Population control is in the news again, after David Attenborough described humans as "a plague".
This morning the Guardian publishes a contribution to the debate from the unlikely shape of Rob Newman, former comic partner of David Baddiel. Newman now likes to be known as Robert - he has published novels and wants to be taken more seriously.
Newman takes an opposing position to Attenborough's. He says population growth "has been slowing since the 1960s . . and has fallen below replacement levels half the world over". Moreover "worldwide, fertility per woman has fallen from 4.7 babies (per woman in the 1970s) to 2.6 in 2005-10 . . . Attenborough's thesis is therefore flawed".
Well not so fast. Is the world's population going up? Yes. Are population levels already too high? Attenborough thinks so, as do a lot of other scientists. Rob Newman is essentially saying, "it may be crowded here in the Black Hole of Calcutta, but don't worry, new people aren't being shoved in anything like as fast as they were forty years ago". At a stroke Newman has misunderstood Attenborough's position, and misunderstood the effect of the statistics he quotes. He has mistaken a situation in which things are getting worse a bit more slowly for one in which everything's OK. Attenborough's thesis might be flawed, but not on the basis of this dozy attempt at ratiocination.
As so often where an apparently intelligent person adopts a position which can be made to collapse in two short paragraphs of scrutiny, there's an agenda here. Newman goes on to say, "You can say there are too many people in a lift . . . but not on earth. To wish to reduce the number of living breathing humans on this planet is an obscenity".
What is Newman getting at here? We soon find out, with a couple of sentences on "mainstream intellectuals such as HG Wells, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence proposing not just sterlisation but extermination". Newman apparently thinks that Attenborough and his fellow travellers (you know, fascists such as Jonathan Porritt) are in favour of this sort of drastic measure. But they aren't.
A rather snarky Guardian leader a couple of years back criticised the Optimum Population Trust for suggesting Britain's ideal population was about 17 million, on the basis that the OPT didn't say "which 17 million would be left". I can enlighten the Guardian and Mr Newman here. The 17 million, say, remaining would be the people who had been born after family planning, tax and benefit incentives had been brought to bear over generations. There wouldn't be any eugenics, sterilisation or firing squads, as I understand it. Thank goodness.
"To wish to reduce the number of living breathing humans on this planet is an obscenity". Perhaps Rob Newman is a Catholic. I can't see any other reason why anyone should feel fewer births would be obscene.
We now approach the core of Newman's argument. Essentially it's all about politics, innit? 30% of US corn ends up as fuel ethanol, while 5% is grown as corn syrup for junk food sweeteners and fizzy pop. Never mind the habitat destruction and climate change attendant on the consumption required by a growing population (sorry to mention that again, Rob - er, Robert), we're just using our resources unfairly.
"Food security and ecological sustainability are impossible without democratic control of land", he writes. Never mind that in the US, for example, land use is already democratically controlled, it's evidently the wrong kind of democracy if it produces a result Rob Newman doesn't like. "Only through land nationalisation can we introduce the connected landscapes, smart cities and wildlife corridors that will let ecosystems bend, not break". Yes, it's not enough for Governments to make laws which tell people what they can do with their property; the Government now has to own it as well.
"As with homelessness a century ago, the problem facing a population of 7 billion is not too many people crowding too small a piece of land, but too few people owning too much world". Because obviously replacing a small number of people with, er, an even smaller number of Governments is going to sort all the problems, right? Because after all, Governments always make the right decisions, don't they?
I'm trying to remember back to a time when previous attempts were made to get the state to interfere with agricultural production on a grand scale. Russia in the 1930s? China in the late 50s? Doesn't augur very well, does it?
Newman's argument at heart is a sort of idealist gradualism. It says, problems of habitat destruction, resource exploitation and climate change can be overcome if we just all get together and organise ourselves in the right way. Even if he is right about that, he must know perfectly well that the chances of such concerted action are absolutely zero. Essentially what he wants is to be able to sit back as events unfold, rub his thumbs together and say, you see, I told you so. He will feel smug, and no-one will ever know whether he was right or not.
But actually a lot of the problems Newman alludes to could be eased simply by there being fewer people. And fewer people will be a good deal easier to accomplish via a lower birth rate than by watching as the population rises and the earth shrugs us off in chaos and famine. Newman poses as a humanist and humanitarian. Actually he risks the greatest inhumanity of all.
