How Many People Can the Earth Support?

"This book is from the middle of the 90s and it’s a fantastic book because the title is very provocative and, if you’re concerned about our impact on the planet, one of the things you want to understand is why there are so many of us and how many people can actually inhabit the earth in a sustainable way. The answer that Cohen comes up with is something between a hundred million and a hundred billion and the reason why it’s such a large range is that he says it depends on which kind of world you want. A lot of the choices we make with environmental impact are now choices we make consciously. We can ask what kind of world we want. This is one of the issues that Cohen comes up with. The definition of what’s sustainable may not be governed by hard physical limits but by the world we wish to inhabit. Right. But again that puts it well into the realm of society and politics. One of the interesting things about population is that efforts to explicitly manage global population have fallen out of favour and predictions now are for the world population to peak and then actually decline without coercive policies. No. The assumptions are that as people get wealthier they have smaller families and in some places, like Germany, Sweden, Italy, people are reproducing at a rate lower than the replacement. In Sweden and Germany the government is creating tax incentives to get people to have more children, an irony that wouldn’t have been envisioned 30 years ago. Certainly not. There are things that we control and things that we don’t and right now it seems that global population is outside of direct control. The idea is that if you empower women and we see a growth in prosperity we will see a slower population growth."