President's Note, September 2024

“The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism — an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”

— Kathryn Schulz, “The Really Big One,” The New Yorker

Population Connection member and Seattle environmental attorney Rick Aramburu put me on to a terrifying 2015 New Yorker story about the Cascadia subduction zone, a coastal area from British Columbia through Washington and Oregon and into California. That’s where a massive earthquake, possibly 15 times greater than the largest potential quake along the San Andreas Fault, will take place — tomorrow, or perhaps some 800 years from now — an inconsequential time difference geologically, but a matter of life and death for inhabitants, human and otherwise. Examining the buildup of human population, the author observed that we are living in an “age of ecological reckoning.” She asked, “How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions?”

Since 1800, our population has exploded as we’ve recklessly drawn down natural capital that took eons to accumulate. Call it overdraft, overshoot, or boneheadedness, this irrefutable truth has inevitable consequences.

Human population and greenhouse gas emissions have grown in tandem. Cataclysmic changes are already baked in, no pun intended. By 2050, we may see “a 20% weakening of the famous North Atlantic overturning circulation which keeps Europe’s climate mild,” according to one recent analysis. A separate study warns that failure of this oceanic system “would disrupt the climate globally, shifting Asian monsoon rainfall patterns and even reversing the rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon.” Peter Ditlevsen at the University of Copenhagen states that “You cannot adapt to this. There’s some studies of what happens to agriculture in Great Britain, and it becomes like trying to grow potatoes in Northern Norway.”

India, the most populous nation on Earth, projects a ninefold increase in home air conditioning by 2050. As temperatures soar, coal-generated electricity in India is rising while renewable sources decline. We just witnessed the extinction in the US of the Key Largo tree cactus. It’s the first species we’ve lost due to sea level rise, but it won’t be the last. Modern Homo sapiens resembles an adolescent who hasn’t yet mastered impulse control, speeding down the highway, pedal to the metal.

We can do better. When women are educated, have access to reproductive health services, and have true reproductive autonomy, the vast majority choose smaller families. And we have scientific data (widely ignored by our friends in the environmental community) that investment in family planning is the single most cost-effective way to meet the twin challenges of population growth and the climate crisis.

John Seager
john@popconnect.org