America's Defense Monitor Interview with

Robert Engelman, Director, Population and Environment Program,

Population Action International

MR. MR. ENGELMAN: Well population as an issue in connection with the environment has been debated hotly since the time of .... In the late 18^th century there's been a lot of exaggeration there's been a lot of over simplification and even some people who deny it makes any difference at all it clearly does make a difference you can't say that the number of people in the world has no impact what soever on the way the world's resources are being used Malthus was right in at least respect he was a 18^th century economist and a minster actually which is that the planet itself the resources you're dealing with is . Its not growing human numbers are growing one of the biggest reasons we have an environmental problem large right now at this time in human history is the scale of human activity it has a lot to do with activities that are not of themselves unsustainable or not a real problem for the environment but are made unsustainable by their scale and that has very, very much to do much of the problem with the world's environment at this particular moment in history relates to activities that are not in their essence unsustainable it might be cutting down trees it might be using rivers to dispose of human waste not in their essence impossible for the environment to handle but they're made unsustainable by the scale of the activity so we have to ask what is about the scale of the activity and why has the scale of the activity reached the point it has to cause some sort of problem where the environment in effect can't absorb it or damaged or is irreparable in some way degraded one of the reasons for the increase in the scale of activity is clearly unquestionably the amazing growth the historic growth of population just especially in the last few decades human population mostly went along and hundreds of millions and even tens of millions in the very early human history and then after about the Cosco period in history in the hundreds of millions all we have told the early 1800's in which it first crossed one million for the first time that's not a big deal for a species if the species is small there are many insect species ant species that have billions of individual organisms not a big deal for them they alter their environment but they do it very locally but we're a large primate 150 pound primate no primate species has come close to the number of 1 billion and we have an impact by our size our weight on the landscape literally the amount of food we need to get by the amount of water we process and we change these natural resources even just in a very simple even just by living basically meeting minimum needs we change the landscaping we change the resources as we use them well from about 1 billion in the early 1800's we went to about 2 ½ billion around the time of World War II and from the time of World War II until now we double again from 2 ½ billion to 5 billion in about 1987 and we're about just next year to reach number 6 billion there's just no question that this increase in human population no matter what else we were during even if we had a very unchanging lifestyle and if we were living quite simply we would have a major impact on the things we need for life we need water desperately we need water every day we need food either that we gather as hunters used to gather or we cultivate as farmers gathered we need shelter we need to appropriate certain amounts of land for our activity we need to appropriate plants for our food, etc even if nothing else were happening it's very likely that this level of population increase would have dramatically impacted the environment but lots of other things are happening which is one of the complicating factors we're also getting wealthier we have a technology which enable a single person to cut down acres of trees almost in a day we fly in airplanes we drive sport utility vehicles we do all sorts of things that process large amounts of resources large amounts of energy population tends to just multiply all of these things its not the only multiplier our increasing economic growth is a big multiplier but it's a major multiplier I don't there is any other single factor that has gone from a level a scale of says 10's of millions in classical times to billions today that has a comparable increase in scale so in that sense there's been a major impact

INTERVIEWER: Can the world sustain the current growth rate of the human population?

MR. MR. ENGELMAN: That's an unknown, that's a provocative question and my own feeling is that it can't do it, there's a lot of debate about how many people can the earth hold how many people can the people can the earth support I don't think we really know the answer to that question we're not likely to know the answer to that question very soon what I think we can say is that the process itself of human population growth is fundamentally not sustainable in the sense that it can't go on forever basically you got to find that planet you got so much air, you got so much oil you got so much land you got so much water it can't double again 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, 1000, 1 million times from the levels that it's at now no one would claim it could so that raises the question of at what point do we really begin to run into problems and what interest me is that we already know that we're going to grow beyond where we are right now and yet we're already seeing now the evidence that there are in effect problems there are tensions between human numbers and the environment that are Inhibiting human well being and human development probably the best example being fresh water but I think we can say that the growth rate is not sustainable over long periods of time because we're already seeing problems in resources that are not likely to increase in any significant way

INTERVIEWER: Where is most of the population growth occurring today?

