Tag Archives: population

Chickadee Explosion

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Chestnut backed chickadee adult tending to a brood in one of my “rustic” nest boxes.

As I’ve brought up before, when contemplating the pros and cons of low infant mortality for humans, chickadees invariably come to mind. Part of the reason for this is that I have made and installed a number of nest boxes tailored for tiny birds. The most frequent tenants during breeding season are chestnut-backed chickadees, but I also get violet-green swallows, red-breasted nuthatches, and less often black-capped chickadees and Bewick’s wrens.

In fact, a recent article in the New York Times—in questioning the overall value of feeding birds in the UK—cites the apparent chick-rearing “success” of one of their chickadee equivalents (blue tit), boosted by bird-feeding practices. The article indicates that the tit’s “success” is upsetting biodiversity by displacing other woodland cavity-nesters, thereby leading to decline and threatening the survival of other species. I had already planned to write a post on a hypothetical chickadee explosion, and this article reinforced that impulse as a real-live case-in-point.

In this post, we’ll explore the absurd consequences that would obtain if medical intervention somehow eliminated fledgling mortality among chickadees, so that all the birds in a brood reached reproductive age. The results become disastrous in a shockingly-short time. Go ahead and make a guess as to how long before chickadees overwhelm the entire Community of Life. I may have biased you already by saying it’s shockingly short. But given that I call the 10,000 year period since agriculture began “a flash” on ecological scales, who knows what I even mean by “short.” Ignoring my characterization, then, what does your intuition say?

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The Smartphone Hypothesis

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By MIKI Yoshihito (Wikimedia Commons)

It was about two years ago when the global downturn in fertility came onto my radar, falling out of my attempt to reconcile the disconnect between observed population trends that suggested a possible peak before 2050 and UN projections that put it in the 2080s (see initial post). As made clear in subsequent posts and a video, year after embarrassing year, UN projections kept failing to anticipate tanking fertility around the globe.

The trend really is astounding. Over two-thirds of humans on the planet live in countries whose fertility has fallen below replacement levels, and generally still heading downward. In a decade or so, when populations in affluent countries around the world have all peaked and started declining, we’ll realize that we can’t manufacture twenty-something-year-old humans who were never born so that they may pick up the reproductive torch. In this sense, the train has already left the station. Population decline is arriving soon at an affluent country near you. Indeed, it’s already started declining in dozens of countries like Japan, China, Italy, etc.

While these countries are currently buffered by engaging in a still-growing global market, as more join the club there will be nowhere left to hide: the affluent consumer-base will inevitably contract. Add to this an increasing ratio of elder-dependents to working-age people and economies will be circling the drain. Those who worship economic growth are sounding the alarm (e.g., Vance, Musk), justifiable in their panic insofar as money is what matters most. But to the extent that economies wreck ecologies, I’m rooting for the other team—and population decline sounds perfectly peachy, even if the adjustment will be rough.

I can’t tell you how many YouTube videos I’ve watched in an effort to better understand drivers behind these trends. This post was motivated by one such video that seemed worth sharing. The hypothesis involves smartphones, which I had heard before without it making much of an impression: one of many plausible “theories.” Then I saw the data.

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8 Billion Will Die!

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By Michael Dornbierer from Wikimedia Commons

Whenever I suggest that humans might be better off living in a mode much closer to our original ecological context as small-band immediate-return hunter-gatherers, some heads inevitably explode, inviting a torrent of pushback. I have learned from my own head-exploding experiences that the phenomenon traces to a condition of multiple immediate reactions stumbling over each other as they vie for expression at the same time. The neurological traffic jam leaves us speechless—or stammering—as our brain sorts out who goes first.

One of the most common reactions is that abandoning agriculture is tantamount to committing many billions of people to death, since the planet can’t support billions of hunter-gatherers—especially given the dire toll on ecological health already accumulated.

Such a reaction definitely contains elements of truth, but also a few unexamined assumptions. The outcome need not be reprehensible for several reasons.

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Food Makes Babies

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From Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Daniel Quinn returned to the theme that “food makes babies” so often in his writings that it would seem he was continually dissatisfied either with the clarity of his case, or with objections people had, or both. I get it. I often return over and over to the same thorny themes, each time thinking I’ll finally nail it. The exercise is as much for improving internal clarity as anything.

Many of the comments following my coverage of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael focused on the food–baby issue. The more recent post on The Story of B dwells on the topic as well, so I figured it would be worth dedicating a post to the matter, trying to covering all the angles.

The statement that increasing food production leads to increases in population touches a nerve for some people, which is what makes it a valuable topic to explore. For some, the statement seems to be an affront to their notion of control. It implies that humans are “no more than” animals, which takes direct aim at our most prized mythology: human supremacism—relating to Ishmael’s second dirty trick: that we “evolved from the slime”—barely tolerated by modernists, but only in a narrow technical sense.

Now, the objections are not without demonstrable legitimacy. In this post, I will start with the basics, point out key objections, then see what we can make of it.

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Life Expectations

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A while back, I came across a fascinating paper from 2007 by Gurven and Kaplan on longevity among hunter-gatherers that helped me understand aspects of what life was (and is) like outside of modernity. My interest is both a matter of pure curiosity, and to gain perspective on how desperate life feels—or doesn’t—to members of pre-agricultural (ecological) cultures.

