I'm Jonathan Tomkin from

the University of Illinois. This is the last lecture

for this week. We're going to be summing up how overall vision of some of the
important
concepts behind sustainability by looking at how earlier thinkers worried
about population growth. We'll see that their worries are very similar to
the worries of today. This is a diagram of
the world's population. This does not appear to be
a sustainable growth pattern, it looks near exponential. We'll discuss why this is
unsustainable in this lecture. But next week we'll find
out if it really is. Global population is
seven billion now. Most recent growth rates for world population is
about one percent, and if that were to continue
that would imply that the global population will
double in about 70 years. Imagine 14 billion
people by 2080. What would happen if
this came to pass? It's a tough question, but
luckily for us somebody has already been doing
the hard thinking on this 200 years ago. Thomas Malthus thought that this kind of
growth
was not sustainable, and he wrote down
his reasoning in 1798. Many of these concerns are
very relevant for today. Let's explore his reasoning. Firstly,he noted that
any population growth that was exponential, this means that it doubles
in any given period of time. So here on this slide, I have a picture of the world
population
growth and an example of how an exponential
growth might happen, for every additional unit of
time the population doubles. So population goes
from one to two, it doubles to four,
it doubles to eight, and it doubles to 16. That is an exponential
pattern of growth. If we have a one
percent growth rate, as we see in the world today, this implies that there is an
annual doubling
every 70 years. So you could imagine
for this time amount, that every 70 year step would double the amount of
population on the planet. Secondly, he assume that agricultural production
was arithmetic, and its growth or
geometric is enough. That is it increases with
time in a straight line. So as you can see
through the starter set, perhaps it starts out at two, and then we add two
for every time step, so it goes to two,
four, six, eight, 10. That's how much food we can produce per population,
if you like. Now, take a minute to think about what would
actually happen, if we tried to compare
these two curves. You can either imagine by filling in the spaces
on this graph, or you can actually pull out a node pattern sketch
for yourself. On the x-axis put the time, we're doing steps one, two, three, four
and so on. On the y-axis, we have
the units of either population, or the amount of food produced. So take a minute to
either think about this, or sketch it out
before you continue. Your two curves should
look something like this, population increases at a greater and greater rate,
it's exponential. While food production increases
at a constant rate. If one unit of food is needed
for one unit of population, what happens after the point where the two curves
intersect? Again, I want you
to take a minute, and either note down, or just think what would happen
to the world population, or the population of the example, after this point of
intersection. The system breaks down. Famine, war, or disease have to prevent the
population are
exceeding the food supply. We can't have more
people and there is food to supply their need for. This point of intersection was
described by,
Thomas Malthus says, the point of crisis
and it has since, become known as
a Malthusian catastrophe. Note that if the population is on the same curve as
the food produced, the world is always
balanced on starvation. So this means that for
the vast majority of people, life is a battle just to put
enough food on the table. This is what concerned
Malthus the most. That population growth
would inevitably lead to a decrease
in living standards. There'll be mass impoverishment, as people scrambled to
get enough food to eat. So this is a very pessimistic
view of the future. In a Malthusian catastrophe, living standards can never
increase in the long run. They are always reduced
to subsistence level. Let's change the model
a little bit to make it a little
bit more consistent, with what I spoke about
in the last lecture. Instead of an arithmetic
growth level, let's move back to that
carrying capacity idea. Remember how the reindeer
could only grow past this carrying capacity for a certain amount of time
for crashing back to Earth? We'll explore this idea
in more detail later, but for now think
of it as an idea of how much population
could be supported. Usually food is the limit, as in the case of reindeer. Other
natural limits
could be pollution, energy, water, space to live. In this case, there would be a
flat line as shown by
the green line in the figure. Now, we reach a point of
crisis and population crashes, and this time, we're kept to that straight level
that carrying capacity. Note that doubling
the food supply, so if we have a new technology, a new green revolution, and new
ability to create food, merely delays the inevitable. In the world's case, if we're
growing at one percent, per year, if we have a new ability, a new technology, to
double
the food supply available. All we do is postpone
this crash into subsistence misery by 70 years. As you can see in this graph, all
we do is delay
the inevitable, because we shift up
the carrying capacity, we double the carrying
capacity of the Earth, but because at
current growth rates, we're going to have double
the population in 70 years. Then all we've done is bought 70 years more time before
we reach this catastrophe point, where we're all on
the edge of starvation. This inevitably comes from the exponential growth
in population. So if population is
always exponential, like in that reindeer case
until the crash, then we're always destined to hit this wall of starvation. It's
even more depressing, If you think that we've gone beyond the carrying capacity. So
for example you might
say that modern agriculture is too dependent on fossil fuels, and since fossil
fuels
