A recent letter to the Public Forum asserts that there's more than enough land to hold all current humans and many more. The only problem is finding the resources to maintain a growing population, and human ingenuity will provide those as it has in the past.
But is such breezy complacency justified? Human population grows exponentially -- like compound interest. To illustrate, there is the story of the Persian courtier who gave the king a beautiful chessboard. The king asked him what he would like in return. The courtier said he would like one grain of rice for the first square, two for the second, and so on -- double the rice for each square.
To the king's astonishment, it would have required over a million grains of rice by the 21st square, over a trillion by the 41st, and more than all the rice in the world for the final squares.
Most recently, the global population doubled in only 46 years. There are now close to 7 billion humans. So how are the resources to sustain an exponentially growing population holding up? Let's look at just one of them -- oil.
Inhabitants of the United States literally eat oil. Oil is necessary to make the fertilizer and pesticides used on our crops; to irrigate them; and to fuel the machinery used to plant, cultivate, and harvest them. In one study conducted in 1994, it was calculated that feeding each American each year required the equivalent of 400 gallons of oil, exclusive of the energy, mainly oil, needed for packaging, refrigeration, transportation, and cooking. The authors calculated that for every calorie of food energy delivered to the consumer, 10 calories of other energy, mostly oil, are required. The lesson is clear: Without oil we starve.
So how fares the oil basket into which we have put so many eggs? Well, it's looking quite frail. Oil is a limited resource. Each successful well exhibits an early rise in production, a tapering off as production reaches a maximum (peak), and a decline until it is no longer economical to pump more. As with each well, so with entire fields and world production as a whole. U.S. production peaked in 1970.
Oil production is already irreversibly declining in at least 54 of the 65 most important producing countries, and information from OPEC countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, is sketchy and suspect. At the beginning of August, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, which monitors oil supply and demand, stated that the IEA believes world production may peak by 2020 and that an oil crunch is possible any time after 2010. Other experts believe the peak is already here.
As oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, so will food. Every new mouth will put more pressure on the resource.
Space does not permit a detailed analysis, but there is now no complete substitute for oil and there is none in prospect--at least within the short time before the emergency is fully upon us. Google "peak oil" for full information.
While oil is the most urgent impending resource shortage, others are close behind, including metals, phosphorus, topsoil, and water. An exponentially growing population can exhaust them all with terrifying rapidity. Nor can the problems of our waste be ignored -- climate change is the most apparent.
The writing is on the wall. We must begin stringently conserving our resources, and that must include curbing our numbers. If we fail to do so, nature will do it for us the old-fashioned way -- through drought, disease and famine.
A. Robert Thurman is a retired administrative law judge from the Utah Public Service Commission, a former attorney with a natural resources firm, and a former Tribune staffer.