Reading last Sunday's "Perspectives" section of the paper -- the op-eds and letters-to-the-editor -- I suddenly had a horrible feeling. There were letters and editorials about a number of subjects -- limiting urban sprawl, the price of gas, mountain lions, the federal government's new plans to increase "harvesting" of timber in the national forests, the threat of a future battle between the U.S. and China for Middle Eastern oil. But, you know, it suddenly struck me that almost everything discussed had to do with one simple fact: the human population of this planet, which was perhaps a bit less than three billion when I was born, hit six billion a year or so ago, and is still growing.
We think of this as a third-world problem, mostly, but right here in California ... well, when my family moved here in 1960, the population was fifteen million. Today it's thirty-five million, if I remember correctly. If it increases by the same amount over the next 45 years, by 2050 the population of California will be fifty-five million -- about half the population density of modern Japan. If it increase at the same rate, it will be pushing eighty-two million. That is more than a quarter of the population of the entire United States in 2004.
What does this mean? People need certain things. They need a place to stand (or, taking up more space, a place to lie down). They need energy, usually in the form of food. They need water. They need some place to dispose of their waste products. (Computers, TV sets and SUVs are luxuries. People don't need them.)
Let's consider water for a moment. Do we have enough? I don't think so. Once upon a time, the word "drought" meant "less than the normal amount of rain falling". Today we use it differently: it means "less than an optimal amount of water per capita". Today, we seem to hear the word "drought" bandied about every year. Does this mean that there is actually less water than there used to be? No, it simply means that there is a whole lot more capita than there used to be.
It was a study of water resources that convinced the Chinese, a third of a century ago, to institute the one-child-per-family rule. That rule, while perhaps not as strictly enforced as it might be, has had an enormous effect on Chinese population growth. Unfortunately, because of the demographics of the situation, the effect was not as enormous as it might be: the Chinese population has grown by around 300 million during that 35-year period, i.e., it has added a population equivalent to the entire United States. Still, one can't sneer; the growth rate has slowed considerably, and is far less than that of California. Maybe, if it doesn't change the rules yet again, Chinese population will top out at about one and a half billion sometime in this century. That will only be about 50% more than China has water resources to serve (hence, one may suppose, the Three Gorges Dam, which Western environmentalists have decried as a sin against the Chinese environment).
We talk about "limiting sprawl", maintaining green belts, etc. Problem is that, as you add people, you have to put them somewhere, and that somewhere is, of necessity, going to be in places not already occupied by other people. You are going to have to provide them with food not already being eaten by others, with water not already being drunk by their neighbors, with waste disposal locations not already full of their predecessors' waste. This means that green belts must give way to houses and factory farms and waste treatment plants and landfills, that urban regions will sprawl further and further out, that forests must continue to be leveled to build houses. With the best will in the world, this is unavoidable.
And the mountain lions, which I mentioned? When it comes to a competition between six or ten or eighteen billion people and a few mountain lions for habitat, I can tell which ones will have to give way, which ones have already given way.
Is there a solution? The Chinese experiment would work if imposed early enough and maintained long enough. Unfortunately, nobody but the Chinese seem interested in it -- India, whose population has hit the levels China's reached three decades ago, is not even considering it, and, of course, the United States, still probably a century and a half short of that billion, simply sneers at it. So, no, I don't think that there's a solution in the ordinary sense of the word.
Nature, of course, always has her own solutions.
Of course, there are certain things that can be changed in society, and sprawl is to some extent unavoidable. government shouldn't, IMHO, limit a woman's right to choose (whether that choice is to have no babies, or 2, or 10) but the number one best way to get women to choose to have fewer children is education. so we can invest in our country's education. and you say that 'of necessity,' the places we put new people are going to be places already not occupied. . .that is a defeatist attitude, when in fact there are *plenty* of spaces already paved over and 'occupied' but in fact devoid of humanity. Think of all the thousands or millions of acres covered by dead malls and empty retail spaces littering our country, and condemned or empty houses. Two friends of mine just bought a house that was recommended to be condemned, and instead they ripped out basically everything but the frame, --but salvaged old growth Douglas Fir planks from the area in the process, and found hardwoods underneath that can be refinished, and prevented the waste of all the materials that go into building a brand new home. Numerous examplse in Portland have proven that creating an urban growth boundary and the subsequent infill of land improve a municipality's health, instead of the opposite. People in this country are just too afraid that we'll all end up living in crowded hovels if we get too close to our neighbors.
</rant>
Oh and here is an awesome site of documented dead retail spaces across the country:
http://www.deadmalls.com