I have talked previously about the problem of sheer scale when dealing with environmental issues, and perhaps the greatest example of this is population. We seem to have difficulty coming to grips with any large numbers, anything bigger than, say, 1000, and perhaps this harks back to our tribal and small-group origins when little if anything beyond this size needed to be comprehended, let alone counted.
The very clever art installation ‘Of All the People in All the World’ (see 1.2.4) tries to overcome this with the use of grains of rice to represent each person on earth, and looking at the mounds of these tiny specs gives you a genuine feel for how many of us there are.
Similarly, it has been calculated that there was barely a handful of us (a few thousands – millions) throughout most of human history: no more than approximately 170 million by A.D. 1, and no more than 1 billion by 18001. The graph below gives some indication of just how extraordinary the last – blink! – of 200 years has been.
Despite this, the crude ‘bigger is better’ ideology is stronger than ever, normalising this freakish occurrence, even lauding it. In my country, Australia, we have a public broadcasting service called SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) which had as its strapline and background on all its TV shows a few years ago: ‘Seven billion stories and counting…’. I felt like responding to this cutesy jingoism with: ‘Yes, and every story sadder than the last’. This vacuous ‘bigging up’ of everything human without the slightest nod to perspective, context and consequence is all-too common, and though much of it is driven by ideology, a deal of the problem is, I’m sure, that we simply can’t grasp ‘7 billion’ and that human population, long ago, for most people, just tipped over into the category of ‘a lot’ and we leave it at that.
The New Economics Foundation has made an amusing effort to jolt us out of this lethargy by producing ‘The Impossible Hamster’ video2 which shows how extreme, aberrant and unsustainable exponential growth, like population, is. (Or, as historian John McNeill describes the last 50 years3: “Bizarre, anomalous and thoroughly unsustainable”).
The impossible Hamster (and economic growth) – YouTube .
The website ‘Population Education’ tries also to express the sheer magnitude of what has been happening with an excellent video – World Population Video – Population Education – of growth since C.E./A.D. 1. Over five minutes, the video shows the spread and increase of population across the globe in dots of 1 million. The first map (A.D. 1) and last map (A.D. 2021) are shown here. (Dots are yellow and yellow/orange and are exact locations or regional approximations).
Watching the dots spreading like wildfire across the globe in the last 200 years, especially, I cannot help but think of the title of John McMurtry’s illuminating book ‘The Cancer Stage of Capitalism’4. More on this in Section 9, ‘Economy’, as it is predominantly about economics and political economy, but it is very much worth engaging with despite not being an easy read.
1 World Atlas. 2021. Worldwide Population throughout Human History. Reunion Technology, St. Laurent, Canada.
2 Simms, A., Murray, L. 2010. The Impossible Hamster. New Economics Foundation, London, UK.
3 McNeill, J. 2001. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World. Penguin, London, UK.
4 McMurtry, J. 1998. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. Pluto Press, London, UK.
