Every animal population must have the latent capacity to grow quite rapidly in a pinch. \u00a0You can translate this to mean, roughly, that a population must be able to double in each generation when it is threatened or expanding freely into a new and fertile environment. \u00a0Human families in indigenous cultures can produce 6 or 7 babies, 4 of which survive to breed. \u00a0Roundworms can lay 300 eggs, 2 of which survive to breed**. \u00a0And, of course, microbes reproduce by cloning and double exactly with each generation.<\/p>\n But the doubling of a population that\u00a0is already at carrying capacity can spell disaster. \u00a0Every blade of grass is eaten, or every rabbit is hunted, or every tree is denuded, and the ecosystem crumbles from the bottom up.<\/p>\n An ecosystem is a food web–predator and prey, the predator\u2019s predator and the prey\u2019s prey, multiply, connected and entangled, in an intricate network of interdependencies. \u00a0\u00a0Stability of the network does not come for free. \u00a0There is no \u201cinvisible hand\u201d that produces a grand harmony from a thousand selfish actors. \u00a0Rather, there is deep and ongoing coevolution. \u00a0Natural selection has taught each species cooperation and restraint via a billion years of tough love. \u00a0Those species that overreached to trash their own ecosystems brought their ecosystems crashing down, and their rapacious behaviors died with them.<\/p>\n (To this thesis, scientists in diverse fields say, \u201cof course–that\u2019s the essence of natural selection\u201d. \u00a0But professional evolutionists have been trained to deny that such processes as this can occur. \u00a0Many still insist that evolution can only work to promote selfishness, never cooperation.)<\/p>\n Ecosystems are resilient. \u00a0There is an ability to bounce back after disturbance, from a natural disaster or the loss of a keystone predator. \u00a0This, too, is a property honed by natural selection, a strength of the community that has evolved gene-by-gene in its component species. \u00a0The unexpected happens, and the ecosystem has to deal with it. \u00a0Those ecosystems that can\u2019t recover from an invasion or a decade of bad weather have long ago disappeared from the biosphere.<\/p>\n But recovery of an ecosystem requires time. \u00a0Bouncing back after a small disruption may require a dozen years or a dozen dozen. \u00a0Bouncing back from a major geologic or climate event requires thousands of years. \u00a0And in the history of multicellular life there have been five major extinctions. \u00a0\u00a0Each time, the biosphere required tens of millions of years to recover.<\/p>\n We are now in the midst of the sixth global extinction <\/a> , and as far as archaeology can tell, the anthropocene extinction is as deep and as rapid as any the earth has seen.<\/p>\n And how did we get here? \u00a0I believe the road to the Sixth Extinction was paved with ideology. \u00a0I speak not just of the Biblical ideology that says it is our place to \u201cbe fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.<\/i>” [Genesis 1:28<\/a>] \u00a0There is also the dominant version of Darwinian ideology <\/a> that admits no explicit need for cooperation, but celebrates the creative power of selfishness. \u00a0Worst, perhaps, is the capitalist ideology that assigns no value to anything that cannot be translated into dollars <\/a> , and that demands perpetual growth <\/a> in order to support a return on investments.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Does Life Extension Contribute to Overpopulation?<\/b><\/p>\n Well yes, of course it does. \u00a0Human history since the advent of agriculture has been a quest to tame the environment, to substitute predictable domestication for nature\u2019s wild ride. \u00a0We have done this to avoid death and the risk of death.<\/p>\n But only since 1840 has\u00a0there been any\u00a0 significant advance in human life expectancy <\/a> . \u00a0\u00a0Our animal nature has responded reliably, compensating with a lower birth rate that not even fundamentalist religious ideologies have been able to hold back. \u00a0But between lowered death rates and lowered birth rates there has been a gap of 30-40 years, leading\u00a0to a dramatic growth in the human population. \u00a0 Aldous Huxley <\/a> recognized this pattern as early as 1956. \u201cWhat we’ve done is \u2018death control\u2019 without balancing this with birth control at the other end\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n Currently, Africa is the last continent where technology is finally moving in to increase life expectancy, and the African birth rate is coming down, but not fast enough to avoid devastating population increases. Over the next 30 years, the population of Africa is expected to double from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion<\/a>, a larger absolute increase than the rest of the world put together.<\/p>\n Life span in 1840 was about 40 years in the world-leading European countries. In 2015 it was 83 in Japan and Scandinavia, the present world leaders. \u00a0And indeed, the increase has been quite steady and gradual, so that \u201cone year for every four\u201d is an accurate characterization. \u00a0For the first 120 years, increased life span was a story of early deaths prevented. \u00a0Before about 1970, all this progress in life expectancy was achieved by preventing people from dying young, benefits reaped from antibiotics, hygiene, and workplace safety. But since then, a remarkable thing has happened: the maximum human life span has risen, and continues to rise at an accelerating pace (as recounted by Oeppen and Vaupel<\/a>). What is more, people in their seventies and eighties are healthier today than ever before. Although there are dramatically more seniors in the population, the proportion of the population in assisted living and other dependent care situations is not rising. This is just what we wanted–we are staying active and healthy longer, retiring later, delaying the ravages of old age and \u201ccompressing morbidity\u201d of late life into a shorter endgame.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gratifying for the individual–treacherous for the collective<\/b><\/p>\n World population at 7.3 billion is about ten times what it was in 1800. \u00a0A tenfold increase over 200 years is a good run, but it\u2019s not unusual in the context of the biosphere\u2019s history. \u00a0Far from it. \u00a0Bacterial populations routinely expand by a factor of a million. \u00a0Insect populations can boom and crash. \u00a0There are many examples even of large animal populations that have grown far faster than Man.