MR. MR. ENGELMAN: Of all of the population growth occurring worldwide probably 97% of it a huge figure you might say almost all is happening in developing countries I don't say almost all because in effect the US itself is growing at about 1 % a year fairly rapidly for a developed country and for one with 260 odd million people but most population growth is occurring in countries that are less wealthy than the US a large proportion of it is actually occurring in the tropics in areas where there is tremendous wealth Of animal and plant species and where the soils probably least suited for farming of anywhere in the world and where many countries have desert conditions that make renewable water a problem so population growth tends to be occurring and tends to be occurring most rapidly in places where the natural recourse base in many respects is a weakness but the key thing its growing its continuing to grow very rapidly in poor countries but one place the population is not really growing much at all is in Western and Eastern Europe where they have a lot of wealth and a lot other ways

The one place where population is not really growing rapidly at all in fact its approaching stability is Europe where natural elemental resources are not as essential to human well being and economic development

INTERVIEWER: How are/were some environmental problems tied to population growth?

MR. MR. ENGELMAN: In a sense I would argue that all environmental problems have some link to population growth in that unless you define then run out of problems as to include natural problems like vulcanism or earthquakes environmental problems are by their nature somehow connected to human influences and human activities and to the extent that there's a human environmental interface the number of human beings active has something to do with it there's no doubt about that the environmental problems that probably create the most problems The scale of human activity that causes our Environmental problems is large part of the issue the fact that it's very hard to reduce this scale of the activity that's causing the problem you can do it to some degree through good policies that discourage waste that improve technologies that make it easier for pollution to be redirected or perhaps not even caused there are lost of things you can do to improve an environmental problem but ultimately if at the source of the environmental problem is a kind of human activity that is increasing as some kind of result perhaps an indirect result of the number of people interacting with the environment it becomes extremely difficult you reach a point of diminishing return where even if you've done everything you can say installed catalytic converters on automobiles which reduces the pollutants coming out the tailpipe of the car at some point just the increasing number of vehicles is still going to cause you a problem where there's certain kind of air problem for example carbon dioxide pollution which relates to climate change in poorer countries there are much closer linkages with natural resources often because they're and with severe environmental problems often because there's less technology in between the human beings and the resources they're dependent upon an example of that would be soil erosion or water availability as more farmers are farming and their limited by the amount of land that they can spread to and they're limited in the amount of land they can clear for agriculture they need to use the farmland they've got more intensively and in fact that's been part of the success of feeding the world's growing population for a number of years we've used the land we're farming to get higher yields and more crops out of but there's a danger if you do that too intensively without paying attention to some of the side effects of that which is that you can leave land bare to rain and you can work land so intensively that the land erodes and you start to lose soil which may not be a problem for a long time you may not notice it much until suddenly the land gets to a point where there's nothing but literally almost bed rock underneath the saprolite, which is close to bedrock, and suddenly you can't farm that land anymore and that effect happens many places that's closely connected to the number of people that you're trying to feed with a set unit of land similarly with water frequently there will be a community that has no problem getting access to fresh water through a stream that passes through the community but as the community grows the stream begins to dry up people aren't quite sure why and there may in fact be many reasons climate may be a factor but one of the reasons may simply be that more people are placing more demands on that stream for water often when people start to sink wells they figure well the stream isn't as reliable for water so we'll start to get water from underground while we dig wells and for a while that seems to solve the problem and a new technology simple technology digging wells postponed the day of reckoning as far as water scarcity is concerned but as that community continues to grow people find and this is happening all over developing countries that they have to dig wells deeper, and deeper and deeper to get to water at this point the stream may have dried up all together but they're reaching further and further down to get water to the point that they may find that they may need to start using oil or some sort of energy to bring the water up and maybe they can't afford that energy and then they really need to begin to think about relocating a lot of this has to do with certain natural thresholds that get crossed that often aren't foreseen in advance where for the longest time everything seems to be going pretty much honkey dorey they're more people but we're able to find more water, more of the arable land more of the fuel wood we need for cooking fires but at some point you get to a place where the environment protests in effect it says now there's no more water at this level or there's no more clean water its not contaminated because of reuse or we can't hold the environment can't hold the soil anymore and so the soil is washing away and what's there is not good enough to plant decent crop or the forest start retrieving classical example of this is a village surrounded by forest maybe for hundreds of years was able to use that forest sustainability to produce fuel because people could just go out in the forest and they could pick fallen twigs basically and that was enough but as the community began to grow as death rates declines as more and more children survived to adulthood say after World War II that community began to grow to the point that some kind of invisible line was crossed where the forest was no longer able to simply supply the communities wood needs with fallen twigs and branches people begin to have to cut Trees down for a while that wasn't a big problem they just cut Trees to very close to the village but as the community continued to grow they crossed another threshold where trees couldn't be replaced fast enough then they had to start moving the forest back now I don't mean to oversimplify any of these issues I'm talking that I'm talking about there's always, always something more than population at issue there usually are terrible government policies they're real problems with land tenure who owns the land they're inequities in power and wealth and its very important to keep those thing in mind when we're talking about populations interaction with the environment its never just population and even though I sometimes give sort of fables of how population growth makes the difference in the environment I don't want to ever oversimplify it so much that it looks population is the only thing that's interacting but that nonetheless it is often the growth of population that is a decisive factor in sending the scale of activity beyond certain critical natural thresholds where the environment can no longer laugh it off and say that's no problem I can handle that one gets to the point where the environment says whoa I'm overwhelmed I'm seriously degraded now that's got to be tough

