Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Population, Technology, and the Human Environment: A Thread Through Time
Population, Technology, and the Human Environment: A Thread Through Time
Pages 33-55
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Population' Technology' and the Human Environment: A Thread Through Time ROBERT W KATES Plato observed it, the old testament taught it, and Thomas Robert Malthus feared it.
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No longer are savage islands dreaded, nor their rocky shores feared; everywhere are houses, and inhabitants, and settled government, and civilized life. What most frequently meets our view is our teeming population; our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly supply us from its natural elements; our wants grow more and more keen, and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, whilst nature fails in affording us her usual sustenance.
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From page 35... ...
By the 1850s, the resource term expanded to include energy and other materials, urgently argued in the classic volume of British economist William Jevons on the coal question (Jevons, 1865~. By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States would discount fears about resource scarcity and promote a new Malthusian numerator that included amenity resources and the pollution-absorbing capacity of the environment (President's Materials Policy Commission, 1952~.
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Each frame highlights significant questions about the sources of technological change; the growth, decline, and stabilization of human populations; and the extraordinary challenge posed by the dynamics of the current period. AGES: TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTIONS AND POPULATION SURGES A few years ago, I had the opportunity to review Beyond the Limits (Meadows et al., 1992)
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From page 37... ...
The first was associated with the toolmaking or cultural revolution, lasted about a million years, and saw human numbers rise to five million. The second saw the population swell a hundredfold to about five hundred million people over the next eight thousand years, following the domestication of plants and animals and the invention of agriculture and animal herding.
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The pushes to agriculture are primarily said to be population increase and environmental change. Human communities six thousand to nine thousand years ago turned to agriculture because their numbers increased beyond the carrying capacity of their accessible resource base, or the resource base was reduced by environmental (climatic, biological, or human-induced)
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They share the assumption of diminishing returns to labour for a fixed technological level. To this common ground Malthus adds the assumption that population growth rates are endogenous, while Boserup adds the assumption that technological change is endogenous (Lee, 1986, p.
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We sought to compare the longest continuous place-based sequences of human activity that we could construct and to relate these, in turn, to environmental change. We were able to do this for four regions: the Egyptian Nile Valley, the Tigris-Euphrates lowlands, the Basin of Mexico, and the central Mayan lowlands of Mexico and Guatemala (Whitmore et al., 19901.
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They evidence both growth and decline; in none is population growth simply upward and onward from the cave. To highlight and compare major episodes of growth and decline and to distinguish these from fluctuations that were minor or artifacts of the estimation methods, we adopted a convention of considering only variations in growth in which the population at least doubles from its preexisting base, or is in decline in which it is minimally halved from its intervening apex.
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From page 42... ...
The second waves, for example, average more than five hundred years in duration even though they include one of the most precipitous population drops in human history the sixteenth-century die-off of the native peoples of the Americas whose immediate cause was epidemics of infectious disease. What drives such long waves of increasing frequency and great amplitude?
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Mayan Lowlands: Clearing the central Mayan lowlands has newly revealed two major ancient urban sites at Uaxtum and Real Azul as well as reduced the habitat of rare birds. Through an initiative of the Organization of Central American States, the first trinational archaeological and biological park in the world is created for tourism, research, and wildlife conservation.
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Three editions later, as Malthus neared death in 1834, decadal population growth had peaked at 18 percent a veritable explosion (Clark, 1968~. The driving force behind the growth was primarily the decline in death rates.
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Thus, many scholars associate the decline in births and deaths with modernization or development (Davis, 1990~. Scholars differ on which elements of development would encourage the decline in births the changing economics and usefulness of family labor, the improved security of family size with reduced infant and child deaths, or greater knowledge and interest in birth control resulting from education, particularly of women.
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From page 46... ...
A phrase of an Indian delegate, "Development is the best contraceptive," was the rallying cry for the Third World countries. Lack of development encouraged large family sizes, and social and economic development would bring, as it had in Europe, a decline in fertility and population growth, even without organized government population programs.
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Less need for more births because more children survive. As the death transition proceeds, families realize that they can have the desired family size with fewer births since the chances of children surviving have increased.
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And over and above development or even the way development makes programs more effective organized family-planning programs make an additional difference of 15-20 percent. But even this amount is disputed, with other analysts claiming that at most 5 percent of the fertility decline results from such efforts (Hernandez, 1981; Puitchett, 1994~.
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Even more important, given the limited confidence in forms of social security outside the family unit, four may be the number of children actually desired in many parts of the developing world, and much of the previously unmet need may have now been met (Sadik, 19914. Finally, some scientists believe in African exceptionalism that in Africa cultural, religious, and economic reasons encourage high fertility rates as much as East Asia seems to favor reductions in fertility (Caldwell and Caldwell, 1987~.
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. KATES Many of us believe that if population growth can be held to some reasonable number, then sufficient food can be produced, even in a more crowded and warmer world.
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Thus, population growth would not diminish to negligible levels until 2075 in China, 2100 in India, and well into the twenty-second century in African nations. The somewhat arbitrary choice of these dates matters, as do the assumptions about how quickly the death rate declines, and demographers therefore prefer to show low, medium, or high variants of their projections.
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To address these interactions; to move beyond theories to practices; to assist in the passage through the Great Climacteric of the next decades these challenges provide an extraordinary and fulfilling charter for studies of the human environment.
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1981. The impact of family planning programs on fertility in developing countries: A critical evaluation.
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Pp. 647-680 in Organizing for Effective Family Planning Programs, R
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From page 55... ...
1992. Long-Range World Population Projections: Two Centuries of Population Growth 1950-2150.
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