I wrote last year about the perceived perils of early human life in Desperate Odds, in the context that to us members of modernity, having never been weened from the teat of agricultural output, it seems like life without agriculture (and supermarkets) would be a virtual death sentence. Add to this a perceived vulnerability to predation from lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), and the mental image that emerges—as depicted by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael—is of a stressed and starving hunter following the tracks of elusive prey as twilight darkens, while a predator is close on his trail, audibly breathing. It feels like a knife edge of survival: everything has to go just right, but teeters on all going horribly wrong.

The core argument from the Desperate Odds post was that surviving to reproductive age was obviously common, or our species would wink out. This simple fact makes daily survival a near-guarantee—enough so that fear of death is not top-of-mind most of the time, allowing most brain cycles to go toward less-troubled, routine activities.

It was either in preparing that post or in connection with A Lifetime Ago that I ran across the aforementioned paper. In this post, I dig in to see what insights can be gained from survival models for various human cultures.

The Attention-Grabber

Let’s start with the plot that caught my eye and drew me in, which is Figure 3 in the paper.

Figure 3 from motivating paper.

Let’s see if it draws you in as well.

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Your Order, Please?

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This may come as a surprise, but people are capable of holding unsupported notions…unexamined beliefs and expectations. A common default assumption—often quite reasonable—is that conditions will continue in a fashion that is recognizably similar to the way they have been during one’s lifetime. Suggestions to the contrary tend to be met with suspicion—or even hostility in the case that the suggested outcome is less than rosy.

What if we presented possible options for future human developments—let’s say human population as a solid example—and pretend it’s a menu from which we get to choose. What outcome would most people see as the desired goal? What would make them happy, or satisfied? Which population curve below do you think most would select?

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Views: 4521

Stubborn Expectations

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The major development underpinning the prospect for an early-century peak in human population and even earlier peak in civilizational power is a rapid and seemingly unexpected decline in fertility rates across the world. All regions except Africa are now below the replacement rate, and still falling.

This short post—probably my last on the population topic for a while—is centered on the following animated GIF showing how the United Nations’ demographic models have expected total fertility rate (TFR) to evolve into the latter part of this century.

U.N. TFR projections from 2010, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2022.

Every few years, the U.N. releases a demographic projection model that includes an expectation of how TFR will behave going forward.  I have already pointed out the glaring discontinuity (kink) at 2020 in the latest projection and a gallery of systematic major misses at the country level.  What the animated GIF above helps us see is how stubborn the imagined far future is—consistently aiming for a one-size-fits-all convergence.

I have referred to the notional TFR endpoint as a “magnet,” acting like a theoretical convergence point to which all regions are attracted.  We see how persistently influential this magnet is on projections in the sequence above.

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Peak Power Video

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I’m on a video kick lately, finding that it’s a good way to capture key points and reach people who never would have stumbled onto Do the Math. Here is a video to accompany the latest post on peak power.

I also added a playlist to my YouTube channel that has other appearances I’ve done (podcasts and the like). While I was at it (as I learn this space), I added chapters to my channel videos to make it easier to find key content. Enjoy! I think I’m also supposed to say: please like and subscribe—but I don’t know if I’m doing this right, yet.

Views: 1553

Brace for Peak Impact

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Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

Guilty as charged: my recent postings have been all about human population and when it might peak. I don’t mean to be a bore, but it’s an important topic connected to planetary limits, human impacts, ecological health, and the appealing prospect that a near-term peak may offer an earlier off-ramp for modernity. In the past, I have stressed the point (in a blog post from 2013 and later in a textbook chapter) that population per se isn’t the phenomenon of greatest concern, but its multiplication by resource usage. It’s the combination that launches us over the ecological cliff edge, commonly expressed by the I=PAT formula for impact on the planet.

In this post, I belatedly take my own advice and re-frame the population investigation in resource terms. Now that I have a demographic tool, I can ask questions relating to when we might hit peak power as a civilization. I use power (rate of energy use) as a proxy for all manner of resource dependencies, as energy usage correlates strongly with materials use and ecological impact. Plus, it is a readily-available measure.

So, given various assumptions about how fertility rates evolve regionally, and factoring in different models for regional survival rates and migration, when might we expect global resource use to peak and begin a decline? In tandem with this event, we might correspondingly expect peak industrial output, and peak rate of (accumulating) damage to ecological health—which includes our own health. In the U.N.’s standard demographic model, population does not peak until 2086 at 10.4 billion—largely bolstered by population growth in Africa, which the U.N. parameters indicate will climb to 4 billion by 2130 (we’ll see…). But, since Africa is by far the region with the lowest per-capita consumption, declines elsewhere could more than offset Africa’s population increases in terms of resource burden.

Enough speculation: let’s unleash the model and see what happens.

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Peak Population Video

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I put together a short (13.5 minute) video to synthesize the main points from my exploration into demographic models and what it could mean in terms of an early peak. If you’ve read the first three posts in the population series (bomb, projections, whiff), then this offers nothing new. In any case, perhaps it is an efficient way to introduce or revisit the content.

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