INTERVIEWER: What forms of instability can be attributed to not directly to singularly to population growth what are some examples of instability you can attribute to population growth and associated environmental degradation?

MR. MR. ENGELMAN: The whole issue of how population growth in itself relates to or contributes to or causes to some degree social and political conflict its controversial its not well established it hasn't been proved it hasn't been extensively documented but there are some hypotheses about it that appear fairly strong under certain conditions people don't migrate for example out of the love of travel for the most part or have seen new places maybe some do but probably not the majority people more than often migrate because they need to and the biggest reason is frequently cited to be for better or greater economic opportunities how the environment in descending locations relates to the lack of economic or sufficient economic opportunities in descending locations is complex hard to get at but there are cases around the world where people who once were living very sustainable rural people particularly off of the food they were able to raise in their own community are no longer able to do that all over the development world in Asia and Africa and Latin America people report men particularly report that they're no longer able to support themselves and their families on the land that their fathers and grand fathers farmed and they therefore have to move to nearby cities usually in their own countries to see if they could find additional economic opportunities leaving therefore frequently their wives or other members of their families younger members older members women to work the farms that they've had for generations what's happening in many of these cases is the size of landholding is progressively decreasing as each generation divides land holdings among large numbers of children so land holding that were previously sufficient to feed entire families at some point become no longer sufficient that seems to be an important driving factor at least for an internal migration to cities and we've seen that happen in country after country water can sometimes play into that as well where water was once abundant as abundant no longer people really have to move because you cannot survive even for a few days without water and frequently you need water for irrigating crops as rain fed agriculture is no longer sufficient to feed families so there are whole communities that sometimes find themselves needing to relocate because their water resources are not extensive enough but the more frequent pattern is that people often then will move to cities because there are no longer opportunities to feed themselves and their own families without additional income that can happen at a level that actually causes conflict when entire communities move in earlier days they probably could have found a place where there weren't any other people but the world is filling up quite literally and frequently when a community migrates or when large numbers of people from the community migrate they have to go someplace where there already are other people and that sets up a certain degree of conflict with those other people there was a case in the early 70s for example when people from Western Bangladesh a number of communities found that were no longer able to support themselves and they apparently received permission to migrate into India and the West Bengal and I think they were able to do this I believe they were Hindu so there was a really just connection and they were able to do this but the local people hadn't been the people who were in the area where they migrated hadn't been consulted about it and set up a conflict that was fairly well documented in that area the main reason these people moved from Bangladesh was food security they weren't able to feed themselves as they had been previously for generations in that area so I would argue that's a case where people who had been in part pushed by the rising population on the landmass there is a fairly well documented argument that some of the push of people from Mexico to Northern Mexico and ultimately to California and parts of the United States is related to the inability to feed families in rural areas of Mexico that farmers who were growing corn and beans were once able to feed their families no longer were or had to look new opportunities and were moving and sort of scene the people moving to northern Mexico and many of them going on if they don't find the opportunities they're looking for in Northern Mexico frequently crossing the border and come to the US again I would never say that these are the only reasons people are moving the social political economic forces that are play in this areas is so complicated it would be very difficult to point at population isolate it and say this is the one factor but in many cases its clearly a factor.

INTERVIEWER: What are some examples of how population growth increases competition for renewable resources?

MR. ENGELMAN: There are resources that are becoming increasingly evident as sources of conflict because they are no longer abundant as they once were. From an international perspective, for example, one can look at fisheries and see that we have pretty much reached the limit of the amount of fish that we have harvested from the oceans, its roughly 90 mile metric tons a year and its been fairly stable at that level for nearly a decade now. And in that same decade, that we've pretty much maxed out on the oceans harvested fish we've also seen a tremendous upsurge of mostly small scale conflict, not violent conflict , but let's say tensions, between the fishing fleets of various countries ranging from the United States and Canada haggling over salmon in the Northwest, to Spain vs. the United Kingdom and Canada in the North Atlantic, China sometimes having conflicts with African countries as China fishes the coasts of Africa. What we're seeing is that as the amount of resources, in this case fish, available on a per person basis declines people are getting anxious about making sure that they can get their little piece of the resources that survive. And this is seen on a small scale often within countries that might involve fish. You might have small scale fisherman protesting against the fishing of their traditional zones of fishing by large scale commercial fisherman, this is evident in India, where small scale fishermen are complaining to the \government in Delhi and state governments that they are no longer able to fish where they have always done so because the government is subsidizing or helping large scale commercial fishermen. So it might be, within the country different classes of resource uses fighting with each other, haggling with each other over resources, or it might cross boundaries.

A case where water ....two cases where water is really becoming an issue internationally are along the Nile River and along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Water is essential to life, health, to well being, as well as economic development. And people for many years have taken it for granted because when populations were smaller and consumption of water was less for the most part the rivers that flowed into country provided all the all that you needed.. But there are some countries that are tremendously dependent on rivers that have a large number of people upstream and very rapidly growing populations upstream . So if you look at the Nile for example, here's Egypt, which goes back to the time of the Pharaoh's, depending on the Nile for pretty much 90% or more, 95% or more of its water needs, suddenly its looking at Ethiopia which is on the Blue Nile which surrounds the Blue Nile, and the Blue Nile supplies about 85% of the Nile's water. Ethiopia has never had a population large enough or wealthy enough economically developed enough to really utilize the water resources of the Blur Nile, but its population is growing rapidly and especially since its conflict ended in the last five ten years its actually developing economically and Egypt is suddenly looking at Ethiopia and saying "That's are water they can't do that" and Ethiopia is saying "What do you mean it is your water its our water, its flowing through our country" and there is beginning to be a concern about how these two countries can work out the possibility that they may be in effect competing for the same water. Now in that particular case the good ness is that the two countries are aware of the problem, there looking at the future they know where their populations are going...they are starting to talk with each other, as well as the other dozen or so countries that are on the Nile basin that are sharing these same resources. Because sometimes these conflicts if people are foresightful, and they use diplomacy rather than guns it can have a good result they can learn to cooperate over a scarce resource, if they are not foresightful and they have high confidence that the resource is always going to be there, or that they are powerful enough to get the resource if it becomes scarce then you have a real problem then you can have fights over resources....

There has been tremendous concern in the Tigris and Euphrates about Turkey's development of the waters of those rivers, they're trying to irrigate large areas of Turkey where rain fed agriculture is no longer sufficient to feed a growing population in Turkey...downstream is Saddam Hussein who is very dependent on those rivers for fresh water, and he is very concerned about what's happening n Turkey because he needs that water to keep flowing through his country, Syria is similarly concerned, here again there has been no out right conflict , there has been no war over water, but its certainly a source of tension and conflict and potentially as populations continue to increase, and economic development proceeds, people use more water,

There's not going to be anymore water going down these rivers that's something we need to be constantly aware of , there's not much you can do to develop more water, desalination is a little bit of an option if you are lucky enough to be on a coast. But desalination is a tremendously expensive technology, it's a mature technology, it requires a lot of energy, its not really sustainable for large numbers of people in the long run, so you really have to look at a very finite resource and how you are going to divide that among increasingly populace countries that are demanding that resource.

