This past Friday, H.V. Cramond wrote about the global population hitting its newest high-water mark: 7 billion. Yes, 7 billion. But that ain’t the apex. Nope. Nine billion by 2050—that’s what demographers predict. Two billion more neighbors in just 39 years. It’s hard to fathom.
And here’s something else I can’t comprehend: the other significant population benchmark passed last year. As of 2010, more people live in cities than rural environments. And like growth and aging, this demographic shift is projected to continue into the foreseeable future.
Years ago the environmental historian Roderick Frazier Nash, author of “Wilderness and the American Mind,” argued the human population should be concentrated in major urban areas, or islands, surrounded by vast interstitial spaces allowed to revert back to wilderness. In 1987, Frank and Deborah Popper famously proposed something similar for the drier regions of America’s Great Plains. They proposed returning the depopulating plains to a buffalo commons, to the buffalo’s home on the range. A very American idea, if I don’t say so myself. The Poppers’ proposal in fact calls to mind George Catlin’s 1832 recommendation to create a park of the plains to preserve Native Americans and buffalo alike from loss at the hands of westward-moving pioneers.
The Poppers’ and Nash’s recommendations, as I understand them, grew out of a concern for nature (the non-human world) and the environment (the ecological systems that together constitute the non-human world that humans rely on to survive). Specifically, they were—and presumably remain—apprehensive about the health of nature and the environment and their future capacity to support human life. The planet Earth, after all, has limits, including, among them, a finite supply of water and oxygen. Even today, nearly one-seventh of the planet’s population lacks access to clean drinking water.
Drinking water was never something I worried about when I was a kid in suburban Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s. I was “normal.” I played sports; climbed trees of all sorts—apple, maple, and pine, to name a few—and jumped dirt bikes off terrifyingly steep and dangerous homemade ramps while not wearing a helmet. (No one ever wore helmets back then.) Like most pre-teen and teenage boys, I loved war and violence and tortured all sorts of insects and other bugs—ants, flies, slugs—for the simple pleasure of watching them squirm and squash. But I was afraid, too; I dreaded we’d deforest the planet to the point that oxygen would dip below the minimum levels necessary to support the world’s growing population. In other words, for a time, I lived in fear of asphyxiation. At any moment, I expected people’s faces to turn the color of my mother’s varicose veins and keel over dead.
Though perhaps I should, I have no such fear today. Instead, I’m more worried about the global population’s shift from living in largely rural to urban environments. As more people move into cities to live and work; as population densities in urban areas increase and produce further competition for space, what will become of nature? Richard Louv not long ago coined the phrase “nature-deficit disorder” to describe what he diagnosed as a significant problem: the mental and physical ill effects suffered by children because of a dearth of contact and interaction with the natural world. An ancillary problem I see is this: people today who have less contact with nature—that is, with environments not by and large human constructs—will have less cause to be concerned with what becomes of nature in the future. If this might in fact be true, what might be the effect of more people, especially children, living in urban environments? Will even more children suffer from nature-deficit disorder? Will they in turn grow into adults who are less aware of their reliance and impacts on the natural world and its ability to support life? What will they teach their children?
If current trends continue, the Poppers’ and Nash’s proposals might be realized to varying degrees. But as H.V. Cramond wrote, attitudes toward consumption rather than population size may be more critical in shaping the future, for consuming stuff means we consumers are consuming ourselves through consumption of the land, water, trees, animals, minerals, and more that we require to survive. So imagine if more people now live with even less direct contact with nature, botanical gardens and grocery store produce aisles notwithstanding. Can we honestly expect these urban residents and their children to appreciate nature more than today and, ultimately, to consume less stuff? And what of the two billion more kids to come by 2050?
Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger