Suffering In Silence

The always incisive Emmett Duffy over on The Natural Patriot has put out a call for scientists to speak out. But Emmett admits, doing so will force many in the scientific community to step out of their comfort zones,

My colleague John Feeney has been working tirelessly to break through the widespread taboo against discussing the root cause of global society’s manifold, seemingly unrelated, yet accelerating problems: there are too many of us. And we use too many resources, of course, but let’s not let that divert our attention from the very basic fact that the earth is finite and we cannot sustain continual growth in population or per capita resource use.

Can I get an Amen?!

Overpopulation is indeed the elephant in the room in my particular field of coral reef conservation. During last year's 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Florida--a twice decade global gathering of coral reef scientists and conservationists--we were presented with almost non-stop reporting of threats to coral reefs. Water quality decline, overfishing, recreational overuse, coastal development, elevated sea surface temperatures, acidification, coral predator imbalances, invasive species... the list goes on. But if memory serves, only a single panelist during a single discussion was willing to mention the unmentionable: the real driver behind coral reef decline is that there are too damn many of us.

This admission was met with enthusiastic applause. Yet when discussion began to move towards the role and responsibility of the coral reef scientific community to offer recommendations to address this reality, you could almost feel the room's angst level rising. There was vocal opposition to any suggestions that coral scientists (any scientists?) should play a proscriptive role in human population planning. The building unease was broken only after one panelist offered the suggested slogan, "Save Coral Reefs: Wear a Condom!"

As a fellow ocean scientist with an inordinate fondness for coral reefs, I know Emmett would be among the first to point out that science has effectively connected the dots for human culpability in coral reef decline. In research published last year in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, author Camilo Mora documents the findings from a study of 322 reef sites across 13 countries in the Caribbean. The study provided compelling evidence that proximity to a large human population spells bad news for the survival of reefs. Mora warned,

The expected increase of the world's human population from 6 billion today to 9 billion for the year 2050 suggests that coral reefs are likely to witness a significant ecological crisis in the coming half century if effective conservation strategies, including policies on population planning, are not implemented soon.

Yet despite the gloomy prognosis for reefs at ICRS and more than a year following Mora's paper, the coral science and conservation communities seem to have been able to only rally behind campaigns that speak to the symptoms but not the root cause of the problem.

What's behind the taboo on telling it like it is? I must admit I've been spending a lot of time dwelling on how to broach this overpopulation issue in my own work. At a recent organizational retreat where we were tasked to brainstorm what we believe we must overcome in order to meet our conservation mission, the same old chestnuts were tossed around: we're fighting against limited time, apathy, ignorance, limited resources. You get the idea. But when I suggested that overpopulation and the fact that we are exceeding the carrying capacity of our planet is the real enemy, I got the sense that nobody wanted to touch that with a ten foot pole.

But if we in the NGO world are afraid to talk about the smoking gun of overpopulation, precisely who is going to take the lead?

Perhaps it's fitting that I'm writing this on the eve of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, given that Darwin himself struggled with this very issue in formulating his theory of Natural Selection. Darwin was struck by the ideas of English political economist Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus observed that in nature, plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive. Based on his observations of the decline of living conditions in nineteenth century England, he also argued that humans too are capable of overproducing if left unchecked. Malthus concluded that unless family size was regulated, famine and poverty would become globally epidemic. For Malthus, poverty and famine were natural outcomes of population growth in a world of finite resources.

Darwin reasoned that this concept of superfecundity (producing more offspring than can survive) establishes a competitive environment among members of a species, and that the variation would produce some individuals with a slightly greater chance of survival. All well and good for driving evolutionary change. But not so much when civilization and technology favors population growth at a rate incommensurate with natural resource stability. The center simply cannot hold.

There are no easy answers here, and I'm not clever enough to offer a solution. But I do know that hope seems elusive indeed if we can't talk about this as a scientific and conservation community.

In my own small effort to promote discussion, I can at least follow Emmet's wise lead in recommending that you add your own voice to John Feeney's Global Population Speak Out (GPSO) initiative. Take it from an out, loud, and proud gay man: there is strength in numbers. If a quorum of scientists and scholars, environmental, science, and social policy writers, editors, and activists, staff members of environmental NGOs, politicians, and a variety of prominent public figures all speak out, perhaps we might weaken the taboo and bring population issues to a more prominent position in the global discussion.