Balancing humans in the biosphere: escaping the overpopulation trap
Costanza, R.
Npg Forum Series 1990: 1-6
1990
PMID: 12178976 Document Number: 378120
Cultural evolution has allowed humans to change their behaviors and adapt to new conditions much faster than biological evolution. The most critical of these is the overpopulation trap, caused by the imbalance between the short-term incentives to have children and the longterm social and ecological costs of having too many. This process of short-run incentives getting out of sync with longterm goals has been called social traps, as the decision maker is trapped by the local conditions into making a bad decision viewed from a longer perspective. The biological and cultural incentives to procreate combined with rapid reductions in mortality have changed the long-run ecological cost structure. The elimination of social traps requires intervention by education (about the longterm, distributed impacts), insurance, superordinate authority (legal systems, government, religion), and converting the trap to a trade-off. In a sense, this is an extension of the polluter pays principle. Summary suggestions: establish a hierarchy of goals for national and global ecological economic planning and management, sustainability should be the primary longterm goal, replacing the current GNP growth mania; develop better global ecological economic models about the interrelated impacts of population, per capita resource use, and wealth distribution; adjust current incentives to reflect long-run, global costs, including uncertainty; and allow no further decline in the stock of natural capital by taxing natural capital consumption. The US population in 1986 was about 240 million. Current technology and consumption patterns from renewable energy alone could sustain about 85 million people, or about 35% of the current population, or with a more equitable distribution 170 million at a high quality life style on renewable energy alone.