We’re Drowning In Our Own Trash
Posted July 11, 2008
Thomas Malthus has suddenly become popular again. While Americans are concerned about fuel prices, much of the rest of the world is concerned about food prices. In countries like Egypt and Bangladesh, and in regions of Africa, riots have erupted over a shortage of food. In other countries, like China and India, when rice is shipped, it’s shipped under the protection of armed guards.
Global production simply can’t keep up with global consumption. And so people are asking: Was Malthus right?
Malthus, an economist and demographer from the 19th century, is known for predicting that population growth moves more quickly than the expansion of food production. As he former moves geometrically, and the latter arithmetically, its inevitable that population overcomes production. As a result, Malthus predicted, people will starve.
Many experts now believe that the 19th century proved Malthus incorrect. The Green Revolution increased global food production, helping it keep pace with global population growth. It allowed us to keep consuming.
But with anything you produce, you also have waste. And, given the growing consumption, unless one is very careful about production technologies, you have waste on a massive scale. As photographs by Chris Jordan and our daily experience of taking out the trash and seeing litter everywhere can testify, our consumption of goods leads to an overwhelming volume of trash. So much so that the scale of the numbers can be difficult to comprehend. Consider some numbers Jordan uses:
- Two million plastic beverage bottles are used in the US every five minutes.
- 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags are used in the US every hour.
- 426,000 cell phones are retired in the US every day.
- While 106,000 aluminum cans are used in the US every thirty seconds.
And that’s just the waste we can see. Waste gases from power plants are filling the air that we breathe, leading to the early deaths of tens of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands or millions around the world. Invisible carbon dioxide is turning the oceans so acidic that shell fish are having a harder time growing their shells while it changes our entire planet’s climate.
The point here is pretty clear. We’re drowning in a sea of our own waste.
This point changes the way we have to understand Malthus. For him, it was a two-way balance between consumption and production. Now, it’s a three-way balance between production, consumption, and waste.
And it’s no longer simply a question of whether we can have another Green Revolution to increase production, because even if we did that we would only increase our waste problem.
We have to begin addressing this question of waste. If we are to feed more people – and we will have to, given predictions of global population growths – than we should also free more people of the sea of garbage and poison and waste our production has created.
Part of this will be to examine of our own, personal consumption habits. Each of us should find ways to reduce our waste, whether it’s by bringing lunch to work, or by using cloth bags at the grocery store, or by driving smaller cars. Whatever it is that works for you, I’d urge you to try it.
Will that be enough? Certainly not. But it is a start. A start to be expanded on every day.
(Photo credit: Chris Jordan, www.chrisjordan.com)
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Comments
Paula Thornton — Jul 14 2008 09:44 AM
Thanks. This is critical information, succinctly represented for further use.
Earl Killian — Jul 14 2008 11:25 AM
Malthus should be read as exponential growth forever is clearly impossible in a finite world. How could that be wrong? High school students have all the math they need to calculate when a given growth rate has the mass of any quantity exceed the mass of the Earth (e.g. the mass of humans in 1500 years at 2% growth). Growth on Earth will certainly reach a limit; that is a mathematical certainty.
The mistake is to predict the end of growth early. When you're wrong, foolish people conclude growth will never end instead of realizing you made an incorrect assumption for some parameter and were off by a few hundred years. Malthusian is often used as a pejorative today because Malthus didn't foresee the green revolution (he also didn't foresee the increase in population growth rate on the other side of the ledger). But the green revolution cannot keep up with growth forever. Nothing can on a finite planet.
Take merely the time that certain land has been continuously farmed in China (the subject of D.F.H.King's wonderful 1911 book, Farmers of Forty Centuries). Just 2% growth for 4,000 years multiplies what you start with by 25,158,633,448,643,996,575,315,407,169,003,337.
2% per year growth yields a human population of 148 trillion in 505 years, which is one person per square meter of land on Earth. I suppose we can go vertical or into the oceans. In 613 years, 2% gives 1253 trillion people. At that point earth’s 3850 ZJ of sunlight per year (land and ocean) is insufficient to feed people, assuming 100% efficiency at converting it to food (forget about transportation, heating, or cooling...). The mass of the Earth is an obvious upperbound for the human population, but so is the mass of the ocean, since we are mostly water. We reach that limit in 1100 years.
Practical limits are obviously much sooner than these calculations suggest. These limits apply not just to human population, but growth of any sort.
Growth is possible for short periods of time (centuries). Then comes collapse, dark ages, wars, depressions, etc. to wipe out growth and keep things within bounds. There is no mathematical escape from this reality.
sinz52 — Jul 14 2008 06:53 PM
The last time overpopulation fears were raised, it was Paul Ehrlich raising them in 1968 with his "Population Bomb" book. He was talking mostly about the Western world, obsessed with slowing down development in the West (but not the Third World) as are most enviros today.
What he overlook was that increasing affluence, and the liberation of women to take advantage of that affluence by having their own careers, would result in a FALLING birth rate. Now, the birth rate in countries like Germany is below replacement levels. If it weren't for immigration, Germany's population would be declining every year. The population of the U.S. would be nearly stable if it were not for immigration.
What that proves is that the answer to "overpopulation" is economic affluence and women's liberation. If the Third World were as affluent, and its society were as fair to women as Western societies were, their population growth rate would fall dramatically. In fact, in newly affluent countries like the Pacific Rim, it already is.
And economic affluence requires the expenditure of a lot of energy.
Earl Killian — Jul 16 2008 01:17 PM
sinz52, First, Amartya Sen has argued (e.g. his book Poverty and Famines) that it is not affluence but health care that matters, so the program would be health care and educating women. Affluence is simply correlated with health care.
More important, it is not only population that is a problem, but all growth. Take any quantity and multiply it by 1.02^4000 (25,158,633,448,643,996,575,315,407,169,003,337) or even 1.01^4000 and you've got a problem. Garrett Hardin’s 1963 essay The Cybernetics of Competition illustrated the point with wealth:
"Suppose, for example, that the thirty pieces of silver which Judas earned by betraying Jesus had been put out at 3 percent interest. If we assume these pieces of silver were dollars, the savings account would today amount to a bit more than 2 × 10^26 dollars, or 70 million billion dollars for every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth."
Of course we never see growth go on this long; dark ages, depressions, wars, etc. always intervene to reset things. Growth requires such periodic resets; that is how Malthus should be read, IMO.
Even the overpopulation prescription ignores something basic about the exponential function. Sum up a bunch of individual growth functions (e.g. representing different groups), some negative, some positive. In the long term, the growth with the largest exponent dominates all others. You must achieve zero population growth everywhere simultaneously. Leave even one group/country/culture out of your program, and they eventually dominate the world (through emmigration), or suffer Malthusian consequences. Such an observation lead to Hardin's lifeboat essay, which is a challenging read.
Tom Cartwright — Jul 16 2008 01:45 PM
Speaking of waste, does anyone wonder how much oil flows through businesses like Jiffy Lube every day? Nevermind the fact they recycle oil - they still waste it. How?
By putting those little stickers on every car they service reminding folks to change their oil in 3,000 miles. This exceeds most manufacturers reccomendations and is totally unnecessary, except to increase their business. What to do? We should ban the sale and use of non-synthetic motor oil. With synthetic oil, one gets better gas mileage, engines last longer, and there's less frequent changes required. Sure it costs more, but the savings could be realized from fewer changes.
Anyone out there disagree?