CHAPTER 30
             ARE PEOPLE AN ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION?
Most environmental, economic and social      
problems...arise from this driving force:  too many      
people using too many resources at too fast a rate.      
Blue Planet Group, Ottawa, Canada, September, 1991


CHAPTER 30: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Income, Growth, Population, and Pollution
Aesthetics, Pollution, and Population Growth
Pollution, Population, and Risk of Catastrophe
Summary


   Human beings get a bad name from some writers on environmental 
matters.  You and I and our neighbors are accused of polluting this 
world and making it a worse place to live. We are charged with 
being emitters of such poisonous substances as lead, sulfur 
dioxide, and carbon monoxide;  we are indicted as producers of 
noise, garbage, and congestion.  More people, more pollution, says 
the bill. Even more ugly, you and I and our neighbors, together 
with our children, have been referred to as "people pollution" and 
the "population plague." That is, our very existence is the core of 
the problem, in their view.
   Indeed, the effect of population growth upon the environment has 
come to be the focus of the anti-natalist environmental movement.  
This is the most recent scare in a sequence in which the anti-
natalists successively have pointed to purported ill effects on 
agriculture, natural resources, and education, and then each of 
these scares in turn was found to be without foundation.  
   It has come to seem as if one must be against population growth 
if one is to be for pollution control. And pollution control in 
itself appeals to everyone, for good reason. A full-length New York 
Times Magazine piece on pollution ended, "The long-term relief is 
perfectly obvious: Fewer 'capita'." And figure 30-1 appeared as a 
full-page advertisement in leading newspapers. So let us inquire 
how various rates of population growth would affect the amount of 
pollution.
Figure 30-1 (old 17-1)
   The sober question we wish to answer here is: What is the effect 
of human population size and growth upon pollution levels? The 
general answer this chapter offers is that, although there may be 
some short-run increase in pollution due to population increases, 
the additional pollution is relatively small. And in the long run, 
pollution is likely to be significantly less due to population 
growth.

   We shall also analyze how prudent risk-avoidance fits with our 
conclusions about population growth's effect on pollution. Though 
values enter strongly into any such analysis, we shall see that, on 
the basis of most commonly held values, the desire to avoid risk to 
humanity from a pollution catastrophe does not lead to the 
conclusion that population growth should be limited by social 
policy.

   Before we begin on the serious work, we should note that most 
discussion of these matters goes no further than this sort of 
commonsensical - but wrong - thinking: Given that there are a 
thousand times as many people on earth now as there were ten 
thousand years ago, the volume of waste animal bones that are now 
produced each year as the result of eating game should be a 
thousand times as large as the volume then, and the mounds should 
be much higher in the more populated places than elsewhere.  But lo 
and behold, we do not see huge mounds of bones taking over the 
planet, as such an analysis would lead us to expect.  And we do not 
find that the most densely-populated rich countries - say, Holland, 
Great Britain, and Japan - are dirtier than (say) less-densely-
populated rich countries such as the U. S. and Australia, or than 
sparsely-populated poor countries in (say) Africa.  We must 
consider why not.


            INCOME, GROWTH, POPULATION, AND POLLUTION

   The more developed an economy, and the more people it has, the 
more pollutants it produces; this story has been well told by Barry 
Commoner, and it is still the main line of conventional thinking on 
the subject.  The total amounts of most kinds of pollutants depend 
upon the total scale of industry, and this scale may be roughly 
gauged by a country's GNP (except that beyond some per capita 
income, the proportion of industrial products in the GNP begins to 
decline as the proportion of services increases).  A less-known 
story is that along with higher income and its consequent greater 
supply of pollutants comes a greater demand for cleanup, plus an 
increased capacity to pay for it and greater technical ability to 
execute the clean-up; this reduction in pollution as a result of 
increased income has been documented for the 1970s and 1980s for 
Europe (see Chapter 15, footnote 6).  As we saw in chapter 9, the 
technology for cleaning up already exists in just about every case, 
and waits only for our will to expend the time and money to put it 
to work.
   For many years governments did not control the flow of 
industrial pollutants very well. But in recent years there has come 
a change in the rules of the game in the Western countries due to a 
combination of rising incomes and consciousness raising by 
environmentalists. And this has caused the favorable trends in air 
and water quality that we saw in chapter 9.  