INTERVIEWER: What are some ways that population growth could effect US national security interests?

MR. ENGELMAN: Certainly from the extent that population growth is a contributing factor, and I would stress contributing factor, to conflict over scarce natural resources in other countries around the world it could have and potentially huge impact on the United Sates for multiple reasons. Number one the United States is a world power, it can hardly look the other way when there are conflicts, especially conflicts that spill over international borders, or conflicts that involve natural resources that are close to us. Say a conflict that occurs again in the Gulf area, where the gulf war occurred several years ago, where we care about oil, that's obviously going to make a huge difference to us so there military considerations. There are considerations of the US military role in the world as a superpower that come into play, and there are diplomatic considerations, everyone looks to the United States to exercise leadership whenever there are international conflicts...

Migration can also be an issue, the United States is the single biggest recipient of migrants, form all over the world and clearly if people are driven to leave their homes because their is not sufficient farmland or freshwater for decent lives they may not come to the United States or at all, but many of them do find their way to the United States. And certainly migration we've seen we've seen is an significant issue in the United States. So certainly from those perspectives , migration, military affairs and diplomacy we are very much connected to the rest of the world.

Another example is we get pollution in from other countries, smoke from fires that are burning in central America and Mexico right now is wafting over the United States. We may not think much about this, this may not seem that serious , but we are connected to the rest of the world.

We import fruits and vegetables, from the rest of the world. To the extent that farmers are driven to use high concentrations of pesticides on fruits and vegetables because their lands is so poor that that's the only y way that they can get a crop, we may be consuming those pesticides...So I think that there are any number of ways that the United States is connected to the rest of world and we'll feel these effects...

INTERVIEWER: What about infectious diseases...?

MR. ENGELMAN: Infectious disease is another area where we are not isolated from the rest of the world. When the Centers for Disease Control goes to Sub-Saharan Africa to look at the Ebola virus and why is that happening that is a kind of border patrol in a sense they are trying to keep that disease form coming to the United States. There's a lot of evidence that crowding, that densely populated urban areas or that changes in forests, people moving in to forests, people moving into rain forest are contributing to all sorts of disease vectors with human beings . To the extent that's happening we're not going to be able to make our country antiseptic and prevent the incoming of any of the bacteria and viruses.

INTERVIEWER: How does population growth lead to political stability , can it lead to violent conflict?

I think population growth can indeed be a contributing factor to violent conflict and political instability. It tends to stress communities and it tends to stress institutions and therefore to stress governments. It's not that the stresses that population growth induces are unresolvable, we've seen throughout history that human beings are smart and can deal with the stresses that do arise from population growth, but it helps if your institutions are strong, it helps if your communities are strong, it helps if your governments are strong. In cases where that's not the case, where institutions are weak , where governments are weak, frequently the sorts of stresses that are caused or at least induced in part by population growth can sometimes be the straw that breaks the camels back. Where governments simply throw up their hands and say there is no way we can solve this question with out favoring this group at the expense of that group, or maybe we just can't do it at all. And when people see that they lose faith in their government and sometimes the result is revolt, rebellion ethnic conflict...

People don't tend blame their own population FOR BEING A FACTOR IN A PROBLEM LIKE THIS. If water starts to dry up in stream, people don't think "well its probably because there are a lot more of us than used to be" they tend to think "what's a matter with the government? Who's taking the water upstream? What about that group that lives up there, I bet its something they're doing to the water." There's this tendency to assign blame, and to identify traditional enemies, it might be governments, it might be some other ethnic group , where as the problem is probably a complex interplay of our own growing populations and the way that we're using our resources....It's harder to get mad at that sort of process so people blame governments or other folks...

I could not begin to specify the details on this, but I would argue that population growth as a historical force has contributed to the shrinking of the world, in a sense that more people living closely together has stimulated interactions between people, new technologies, and in general the globalization of the world, so that the world is more interconnected in travel, in communication, than it has ever been before...Clearly population growth has been part of that. Had population stabilized at the levels it had at the times of the Greeks and the Romans, people wouldn't have been driven to sail in boats to discover other continents, people wouldn't have been driven to develop technologies to fly across the oceans or drive across a continent, to invent television or radio things that have connected the world, and in fact the whole process of urbanization,, which is a result of population growth, certain kinds of population growth, it's the demographic process,

moving to cities...