<\/p>\n But other population increases have been local, while the rise of mankind has been all over the planet. \u00a0We are now a global population, adapted to living in deserts and jungles, snow-capped mountains and forests and fields. \u00a0We mow them all down, or burn them, or pave them over. \u00a0Man has put many other predators out of business, from mastodons and sabre-tooth tigers to moas to a slew of toads and salamanders in the present age. \u00a0We inhabit every corner of the earth\u00a0and\u00a0have wrought just as much devastation on the seas–perhaps more. \u00a0Technology has enabled us to dominate\u00a0such a wide range of other species, and it has made human beings a uniquely devastating competitor.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Will we Destroy all Life on Earth?<\/b><\/p>\n Don’t give yourself airs.<\/p>\n Eradicate Gaia? Life is bigger and more robust than anything we are able to disrupt. No, the threat is not to Gaia but to ourselves. Life will eventually roar back, more diverse, more wondrously inventive than ever. But recovery from a mass extinction requires, typically, a few tens of millions of years. That’s nothing for Gaia, but for our grandchildren, 30 million years may try their patience.<\/p>\n There is life in boiling hot sulfur pits and life on the pitch black ocean floor, thriving under pressure that would crush a SCUBA tank, and life embedded in dry rock<\/a>, equally deep under the land, living on who-knows-what. There are spores that were trapped in salt deposits 250 million years ago, recovered by scientists and brought back to life <\/a> in the laboratory. To eliminate all life on earth is far beyond humanity’s destructive power for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n But can we imperil the ecosystem that sustains human life? Quite possibly we can.<\/p>\n We may imagine the worst case scenario is that we destroy all of nature, lose all biodiversity and turn the earth into a vast farm to feed 20 or 30 billion humans. \u00a0But it\u2019s a good bet that this kind of world cannot be, and it is certain that we don\u2019t know how to create it. \u00a0Ecosystems are complicated and interdependent. \u00a0From bees to bacteria, our farms and our pastures and livestock all sit atop ecosystems that we do not\u00a0 fully\u00a0 understand. \u00a0Already, we are washing into the sea <\/a> each decade topsoil that took 1,000 years to create <\/a> . \u00a0Farmers rent hives of pollinating bees, and the beekeepers are keeping them alive with increasing difficulty <\/a> . \u00a0For nitrogen-fixing bacteria, we have substituted saltpeter that we mine from the ground until there is no more of it left to mine.<\/p>\n Factory farming and antibiotics are two of mankind\u2019s most successful and heavy-handed biological interventions. \u00a0Each has worked spectacularly well for a few decades, and we have perhaps a few decades more before each will as spectacularly fail. \u00a0We have that much time to create more sustainable replacements.<\/p>\n No, a world of monoculture to feed humans is not a viable world. \u00a0We are animals. \u00a0From an ecosystem we derived, and, for the foreseeable future, on a natural ecosystem we will continue to depend. \u00a0We are not nearly smart enough to build an artificial ecosystem <\/a> to support human monoculture. \u00a0In all likelihood, the end of natural ecology would be the end of humanity.<\/p>\n Poets bemoan <\/a> the loss of our spiritual connection to nature. \u00a0Meanwhile, ecologists warn us <\/a> that we are starving more than our spirits. \u00a0We can\u2019t engineer our way out of this. \u00a0We don\u2019t know how. \u00a0We can\u2019t understand or model ecosystems, so we have no idea how to move them in a given direction, even if humanity had the collective will to do so. \u00a0If we destroy the ecosystem we have, we will have to wait for nature to take her course, and the wait is likely to be tens of\u00a0millions of years.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Libertarian ethic<\/b><\/p>\n Many of my colleagues in the life extension community lean to libertarianism, and in some ways I am with them. \u00a0I am frightened by our disappearing Bill of Rights, corporate takeover of the Free Press, exceptions to habeas corpus<\/i>, wholesale domestic surveillance–and all this in service to perpetual war which most Americans want no part of.<\/p>\n But overpopulation and ecological collapse are problems that cannot be addressed individually. \u00a0China realized decades ago that we cannot allow each family to decide how many children they wish to have. \u00a0Still less can we condone men who impregnate women and walk away; and worst are the institutions that seek to preserve the morals of other people\u2019s children by denying them knowledge of basic reproductive biology.<\/p>\n We will have to find ways to come together. \u00a0The good news is that polls show consistently <\/a> that people are aware of the threat and willing to put aside their own (short-term) economic interest to address it. \u00a0(This despite concerted efforts <\/a> to downplay the issue in the media.) \u00a0The bad news is that present political structures will not address the problem. \u00a0Our existing political order is, in fact, a big part of the problem. \u00a0Politics is dominated by capitalist megacorporations that have their own agenda, and preserving the ecological foundation of human life is not part of it. \u00a0Subversion of democracy by capitalism may have taken root in America and West Europe, but it is now a global blight.<\/p>\n We must\u00a0work around government, the corporate media, the megacorporations and the whole capitalist economy. \u00a0We must come together to consolidate and act on an existing consensus\u00a0for<\/p>\n I invite your thoughts and ideas about how to do this.<\/p>\n The more dramatic images in this column were taken from the book <\/i> Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot <\/i><\/a> , published this year and available free online or for purchase in hard copy. <\/i><\/p>\n * Aging genes or the equivalent, combinations and epigenetic networks that work to ensure that our bodies weaken and ultimately self-destruct over time.<\/p>\n ** Since they are hermaphrodites, each worm can breed without a partner, and so needs only 2 surviving offspring rather than 4 to double its population.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"art](\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/12\/Maddy-trophic-pyramid3-1.jpg\")
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