   If you have any doubt that increases in income are associated 
with a decrease in pollution, examine the levels of street 
cleanliness in the richer versus the poorer countries of the world, 
the mortality rates of richer versus poorer countries, and the 
mortality rates (or cleanliness of streets) among richer versus 
poorer people within particular countries.  
   If increased income makes for less pollution, what is the effect 
of population growth?  You might think that adding people 
necessarily induces more pollution.  Yet in Australia's affluent 
cities, for example, there is much pollution despite the country's 
low population.  And analyses find only a slight short-run 
relationship between population growth and pollution.  In the long 
run, however, the total pollution output will be more or less 
proportional to the labor force (and hence, to population) for a 
given level of technology, all else being equal as you might 
expect. 
   It is not sound, though, to assume that all else is equal. When 
pollution increases, political forces arise to fight it; this is 
the force that warred against smoke pollution in Great Britain at 
the local level beginning centuries ago, and that has had success 
since the 19th century (see Chapter 9).  Once this process begins, 
the result may well be less pollution than earlier - or, of course, 
nothing may happen for a while except an even worse level of 
pollution. 

     Also as a result of a higher population, and of the higher 
income that occurs after a while, new techniques emerge to handle 
the temporarily worse problems of pollution.  And eventually there 
results a cleaner world than before population and income grew.

   Regarding any particular period in the near future, especially 
in poor countries, the overall outcome simply cannot be known in 
advance; neither economic logic nor political history can predict 
with confidence whether the intermediate-run result of the larger 
population and of the initially higher pollution will be a 
situation better or worse than if the population had not grown so 
large. Yet we must keep in mind the empirical fact that over the 
longest sweep of human history, while population has grown 
enormously, total pollution - as measured by life expectancy, and 
by the rate of deaths due to socially transmitted and socially 
caused diseases such as cholera and smog-caused emphysema - has 
fallen markedly.  We do not live amongst ever-more-huge garbage 
dumps infested by rats, as in earlier times.
   The outcome of more people also depends very heavily on the kind 
of economic-political system in the given country.  As discussed in 
Chapter 9, Eastern European communist countries suffered much worse 
damage from pollution than did Western free-enterprise countries, 
in considerable part because socialism rewards managers for using a 
high ratio of inputs to outputs whereas a market system rewards 
managers for economizing on inputs.
   The latest environmental justification for slowing or halting 
population growth is supposed global warming (see chapter 18 on 
global warming and the greenhouse effect).  A World Bank paper on 
the subject concludes, "The global negative externality represented 
by rapid population growth in developing countries provides a 
strong, new rationale for developed countries, in their own 
interests, to finance programs that would reduce population growth 
in developing countries."   That is, the old rationales for World 
Bank population-control programs - economic growth, resource 
conservation, and the like - having been discredited, a new 
"rationale" has been developed on the basis of speculative 
assumptions about global warming's economic effects derived from 
controversial climatalogical science. 
   But isn't it obvious, the environmentalists argue, that 
additional people and additional economic growth will cause us to 
use more energy and hence emit more greenhouse gases?  Therefore, 
even if we can't be sure of the greenhouse effect, wouldn't it be 
prudent to cut back on growth?  It does make sense that during the 
next half-century or century there will be increased energy use as 
a result of more people as well as increased consumption per 
person.  Some forecasts project that the former component will be 
larger, some the latter.  But contrary to the implications of many 
such writings on the subject, these events need not be seen as 
malign.  Shifts to nuclear fission and to other new sources of 
energy may result in reduced total emissions even as total energy 
use goes up - as was the case in the U.K. and the U.S. over the 
years. 

          AESTHETICS, POLLUTION, AND POPULATION GROWTH

   Because aesthetics are a matter of taste, it is not sensible to 
dispute about them.  For those to whom being alone in a virgin 
forest is the ideal, other visitors constitute "people pollution"; 
for those with different tastes, seeing lots of people at play is 
the best sight of all.

