daily), a number far surpassing that of most places on Earth; for most sub-Saharan African countries the average is closer to half gallon. With an increasingly affluent and large population, China – like the United States – definitely has a major environmental impact.
But these raw numbers and their apparent demographic drivers can be enormously deceptive. First, a significant proportion of water use and greenhouse gas emissions, among other areas of heavy environmental impact, are driven by the export of resources, industrial materials, and consumer good consumed elsewhere. Where less than 10% of water use, for example, is domestically consumed there, roughly 30% goes to industrial production. With exports to places like the European Union, North America, and elsewhere in the world, the population of China seems to be a far less major source of environmental woes than the circulation of the global economy itself.
So too, the population growth rate of China is at an all-time low. While in 2020 China’s population will continue to experience a net gain, and some seven million more people will live in the country by then end of that year than the beginning, the growth rate is actually only about 0.5%. That compares to growth in 1969, which peaked at a staggering 2.8%. China has essentially stopped growing, and is headed for contraction (see Box 2.1 ). The country is likely to begin shrinking in this century. With fewer young people entering the economy to support the aging population, all kinds of new issues attend the “population bust.” Yet fears of runaway over-population impacting the environment need some careful reconsideration (Robbins and Smith 2017).
Box 2.1 1Environmental Solution? The One-Child Policy
The People’s Republic of China’s “One Child Policy” came to an end in 2015. Viewed originally as a solution to “overpopulation,” the suite of penalty and incentive policies created by the Chinese state in 1979 appears flawed in retrospect. Indeed, China’s more recent concern is underpopulation.
This radical family planning policy upended reproductive decision-making across the country and changed the demographic face of the country. The change in family size was accomplished through a set of fines leveled against families having more than one child, coupled with incentives for single-child families to obtain education and other elite privileges. Though rural families and some ethnic minority groups were exempted, a significant proportion of the Chinese population lived under the constraints of this law, which strongly incentivized small families. In 1979, the fertility rate in the country was a relatively high 2.9, and in rural areas it was perhaps double this figure. According to the World Bank, the current fertility rate of the country is a remarkable 1.7. This wholesale transformation of family size has been greeted by many as a model and by others as unnecessary and regressive.
The advantages of a slowing growth rate are several. They include a potential lessening of demand for natural resources, though as a growing proportion of China’s one billion citizens enter the middle class, the overall resource demands of the economy have expanded on the whole. The potential effect on the country’s environmental impact from the generation of waste, air pollution, and greenhouse gases is also celebrated by observers, though here again the rapid industrialization of the country has meant an overall increase in all three problems.
The disadvantages of the policy are more indirect, but nonetheless widespread. First, a cultural preference for boys has caused widespread sex-selective abortion of females, resulting in a wildly skewed ratio of young men to young women in the current generation. Estimates put the ratio at roughly 120 males to 100 females in the population under 15 years. This trend is exaggerated over time, and the National Population and Family Planning Commission estimates that Chinese men will outnumber women by 30 million in 2020, with implications for social stability. Second, the traditional family structure, in which children collectively cared for aging parents, has been put under enormous stress.
Perhaps the most understated feature of the one-child policy is that the reduction in family size may only be partly attributable to the law. Falling birth rates have accompanied industrialization throughout Asia, as changing economic conditions have created their own incentives for smaller families. In countries like Japan and South Korea birth rates have plummeted in the past 40 years, without any state-sponsored population policies, and with fewer attendant social problems and shocks. Given that the Chinese resource and environmental impact footprints are still growing dramatically, critics suggest the policy was largely misconceived.
Most remarkably, by 2020, China was searching for new policies to increase family size. With a skyrocketing dependency rate (ratio of old to young people), a decline in care for the elderly, a disappearing labor force, and general stagnation have become national concerns.
To what degree does the historically meteoric growth of population in China (or the United States or anywhere else in the world) represent an environmental crisis? How have affluence and lifestyle influenced this impact? Is there enough water to allow 10 billion people to survive on the planet? Many explorations of the relationships between environment and society typically start right here, asking a basic question: Are there simply too many people? Can the world support us all? If not, can human numbers ever be expected to stop growing? How and when?
The Problem of Exponential Growth
These questions are by no means new either to the field of ecology or to the examination of society or policy. The concept of overpopulation is indeed ancient, though its most prominent modern adherent lived in the decades spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Reverend Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus. His assertion, in its clearest form, was that the capacity of population to grow is greater than the power of the Earth to provide resources. Given the procreative capacity of humanity and the inherently finite availability of the Earth’s resources, in this way of thinking, human population is the single greatest influence on the status of the Earth and its resources. Conversely, the Earth’s resources provide the most definitive and powerful limit for human growth and expansion.
Exponential Growth A condition of growth where the rate is mathematically proportional to the current value, leading to continued, non-linear increase of the quantity; in population, this refers to a state of increasingly accelerated and compounded growth, with ecological implications for scarcity
In more careful phrasing, Malthus was clear to describe the mathematical underpinnings of this relationship, stressing that population growth is effectively “geometric” (“exponential” in today’s terms), since the multiple offspring of a single mating pair of animals or people are each capable of producing multiple offspring themselves. Assuming six children from every mating couple (a family size typical in Malthus’ time), for example, means a growth of 6 in the first generation, 18 in the second generation, 54 in the third, and so on. That growth, when graphed, takes the form of a curve, much steeper than a straight line, moving toward an asymptote, that is, a steep increase in a few generations and a large number of individuals, increasing every generation.
On the other hand, Malthus argued, the food base for this growing population over time is essentially fixed or, perhaps, amenable to slight alteration through “arithmetic” (“linear” in today’s terms) expansion. Food supplies can grow by putting more land under the plow, for example, but not nearly at the rate that population expands. Over time “geometric” growth always outpaces “arithmetic” growth, with obvious implications.
These implications sit at the center of Malthus’ key written work, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus 1992), which he first published in 1798. Here, Malthus suggested, wars, famine, destitution, and disease are natural limits to growth and act to keep population in check. Second, he maintained that policies promoting the welfare of the poor are counterproductive, because they only encourage unnecessary reproduction and resource waste. Third, he argued that the
