Chapter 15. National and International Scenes.
Arriving at an international agreement regarding the ultimate population of the world, is without doubt the most difficult aspect of the entire problem. There has to be some question as to whether this can ever be completely settled. Not only because of the many factors that have already been discussed, but also because of national pride, the desire of one country to better its neighbor, and in many cases the historical fear of being overwhelmed by another ethnic society.
It is quite obvious that each area of the world will have to calculate the number of people it can support using its own replaceable resources. This calculation will also have to include the difficulty of moving goods and people when the oil supply is totally depleted. The final population density will vary considerably from place to place. Malaysia for example may have the potential to provide more food than Nepal, but Nepal on the other hand may have a greater potential to generate electricity from rivers and sunshine. The ability to easily transfer and trade these resources will affect the population of the respective countries, and this factor will also have to be taken into account. All of this planning requires extremely close cooperation, which to date has been missing in many of our international relationships. It also demands that all countries, once they have agreed on a particular population plan must stick rigidly to the calculated figures. Hopefully the obvious world chaos that will develop from any attempt to deviate from the plan will be sufficient to make this action unthinkable.
Within each country there will have to be a similar accounting of the population capacity of each particular area. For example Florida, with is mild weather and adequate rainfall has a potential for a larger population density than Arizona with its large areas of desert. While people will be required to reside in the Mid West to grow the food for the rest of the nation, the cities may well be limited in size because of the power needed to maintain the heating that will be necessary during the very cold winter months. So the country will have to be assessed, district by district until a clear plan is developed showing just how many people can be offered the proposed standard of living in each area. Based on this plan we will then have to begin to reduce our population accordingly. It may well be that in some places the plan can be achieved by moving people from one area to another, but an overall reduction of our population appears to be inevitable.
This will be far from straightforward as we consider the interrelationship between adjoining areas, and much will depend on our ability to transfer materials, people and power once our oil supplies are finished. We can see the problems clearly if we look at the situation with severely practical eyes, but we will here be dealing with the wishes, hopes and fears of many people. Consider the need to persuade people to live a comparatively lonely life farming the great plains of the Mid West with little or no personal transport. Think of the anguish of the retired couple who, all their working lives have planned on living the end of their days in California. Now they are told that there is a waiting list of people wanting to live there and the water supply is inadequate to provide for all the applicants.
These and similar cases will turn up by the thousands and we have to prepare our people to accept these restrictions. Not that they are basically much different from those that already apply. For example, for years we have lived on the principle that the only limit on where you lived was the money you could afford for a home, which immediately restricts our choices. Now we will have to accept the idea that it may well be based on the availability of resources. Not that this is really a new philosophy. A neighbor wanted to build a home on a piece of property he had owned nearby for years, only to be told that it was too small to build the house he wanted as it would exceed the building code boundary. This too is deciding where and how people can live based on resources.
So each county and each state will have to estimate just now many people they can accept and still provide the necessary resources. From this we can calculate the total sustainable population for the entire country. In making this calculation we will have to take into consideration the availability of power and transport to move products, food and people from one site to another. However once each country has made and agreed this figure, we will have to see that the limits are not exceeded. We can even now see examples of countries being overrun by people from a neighboring society that has allowed its population to continue to grow unabated. The subsequent lowering of living standards, and lack of work, forces its inhabitants to risk life and limb in trying to arrive at a neighboring countries to find an acceptable way of life.
Hopefully the nations can agree on their ultimate population figures and the methods to be used to maintain these numbers. If this cannot be done then countries that effectively control their population will be forced to install very tight boundary controls to maintain their integrity. This is not to infer that people will be prevented from moving from country to country, but that the movement will have to be controlled and limited to acceptable figures. The days have gone by when large numbers of people will be able to immigrate to a particular country simply because it offers a higher or different standard of living. To our freedom loving minds this may all seem some impossible nightmare that can never happen. But the only other option is chaos and the ultimate death of millions of people from starvation.
We have all seen or heard of examples of the demise of a particular species of animal life when their source of food disappears. This is the way that nature controls the various populations and to nature we are nothing more than one of the animal species. We have advanced more than other species through our science and technology, but we cannot defeat nature, we still need food to exist. We can either limit our population to that which can be sustained or we will eventually die struggling for the limited food supplies. At this moment we are artificially boosting our supplies of food by using fertilizers which rely on our limited oil supplies, and machines that are driven by fuel from the same source. When the oil supplies are exhausted we will see a dramatic reduction in the available food supply. When the oil supplies are exhausted we will be unable to quickly ship our food supplies around the world.
On a more positive note, our advances in communication technology will give us the ability to move our ideas, thoughts and wishes quickly to any place in the world. This can make up for the difficulty in moving materials and personnel once our limited supplies of oil are completely depleted. It may well turn out that much of our personal travel is totally unnecessary when we can quickly and easily sit face to face and hear and see each other as we wish.