What happens when people move to cities. They become exposed to whole new ways of life that they were not exposed to in their traditional villages,. So to some degree and I couldn't say exactly how much, the long historic process of population growth is contributing to the mixing of culture

It's clear that the growing numbers of peoples in the world and the movement of the world's people from rural areas to the cities in combination with technologies and global trade that mean that any ideas that happen in Chicago today is going to be in Nairobi and the villages of Kenya tomorrow or next week or next month means that it's a real tough thing for traditional cultures to survive.

INTERVIEWER: If we identify population growth as a factor that could lead to destabilization how do we prevent the problem?

MR. ENGELMAN: The good news is that population growth is amenable to influence, it is not this force that is inexorable that is going to happen no matter what, I mean there is going to be a certain amount of population growth for the next few decades I mean there is not much doubt about that. But governments and policymakers have choices they can make about the size of... the rate of population growth and the ultimate size of world population and if they come to see population as the nexus of factors that influence security that influence our national security, international security and our overall well being then they can begin to think in new ways about the policies that we know already influence population growth. Policies like making family planning and reproductive health available to everyone who wants it, policies like educating girls so that they have options to becoming mothers early in life and having frequent child births and large families.

If policy makers could begin to see that these policy issues that may seem like health or education, actually tie in mor intimately with the sort of more hard edged issues of conflict, of tensions, of international tensions that impact the military and diplomacy it would have a tremendous impact on the rate of population growth. And population growth which is already starting to slow down, and which could be slowed more rapidly if we made certain social investments that are good for people anyway, particularly in the well being of women, could become a powerful ally in our goal of having a safe world in the 21^st Century.

INTERVIEWER: What are the relationships between the number of people and the rate of growth, natural resources, and conflict? Is Sub-Saharan Africa an example of how these the environment and population have combined to cause conflict?

MR. ENGELMAN: I wouldn't want to say that population growth is the source of conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, there's been a lot of conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa, ......

One place in the world where we see a lot of conflict within nations and often between nations is Sub-Saharan Africa. The Rwandan conflict, which had influence in the conflict in Zaire, now Congo, Sierra Leone, Southern Africa, there are multiple evidence of conflict that relates to ethnic rivalries, of governments that aren't very strong, Somalia is another example, there is effectively no government. Some people have posited that much of this has to do with the rapid growth of population these areas and indeed the high density of population in some of these African countries and it is a theory that needs to be explored at lot more, certainly that one could argue that there is a connection. Certainly, Africa as a continent has some of the lowest ratios of people to freshwater that we find in the world, ....some of these countries have among the lowest ratios of people to cultivated farmland, and in fact we've looks at countries that are both short of farmland and freshwater, and it turns out that if you look at some of the countries that of all the world have the least freshwater per person and the least farmland per person, the countries that emerge out of that are Somalia, Rwanda, Egypt, Yemen, and Haiti, a country we know sent a very significant stream of refugees and migrants to the United States. Now can we say that there is something causal happening here..I suspect something is, because I don't think that these things can be completely unrelated. But there are so many other things operating in these areas that its hard to quantify the role of population.

I think that policy makers are increasingly looking at these relationships between the number of people and the rate of growth and the natural resources they depend upon, increasing competition for those natural resources, and various other stimulant of conflict that may lead in fact to war.

One of the ironies about the impact of population growth in other countries is often the resources that become the most depleted and degraded are the very resources that we all need in the United Sates as anywhere, to help us resolve the problems that are in part stimulated by growing populations. For example, the relation of population to infectious disease....Infectious disease which has some connection to increasing population density and the interaction of greater numbers of people. The search for new medicines is very much effected by the availability of rain forests. Which is something like one third of the medicines that you can get at the typical U.S. pharmacy had their origins in rain forest or in natural wetlands or in the very areas which are most effected by population growth, whether in developing countries or in the United States. So that's one of the paradoxes that the ways that the United States is effected by population growth that may be occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia or Indonesia.