So Many People . . . How Will We Feed Them? : WORLD WAR III: Population and the Biosphere at the End of the Millennium,<i> By Michael Tobias (Bear & Co.: $29.95; 656 pp.)</i>
Apocalyptic visions of the end of humankind are nothing new. Mathematician and amateur sociologist Thomas R. Malthus began the modern tradition with his famous “Essay on the Principles of Population,” published in 1798. It was Malthus’s view that human populations would inevitably increase in geometric progression and therefore must of necessity ultimately outstrip their food supply, a resource which can only increase arithmetically. Many others have continued in this vein, not least of whom is Paul Ehrlich who drafted his “Population Bomb” as a response to the sense of imminent collapse of the world’s support base through population pressure.
Michael Tobias follows in this melancholy if not misanthropic tradition by writing a lengthy and complex treatise that is a distillation of a lifetime of thought and action concerning the human condition. But “World War III” is a treatise with a difference. It provides a thread of hope, offering a new vision about how humankind may ultimately come to peace with Nature.
World War III, in Tobias’ account, is humankind’s struggle with nature--and people are winning.
In defiance of Malthus’s logic, the food supply for humanity--or at least those with the wherewithal to afford it--continues to keep pace with our rate of increase. Much of this vaunted success is the result of the “Green Revolution” in which researchers selected varieties of wheat, rice and corn with disease resistance, high yields and easy “harvestability.” A recent news story announced a further genetic improvement in rice strains, leading to a 25% increase in production without the need for more fertilizer. With these new advances comes the ability to support at least another 450 million people a year. Isn’t this enough, you may ask?
Tobias’s answer is a vehement “No!” Food crop enhancement is just another strategic move in a war of attrition. Where there were once immense plains of wild grasses and diverse legume foodstuffs, there are now mono-cultures of corn or wheat. The African veld is now pockmarked with fields of corn, much as is the Argentine pampas and our own native grasslands in the Midwestern prairies. What were once vast plains supporting a balanced ecosystem of ungulates and herbivores have been supplanted by vast, monotonous tracts of cereal crops. The devastation of the tropical rain forest by the relentless push of population pressure is by now a well told story.
This continuing devastation of the ecosystems of the planet is the greatest peril represented by the superabundance of its most profligate large species, Homo sapiens. Our incursions into the thin life of the planet are in truth a war “against the future.” Our pillaging of the biosphere will produce a radically reduced biodiversity.
If our own survival is a victory, it is a sullied one at best. In winning, we are killing the planet. Our continuing survival has come about at the expense of species diversity and the stability of the web of life on the planet as a whole. In this war, the victors (even the next generation) will inherit a much impoverished planet, devoid of the species richness which ensures balance and perhaps survival of the whole. The costs to retrieve the essential balance and integrity of life on the planet when humankind is 40 billion strong will eclipse all contemporary expenditures for ecosystem restoration. Tobias sees our blindness to these consequences as akin to the denial of the early symptoms of a cancer patient whose ultimate illness will be incredibly costly and drain his remaining resources. And like the cancer patient, Tobias believes that we have only a very short time to muster our resources for the end game.
Tobias believes that the war to protect biodiversity will be won or lost in the next few years. Protecting the web of life will require herculean efforts from the wealthy who above all others must greatly curtail their population growth. In championing this view, World War III is more akin in spirit and focus to E.O. Wilson’s “The Diversity of Life” than it is to either Malthus or Ehrlich. Like Wilson, Tobias perceives the duty to maintain biodiversity as a moral requirement of planet stewardship.
But Tobias has the breadth of experience as a political scientist and participant in population conferences that allows him to put this perspective into a world view that eclipses that of Wilson. Unlike other contemporary social reformers, Tobias sees the origins and solutions to this dilemma as going beyond a simple interplay of political and economic forces of supply and demand.
While acknowledging the role of disproportionate consumption by the rich in depleting resources among the poor, he probes deeper. What he finds is a perplexing and counter-intuitive pattern of resource utilization. Why have the teeming minions of the Southern tier of developing nations decimated their own resources to keep pace with the insatiable demands of the wealthy North? As an example, he cites Kerala Province in India, where the perceived need to service the economic demands of the wealthy few has led to the devastation of its own commons.
What accounts for the particularly human penchant for aggression against nature, a penchant that ultimately leads to species destruction in the name of self-preservation? This question is not new. What is new is the way Tobias puts this concept into the context of political, social and religious realities that make for the patchwork quilt of human cultures and proclivities.
Population pressure per se is not the core of our current dilemma. It is a symptom that greatly exacerbates what Tobias sees as an individual penchant to mar the face of planet with individual acts of stupidity--nuclear accidents, oil spills, and mass toxic poisonings. These acts reflect an intrinsic human proclivity that is part of the fabric of the human condition itself. And without intervention, this proclivity will be greatly intensified. At a population of 20 billion or 40 billion (which we may well reach in the next century), Tobias predicts that humanity will become a “far more malicious, unpredictable, and emotionally bereft creature, stressed to the point of utter, relentless insanity.”
The view that the greatest acts of social and ecosystem destruction will be the result of beserk, out-of-control “ecoterrorists” or demented souls seeking salvation may seem far-fetched. But political terrorism in the name of fundamentalism is a present-day reality. And the near fanatic resistance to world pressure toward population containment evinced by the Islamic nations at the recent UN population conference in Cairo may be the germ of just such a movement.
What then is the countercurrent to the powerful streams of modern political movements that demand their fair share? What philosophy or approach can thwart the tendency to unlimited growth, dominion and destruction of the world’s ecology? The answer, in part, comes from Tobias’s immersion in Buddhist culture. But philosophy is not enough.
To curb the population growth which threatens to girdle the life of the planet, Tobias effectively points to examples from political states like Tamil Nadu in India that integrated religious and cultural traditions to enact more sane environmental legislation. He also advocates a return to vegetarianism, a long recognized solution to chronic overconsumption of protein resources. But restraint and self-denial as the routes to curb the devastating and almost uniquely American tendency toward consumerism is unlikely to prove a prescription for success. To achieve both population control and protection of biodiversity will require some form of enlightened self-interest.
What is the best method to dampen our proclivity for subordination and destruction as a means to the ends of species survival? Unfortunately, the Theravedic Buddhist ideal of passing through the forest without harming a living soul (in Thailand, village youths are hired to sweep the paths of elders) is just that, an unattainable ideal. But it serves as a metaphor. That is what we need: a metaphor for who we should be, and who we might select as our leaders. And were those leaders committed to reshape the course for the Earth’s survival, they would be well advised to read World War III. For the rest of us, this daunting book might serve as a kind of reference book for survival, chronicling all that has gone wrong and, more importantly, what might be done to set it all aright.