will eventually run out, then we're artificially living above our carrying
capacity. So we can imagine then, that if we have a population that lives
above the carrying capacity, according to the
Malthusian model, we are destined for a crash. So in other words, the
population will collapse. Of course, a
population collapse of a large magnitude would probably collapse
society as well. Could civilization survive, if we only had half enough food
to go around. There are lots of
things that could follow this pattern
beyond population. Of course, we might think about mined goods including
energy, like fossil fuels, but also essential resources, or some would say well
that we're mining top soils in
modern agriculture. So you can use this sort
of Malthusian model, not just for population
but for lots of other potentially
unsustainable systems. Now it turns out, that we did not have
the sort of collapse that Malthus predicted over
the last 200 years. But in defense of Malthus, his model was essentially correct up
until the point of
time in which he wrote it. This is an image of urban poverty in
18th century Britain. At this point in time, the masses of Britain
were very poor. The increases in
agricultural productivity seen over the last couple
of centuries in Britain, had done very little to
alleviate this poverty because population growth had indeed matched this increase
in the carrying capacity
of the country. In fact, it's been argued that living standards in
18th century Britain, that is for the average
person living in the country, were lower than they were for the stone age peoples
that they replaced. The stone age peoples
were much less numerous. They were far less people, but they actually
had more calories, and they had more protein,
and they had more meat. So it has been argued that
being a median person, that is the middle person in 18th century Britain meant
that you had a worse life, than you would if you were a Stone Age hunter
and the gatherer. So Malthus's model was a very good description
of what had happened, over the past few thousand
years in Britain. In fact, the only times that the average Britain
was better off, was when there was a catastrophe
from other reasons. So for example, when there
was the Black Death, about a third of all the people on
the island were killed, and this suddenly
meant that there was much more land available, and so the demand
for labor went up, and at that point in time, the average peasant farmer enjoyed a
higher standard of living than they did previously, or afterwards once the
population came back up to that
carrying capacity level. This is all very consistent
with a Malthusian worldview. So we should remember that, when we're thinking
about this model. The reason why I bring this
up is because otherwise, Malthus made a spectacularly wrong prediction
about the future. This is England's population. The blue line represents
the population change over time, and the yellow dot is when
Malthus published his model. As you can see, what happened directly after Malthus
published the model, was that there was
an enormous increase in the population of England, the more the population doubled,
then doubled once more, and has almost doubled again, in the last 200 years. Not
only that,
the average Britain is far wealthier today than
they were 200 years ago. The Industrial Revolution meant, that the average person
in the country has about 15 times as much wealth today as they did 200 years ago,
when Malthus wrote
his predictions. So rising populations has
not led to mass starvation. Not only that, rising populations has not made people
poorer. In fact in both of these cases, the reverse has happened. People in Britain
are more
numerous and wealthier, than they were 200 years ago. People make Malthusian
predictions today. This is often called
Neo-Malthusian, it's new Malthusian prediction. Recent Neo-Malthusian
predictions have been as bad as the predictions made
by Malthus 200 years ago. For example, Paul Ehrlich, wrote in 1967 that
the battle to feed all of humanity is over in
the 1970's and 1980's, hundreds of millions of
people will starve to death, in spite of any crash programs
embarked upon now. Now, this statement
was made in 1967, and I've marked this with
a yellow dot on this graph. The blue line is
the world population since then, the population has doubled
since the prediction was made, as has the world
income per person. So people are both
wealthier and more numerous than they were when
this prediction was made. As you can see the very
opposite of what a Malthusian would predict has
happened across the world. This thinking may
indirectly influence a lot of other sorts of documents we read when we think
about sustainability. This is from one of
the very early texts that considered
sustainability issues, it's for the Agenda 21 document from the Rio Earth Summit.
Baye suggested in
this document than a less significant
changes were made to the world economy
and social systems. This was in 1992,
we can expect to have the same sorts of
issues Baye talked about, perpetuation of disparities
between nations, or worsening of poverty, more hunger, ill health,
and literacy. Now on all of these measures, the reverse has happened. Globally,
there's more wealth, there's less illiteracy,
there's better health. So we have to be aware
that when we hear about these Malthusian predictions
that it is following a model that sometimes works,
and sometimes doesn't. Now it is possible that we
are living on borrowed time, and that the only reason why these predictions have
failed, these more recent predictions, is because they're just
a little bit too early. Maybe we're living on
unsustainable practices, just like the reindeer
were for so many years. Surely there must be some limit to how much population
growth we can have. I think that's probably true, but in the next set of lectures,
we're going to talk
about population growth, and we're going to find out that it's not all doom and
gloom. Produced by OCE Atlas
Digital Media at the University of Illinois
Urbana Champaign.