots; most meetings and negotiations are conducted by telephone or computer. Market days, when people go into town and mingle, occur a couple of times a month and are festive occasions. People resent each other less when they don't see each other every day..

* Food: Most of the time most people have access to a good variety of good-quality plant-based food, milk and eggs for part of the year, and meat a few times a year. People exchange food in the market. Only a small  amount of food needs to be grown for commercial use. As people are no longer under pressure to deliver certain amounts of one cash crop for each field, most plants formerly regarded as "weeds" are known as "spring vegetables." 

* Pavement: Mostly broken up and re-purposed. When gravel tracks become muddy, this is taken as an indication that people need to choose alternate routes or build bridges.

* Slums: Abandoned, crumbling--without new ones forming a few blocks uptown. Sometimes you read about a family that inherited an apartment block, and each child has always had his or her own apartment. Anything above the third floor is storage space. "Skyscrapers" are being dismantled.

* Average single-family dwelling: One to five acres. Who'd buy a house without space to grow food?

* Social behavior: Might seem extravagant with time and space to most of us. Even small children have rooms of their own and maintain a healthy interpersonal distance. People probably find, however, that when they really want to cuddle together, they enjoy snuggling more because they have adequate interpersonal distance most of the time. 

* "Sexual minorities": A few people are sterile or asexual for obvious medical reasons, so others are polite about it. Having more than two children might be considered kinky. Otherwise, as when other lifeforms enjoy a healthy uncrowded population density, human sexuality is so vanilla that people wouldn't even get their knickers in a twist if they heard of someone still managing to be "gay." That morbid obsession with what other people might be doing also ceases to occur.

* Primary sexual taboo: Doing anything without your partner's wholehearted (if perhaps nonverbal) consent.

* Military situation: There will always be an army, and they'll always need to be prepared for anything--and people really respect those who can get the troops to prepare for purely hypothetical encounters with hypothetical invaders from other planets, because humans don't fight wars with other humans any more. On an uncrowded planet everybody has Lebensraum already. Compromising that Lebensraum by having more than two babies is considered selfish and foolish but, as long as some people have no children, it doesn't have to be considered an act of war.

* Abortion: People have read that once long ago this was a topic of debate, but find that hard to imagine. What's to debate about a personal tragedy caused by illness?

* Birth control: Most people agree that making love, when focussed on one's partner, is physically as pleasurable as making babies, when focussed on the babies. You might, however, hear an urban legend about the couple who dreamed they were making a baby, although they weren't physically fit to have one, and didn't want to wake up before they had to admit it was true. You ask a doctor whether that ever happens; the doctor says, "Yes; there's a hormone formula that terminates the pregnancy, but it can take a week or two for it to be shipped up from Backobeyond Laboratories."

* Sexual deviations: Since women don't consent to sex on polygamous terms, young men have learned not only to lower their eyes when a pretty girl passes by but to feel shamefaced and "dirty" about having polygamous impulses. "Cheating" is recognized as, well, cheating. Men stop fooling themselves that a man who "only" cheats in relationships with woen isn't going to cheat them, too. As a result eople sue for libel damages when accused of any interest in extramarital sex.

* Sounds typically heard on a city street: Footsteps, bike tires, birds, an occasional yard dog or delivery truck. When people replay music, they gather around and listen to it, sing or play along with it, exercise or dance to it, and are mortified if they realize that anyone not part of an agreement to listen to recorded music together can hear it--they didn't mean to be rude. Noise is rude.

* Animals: Nobody feels motivated to complain about animals that don't eat humans or spoil crops. Neither humans nor domestic animals are crowded together enough to generate much of an odor problem or health hazard. Having time to ride a horse is a status symbol. Houses whose front doors are not normally watched by a cat raise suspicions. Not everyone eats milk or eggs, so not all nice people live with cows or chickens. Most gardens include things planted for the benefit of songbirds and butterflies. On the other hand, anyone who felt called to lobby for allowing animals that are truly incompatible with humans, like bears or coyotes, to roam around outside of specially constructed islands in zoos, would be self-identifying as an antisocial "ticking bomb." Animals that attack humans are rigorously "controlled."

* Landscaping, clothing, decor: Rich variety, with an increasing number of "tiny houses," trailer houses, "playhouses," and other outbuildings popping up near big houses, as parents and children often enjoy having separate houses within sight of their relatives in the active generation. The idea of "zoning" for different types of houses or business in different neighborhoods seems ludicrous. There's room to plant trees to block out the sight of your neighbor's house.

* Energy: Most people have room for enough solar panels, not attached to their roofs, to meet their energy needs. Biomass is burned for additional energy. Pollution from batteries is less of a problem because humans are scattered widely enough for pollution to be reabsorbed harmlessly into the earth.

* Water: Most springs are carefully maintained as good sources of clean water. Underground drainage helps keep rainwater from forming stagnant pools near houses, but dung and carrion are too rich sources of cheap energy to be dissolved in water, and are dried out and burned.

* Vaccines: Are manufactured only in response to epidemic diseases. Most people never see an epidemic disease and thus never see a vaccination. Diseases become epidemic when people are crowded together.

* Immigration policy: Probably at some point in the past people from more crowded countries were desperate to get into this one and were admitted as legal immigrants if surgically sterilized. By now, what need? Humankind survived into the twentieth century without formal documentation of citizenship. People were lawful residents of wherever someone had lawfully sold or leased them a house. The fact that existing technology makes it possible to spy on people and keep elaborate records of their movements does not justify the expense of paying anyone to do that. When people aren't crowded together, there's less reason to fear that their voluntary movements will unbalance the economy.

* Education: Since every child is a wanted child, laws no longer require children to be confined to warehouses for unwanted children. Elementary education usually takes place at home. Schools teach special skills and subjects, mostly to mixed groups of teenagers and adults. Admission to school programs is based on preparation not age.

* "Race": Family pride is unquestioned as being a healthy thing. "Race" bigotry, which forms among populations competing for jobs and status, no longer exists. All the old hereditary "racial" genotypes probably are preserved somewhere in their purest forms, and some new ones may be recognized by people who want to perpetuate their hereditary traits...but nobody hates other people just because they look different. When people aren't crowded together to the point of feeling hostile toward difference, they see difference as interesting.

Are we there yet? Does this sound like your neighborhood? Right. Differences between this hypothetical community and the real ones in which we live indicate the degree to which we are an overcrowded species. The public-spirited choice is: One child or none.