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- Herausgeber: Liberties Press
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Now that he has reached his tenth decade, Risteárd Mulcahy is issuing his twelfth and last book. He has always been interested in the relationship between population and the planet and is deeply concerned about the future of mankind as it ignores the wellbeing of our planet home. As in previous publications, he warns us about the limitations of Planet Earth as the home of man and other living creatures. Whilst he takes a gloomy view of our future on this earth, he puts forward solutions which might prevent the final cataclysm.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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An Essay on THE SURVIVAL OF HUMANITY
Risteárd Mulcahy (Prof) MD FRCP
Contents
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my two daughters, Barbara and Lisa, and to my two sons, Richard and Hugh, for their interest and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Karena Walshe for her guidance and her encouragement while I was writing the text. As usual, I was assisted by my wife Louise’s patience and tolerance. I am grateful to Seán O’Keeffe for his assistance and guidance.
An Essay on the Survival of Humanity
THOMAS Robert Malthus was born in 1766. After schooling, he had a brilliant academic career in philosophy and science in Cambridge. He later became a priest in the Anglican Church, a profession which allowed him time to read, write, correspond widely and travel. he published his first book on population, An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798 and subsequently published five further editions up to 1820, as well as A Summary View of the Principles on Political Economy and Social Philosophy, which included various additions and emendations. I first read An Essay on the Principle of Population in an edition published by Penguin in 1970.
No work, apart from Darwin’s The Origin of Species, received so much attention, both approbation and criticism, as this first essay, and Darwin and other evolutionists acknowledged the considerable influence malthus had on their opinions and conclusions. In 1820 a bibliography of titles dealing with his views on population required more than thirty pages of text. It is a testament to Malthus’s abiding importance that editions of his manuscript have been reprinted in both the United States and the United Kingdom up to the present day. The substance of Malthus’s writings was based on his belief that every animal species, including man, will increase in numbers by geometric progression every generation if humans exist in an optimal milieu where checks on survival do not exist. Geometric progression implies doubling in numbers every generation (2, 4, 8, 16, and so on).
An optimal milieu exists for humans where there is an absence of civil strife, war and epidemic diseases, and adequate nutrition for the entire index population. Malthus also wrote about factors which adversely influence population growth. These include sexual restraint, celibacy, late marriage, infanticide, poor community organisation, and what he euphemistically describes as ‘corruption of morals and vice’, which includes contraception, abortion, homosexuality, sterilisation and ‘illicit’ sexual activities. He did not envision the prospect of the current high level of extramarital births and believed that sexual restraint was the only method of control consistent with virtue, happiness and good health.
There is a logical basis for Malthus’s population hypothesis: he provides a number of circumstances during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries where, under appropriate conditions, the population increased close to the point of geometric progression. The white population of the American colonies was one such example; he also quotes humboldt, who reported a doubling of the non-indigenous population in South America every thirty-seven years.
In the summary of his writings published in 1830, Malthus refers to the population increase in Ireland from about 1 million in the late seventeenth century to 6 million in 1820 (and close to 8 million at the time of the Famine in 1847). The Irish peasant lived in the countryside, where they were free from the massive deadly epidemics of the city people, and they were well supported at the time by the potato. He refers to a few other examples in Europe where similar increases in population occurred.
Malthus believed that population increase depended on a corresponding increase in food supply but that, because of crop failures, soil exhaustion, the limits on the amount of arable land, and the finite space on the planet suitable for agriculture, food production could only increase at the most by arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, and so on). He undoubtedly underestimated increases in agricultural productivity which we have seen since his time through as a result of scientific advances and globalisation. However, it is certain that eventually there must be a final limit to food production if the human population continues to increase at its present rate and if our environment deteriorates, particularly as it is unlikely that problems of distribution can be easily solved.
Perhaps more important than the influence of food production, it is understandable that Malthus did not anticipate the adverse effect an increasing population has had on the environment. Our well-being and even survival must be affected by climate change, CO2 accumulation, shortage of fresh water, the dwindling of lakes and glaciers, the invasion of alien species, overfishing, the destruction of rainforests, and the continuous loss of many species of flora and fauna.
According to the United Nations, the population of the world passed the 6.5 billion mark in 2006. It was over 7 billion by 2012 and is likely to reach 8 billion by 2035. The gradual increase in world population during the last two centuries can be attributed to the control of epidemic diseases, which started in the eighteenth century, when smallpox and other epidemic diseases were gradually brought under control. In more recent years, we have seen rises in human longevity as we adopt healthy lifestyle and dietary changes and take advantage of new means of health promotion and medical treatment.
It is probable that to stabilise the population, a world fertility rate of much less than two would be required. The fertility rate refers to the number of children born to each woman in the community. (It is important to note that this figure is far from certain, despite careful review of published sources.) The more populous developing countries, mostly in Africa, have fertility rates of 3 or more. Today, 9 percent of the world’s population live in countries where the average woman has five or more children, while another 46 percent live in countries where women have between two and five children. Some of the more developed countries are witnessing a decline in their fertility rates but the more populous and poorer countries still have fertility rates of three or more and their population growth rates, including in such highly populated countries as India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nigeria, continue to rise. China has been attempting to control fertility for some years, but because of its huge and ageing population, and the increasing longevity of its people, its population growth rate continues to increase at an annual rate of 0.45 percent.
The United Nations predicts that the world’s population will increase from 8.5 billion in 2030 to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100. This raises the likelihood of a world fertility rate reducing from 1.25 percent to 1.18 percent per year towards the end of the century. But many of the predictions must be considered unreliable because of fluctuating political, economic and climatic circumstances. Despite an estimated 6 percent fall in the fertility rate in the last fifty years, it is unrealistic to think that we can continue with the predicted increase in global population, considering that we are already in serious crisis with our current global population of 7.3 billion.