   Of those who praise a reduction of population in the name of 
making the world more beautiful, I ask these questions: (1) Have 
you not seen much beauty on this earth that comes from the hands of 
humans - gardens, statues, skyscrapers, graceful bridges? (2) The 
population of Athens was only 6,000 persons in 1823.  Do you 
suppose that Athens was more beautiful a) in 1823, or b) two 
millennia earlier when it was more crowded? (3) If the world's 
population now were only a hundredth of what it actually is, would 
there be a transportation system to get you to Yosemite, the Grand 
Canyon, the Antarctic, Kenya's wildlife preserves, or Lake 
Victoria?
   We hear calls that humankind should live in equilibrium with 
nature.  The last time we were in equilibrium is when our numbers 
were small and not growing - nomad tribes.  Then we did not change 
the environment much from century to century.  But growth in 
numbers, civilization, and alteration of the environment went 
together.  Humans ceased to be like other animals, and began to 
make.  Equilibrium then necessarily was left behind.  Creating is 
not consistent with equilibrium.
   Overall, human creation is greater than human destruction, in 
the sense that our environment is becoming progressively more 
hospitable to humankind - a basic theme of this book.   The 
movement away from equilibrium is a movement toward safety and 
sustenance.  This progress carries with it some undesirable 
features for a while, but eventually we get around to fixing them. 
   The doomsayers believe we are in period of greater destruction 
than creation - that is, headed toward a reduction in the safety 
and hospitableness of our environment.  They speak about the planet 
being in a worsening "crisis".  But if this were true, it would be 
a complete break with all past trends.  Of course this is logically 
possible.  But it is helpful to remember that there have always 
been plausible-sounding theories of approaching doom, always 
statements that this moment is different than any that has gone 
before;  the making and believing of such ideas seems to be 
psychologically irresistible for many.  But to succumb to such 
unfounded beliefs is to court disaster - as groups that have sold 
all their belongings and gone to mountain tops to await the end of 
the world have found out.  


         POLLUTION, POPULATION, AND RISK OF CATASTROPHE

   A safety-minded person might say, "With regard to pollutant X, 
perhaps the additional risk that is induced by a larger population 
is a small one. But would it not be prudent to avoid even this 
small possibility?" This question is related to the issue of risk 
aversion discussed in the section on nuclear energy in chapter 13.  
To state the problem in its most frightening form: In an advanced 
technological society there is always the possibility that a 
totally new form of pollution will emerge and finish us all before 
we can do anything about it.
   Though the incidence of general catastrophes to the human race 
has decreased from the time of the Black Death onwards, and though 
I'd bet that it is not so, the risk may have begun to increase in 
recent decades - from atomic bombs or from some unknown but 
powerful pollution. But the present risk of catastrophe will only 
be known in the future, with hindsight. The arguments in Part I 
about non-finite natural resources cannot refute the possibility of 
some explosive unknown disaster.  Indeed, there is no logical 
answer to this threat except to note that life with perfect 
security is not possible - and probably would not be meaningful.
   It might make sense to control population growth if the issue 
were simply the increased risk of catastrophe due to population 
growth, and if only the number of deaths mattered, rather than the 
number of healthy lives lived. A flaw in this line of reasoning is 
revealed, however, by pushing it to its absurd endpoint: One may 
reduce the risk of pollution catastrophe to zero by reducing to 
zero the number of persons who are alive. And this policy obviously 
is unacceptable to all except a few. Therefore we must dig deeper 
to learn how pollution ought to influence our views about 
population size and growth.

   The argument that population growth is a bad thing because it 
may bring about new and possibly catastrophic forms of pollution is 
a special case of a more general argument: Avoid any change because 
it may bring about some devastating destruction by a power as yet 
unknown. There is an irrefutable logic in this argument. In its own 
terms, adding a few not-too-unreasonable assumptions, it cannot be 
proven wrong, as follows: Assume that any alteration in industrial 
technique may have some unexpected ill effects. Assume also that 
the system is acceptably safe right now. Additional people increase 
the need for change, and this makes a prima facie case against 
population growth. And the same argument can be applied to economic 
growth: Economic growth brings about change, which can bring 
dangers. (See comments by Ehrlich and Lovins in chapter 00.) Hence 
economic growth is to be avoided.
   Of course, this sit-tight, leave-well-enough-alone posture is 
possible for us 1990s humans only because economic and population 
growth in the past produced the changes that brought many of us to 
the "well enough" state that might now be "left alone."
page # \ultres\ tchar30 February 10, 1994