Sustainability and global population growth in the twenty-first century

¶ … running through all of these articles is sustainability of human population growth. This is indicated as "Megatrend 3: Demographic Patterns" in the 2030 overview, where over a billion additional people will be added to the total population in less than two decades. Every other article reveals potential impacts on human population growth, whether it be Kaplan's analysis of the limits imposed by geography, or the Scientific American survey of aquaculture which might tell us how over 8 billion humans plan to feed themselves. Goldstone sees population as potentially the most destabilizing megatrend globally; the Economist's reporting on child mortality decreasing in Africa and the New York Times reporting on demographic shrinkage in Germany show that increased population is not necessarily increased productivity, except insofar as capitalism requires a consistent growth pattern.

Q2. FIVE FACTS.

* "In 1990, 43% of the population of developing countries lived in extreme poverty…by 2010 it was 21% percent." (Economist, June 1, 2013)

* "World grain and soybean prices more than doubled between 2007 and mid-2008" (Futurist Vol 47 No 1, Jan-Feb 2013)

* "…in many developed countries, productivity is more likely to decline as the population ages" (Goldstone, Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb 2010)

* "Most commentators…imagine that American predominance would be replaced by some kind of multipolar harmony. But multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor particularly peaceful." (Kagan, Wall St. Journal, Feb 11, 2012)

* "Crop and grazing areas, at today's yields, would have to rise by 50% to 70% to meet 2050 food needs; such land may not exist." (Simpson, Scientific American 2011, p56)

Q3. I strongly disagree with Robert Kagan's flimsy neocon propaganda in "Why the World Needs America," first published in the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper dedicated to propping up the Ponzi Scheme of global capitalism. Kagan claims that the downfall of the Roman Empire set back the cause of human civilization for centuries: he seems blissfully unaware that Constantinople, the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, would remain the capitol of successor empires in the east, from the Byzantines to the Ottomans, that would span many centuries and sustain all those glories of human civilization (like science, astronomy, and medicine) during a period when Europe was admittedly a backwater. It is a highly Eurocentric view of what happens when a hegemonic power collapses -- for Averroes or Avicenna or Ibn Batutta, the dark ages were not precisely dark. Kagan also seems fundamentally to misunderstand what happens when there is only one superpower, as is the case with both Rome and America: it makes the superpower a target for all dissatisfaction. The Roman empire did not merely collapse: it spread to all of its former conquered territories a cult religion celebrating a man from one of Rome's most ungovernable provinces (Judaea) who was killed like Spartacus himself (by crucifixion). Kagan seems so concerned with the imperial business of making trains run on time, metaphorically speaking, that he barely notices where those trains are going or how many humans they run over on their daily rounds.

Q4. Robert Kaplan's 2009 article on "The Revenge of Geography" can be a useful reminder to students of geopolitics to remember certain basic and inalterable facts -- like why it might be inadvisable to start a land-war in Asia -- but Kaplan's overall conclusions seem tenuous at best. Indeed, the article seems to be written by looking for obvious sources of global conflict in 2009 -- the Fertile Crescent, the Vale of Kashmir, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the Indian Ocean and South China Sea -- and then noting ways in which geography might exacerbate these existing conflicts. This is not really a piece on geography: it is a standard neocon policy paper disguised as an essay on geography. If Kaplan were serious about this subject, he might have looked at some genuinely interesting ways in which the "revenge of geography" might happen, such as climate change permitting a resource scramble in the Arctic Circle between Russia, the United States, and American allies who are players in that geographical region like Canada or Norway. Instead we are just treated to a tedious set of footnotes on how mountain and oceanic boundaries can exacerbate conflict in the places were conflict already exists.