I strongly suggest that those of you intrigued by what you read here go out and buy this book. Or any other book by Daniel Quinn, really. In fact, I so badly want some of you to do this that I just took the time to transcribe this entire section from the book in order to entice you. Don't let my effort go to waste, please.
Population: A Systems Approach
21 May, Stuttgart
Because the ideas I'm going to be presenting here have proved to be so unsettling for people, I've learned to approach them cautiously, from a good, safe distance—a good, safe distance being in this case about two hundred thousand years. Two hundred thousand years ago is when a new species called
Homo sapiens first began to be seen on this planet.
As with any young species, there were not many members of it to begin with. Since our subject is population, I'd better clarify what I mean by that. We have an approximate date for the emergence of
Homo sapiens because we have fossil remains—and we have fossil remains because a sufficient number of this species lived around this time to
provide those fossil remains. In other words, when I say that
Homo sapiens appeared about two hundred thousand years ago, I'm not talking about the first two of them or the first hundred of them. But neither am I talking about the first million of them.
Two hundred thousand years ago, there was a bunch. Let's say ten thousand. Over the next hundred ninety thousand years,
Homo sapiens grew in numbers and migrated to every continent of the world.
The passage of these hundred ninety thousand years brings us to the opening of the historical era on this planet. It brings us to the beginning of the agricultural revolution that stands at the foundation of our civilization. This is about ten thousand years ago, and the human population at that time is estimated to have been around ten million.
I want to spend a couple minutes now just looking at that period of growth from ten thousand people to ten million people. As it happens, what this period of growth represents is ten doublings. From ten thousand to twenty thousand, from twenty thousand to forty thousand, from forty thousand to eighty thousand, and so on. Start with ten thousand, double it ten times, and you wind up with about ten million.
So: Our population doubled ten times in a hundred ninety thousand years. Went from about ten thousand to ten million. That's growth. Undeniable growth, definite growth, even substantial growth . . . but growth at an
infinitesimal rate. Here's how infinitesimal it was: On the average, our population was doubling every
nineteen thousand years. That's slow—glacially slow.
At the end of this period, which is to say ten thousand years ago, this began to change very dramatically. Growth at an infinitesimal rate became growth at a rapid rate. Starting at ten million, our populations doubled not in nineteen thousand years but in five thousand years, bringing it to twenty million. The next doubling—doubling and a bit—took only two thousand years, bringing us to fifty million. The next doubling took only sixteen hundred years, bringing us to one hundred million. The next doubling took only fourteen hundred years—bringing us to two hundred million at the zero point of our calendar. The next doubling took only twelve hundred years, bringing us to four hundred million. The year was 1200 A.D. The next doubling took only five hundred years, bringing us to eight hundred million in 1700. The next doubling took only two hundred years, bringing us to a billion and a half in 1900. The next doubling took only sixty years, bringing us to three billion in 1960. The next doubling will take only thirty-seven years or so. Within ten or twenty months we’ll reach six billion, and if this growth trend continues unchecked, many of us in this room will live long enough to see us reach twelve billion. I won’t attempt to imagine for you what that will mean. At a rough guess, my personal guess, take everything bad that you see going on now—environmental destruction, terrorism, crime, drugs, corruption, suicide, mental illness—violence of every kind—and multiply by four . . . at least. But, believe it or not, I’m not here to depress you with gloomy pictures of the future.
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We have a population problem. There are a few people around who think that everything is fine, and we don’t have a population problem at all, but I’m not here to change their minds. I’m here to suggest that the
angle of attack we’ve traditionally taken on this problem is ineffective and can never be anything
but ineffective. After that, I want to show you a more promising angle of attack. But right now I'd like to read you a fable that I think you'll find relevant. It's about some people with a population problem of their own and the way they go about attacking it. It's called "Blessing: A Fable About Population."