Published Feb 07, 2024 • 4 minute read
The crowds are back at K-days on Saturday, July 30, 2022 in Edmonton. Photo by Greg Southam /Postmedia
Population issues have at last begun to get public attention. In the five years from 2016 to 2021, Canada increased its population by 1.8 million and, in a single year in 2023, admitted another one million people. (And Alberta was the fastest-growing province, with a phenomenal population growth rate of four per cent last year.)
The social pressures of such increases, shortages of housing, health services, schools and jobs, are raising concern. Yet, I have not heard one complaint of the effect they are having on the natural environment.
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Canada may seem big geographically, but even its remote Arctic and boreal regions are not immune from human impact: agriculture, forestry, fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing, residential development, damming of rivers, fishing, recreation, pollution and climate change.
In 70 years, roughly the span of my lifetime, the world human population has tripled, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 7.7 billion in 2020 (now 8.1 billion). Simultaneously, the populations of non-human life have declined, some to the point of extinction. In its Living Planet report for 2022, the World Wildlife Fund calculates a decline in animal populations since 1970 of 69 per cent, with about 20 per cent of species from major animal groups already extinct.
About 700 species are at risk in Canada according to the Canadian Wildlife Federation. The causes are habitat loss and degradation due to human economic activity. Canada has already lost 80 per cent of its native grasslands, and in the last 10 years, 32 million acres of grassland in the Great Plains have been plowed up in Canada and the U.S.
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Canada has an international responsibility to protect its national biological diversity, which is also a global heritage. It cannot discharge this responsibility when its population is being constantly increased as a matter of policy, by immigration. Canada has a population growth rate twice that of other G7 countries and is among the worst culprits for over-consumption.
Despite this, the political elite has conceived the Century Initiative, a plan to increase Canada’s population from its present 39 million to 100 million by the end of the century. This is nation-building hubris of the worst kind, with less moral justification than colonization.
It is unethical, both globally and nationally, to bring people from countries with a lower ecological footprint into one with a higher one (Canadians have a high ecological footprint because of their cold climate and high standard of living). It is selfish to filch citizens for national economic advantage from homelands needing their own skilled labour. Instead, Canada should be assisting foreign governments to achieve better governance and economies so that they can retain their citizens.
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Why is population increase accepted as sacrosanct despite its obvious challenges? Presumably because the model of perpetual economic growth reigns supreme. More people are needed as labour and consumers, goes the myth, so that national income (GDP) will increase, in turn, raising per-capita income or individual standard of living.
There is also the idea that young, working people must be imported to support unproductive seniors top-heavy on the demographic pyramid. Alas, ever-increasing productivity consumes ever more resources that are in limited supply on the planet. Currently, these limits have meant that human population and economic growth have come at the expense of other forms of life, hence their decline. Ultimately, growth on a finite planet is unsustainable for humans too.
Whatever happened to the consciousness of the 1970s, the international recognition of limits to growth and the external costs of productivity, as well as economist Herman Daly’s concept of a steady-state economy? Climate change is now top of mind as the world environmental crisis but, amazingly, the connection between climate and human population size has not been made — it is people after all who use fossil fuels!
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The late Donald Mann of the American Negative Population Growth movement offered a solution that is the converse of growth, arguing logically that a smaller human population would require a smaller GDP. He suggested determining the size of economic pie that the Earth could sustain (including all of the living world), then the size of the slice of that pie that would entitle every human being to an adequate standard of living; the number of such slices in the pie would equal the number of people the planet could support.
Perhaps the younger generations can lead the way to an ecological economics model and the necessary societal change as they have most to gain from a future. Excluding an appropriate area of the Earth from human exploitation would be a start. The “30 x 30” initiative of setting aside 30 per cent of the land surface for other forms of life by 2030 is already an international target.
Mann’s idea would also imply a more equitable distribution of resources, resulting in less human conflict, with huge benefits for both human society and the environment.
We need a brave new world with fewer people in it. We need reduced birthrates in the more populous countries, which will have immediate benefits in greater family prosperity (the family economic pie shared among fewer members), and better welfare and self-fulfillment for women.
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Nationally, Canada must abandon immigration as a tool of the growth economy, and learn to function with the people it has, or with the smaller populations of previous decades, training the skilled citizens it needs, using technology to reduce labour needs, providing incentives for Canadians to do unpleasant but necessary jobs instead of unloading them on the foreign disadvantaged. Retirees, still part of the economy as consumers, can contribute to productivity by volunteering.
There is a line in the hymn: “ … and nations crowding to born … .” Why crowd? If we look after this planet there could be a long future for humans and non-humans and plenty of time for them all to be born.
P.J. Cotterill is a naturalist whose lifespan has coincided with a huge increase in human population and who has witnessed firsthand the concomitant loss and degradation of the natural environment.
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