Good ideas don't go away. Although they may be offered in only one context, they can reverberate elsewhere, offering insights where they were never originally intended. Consider The Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury. (This was the subject of a Shades of Green column on January 18, 2008).
Articulated in 1993 by John Grohman and Egan O'Connor – they describe it as "humanity's most harmful law" – it attempts to understand how an individual or special interest group so often succeeds against the general interests of the public. According to them, it explains how "a small, determined group, working energetically for its own narrow interests, can almost always impose an injustice upon a vastly larger group, provided that the larger group believes that the injury is 'hypothetical' or distant-in-the future, or real-but-small relative to the real-and-large cost of preventing it." This law can be applied to human population growth.
The exploding human population is arguably the single, largest stress underlying our environmental challenges today. The staggering demands of the 6.5 billion people now inhabiting a place of finite area and resources can only increase as the population peaks at a predicted 9.5 billion by 2050. To compound the stress, almost all these people are aspiring toward greater material consumption – at present levels of efficiency, we would need four planets to support the world's existing population at Canada's standard of living. Indeed, we are already living about 25% beyond the biological capability of the Earth to replenish what we are consuming.
How did we get into this mess and what does it have to do with The Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury?
Think of each procreative couple, regardless of status or occasion, as a unit of "concentrated benefit". Their proclivity for copulational enthusiasm produces children, whether intended or inadvertent. The result, multiplied over millions of encounters by hundreds of millions of couples, is an exploding world population. And the human inclination to make itself as viable as possible, urges the numbers upward as societies do their best to promote health, maintain fertility and postpone death.
For most of our human history, when fertility and survival were key to our biological success, procreation was crucial and could be construed as "diffuse benefit". But our numbers are now so large that we must ask if the addition of more people to an already crowded planet constitutes "diffuse injury".
The question raises complicating issues, partly because procreation – as in all species – is what people are biologically programmed to do. Besides, societies need people to sustain themselves, just as economies need people to function. The crux of the issue is limits. At what point does a society have enough people to be viable, after which more members simply overwhelm the ecologies and resources that supply their needs. History is littered with examples of collapsed civilizations that have been undone by their own successes.
Another complicating issue is our inclination to experience ourselves as individuals rather than as impersonal members of a species. "Concentrated benefit" is interpreted as a private affair – "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation," as Pierre Elliott Trudeau succinctly put it. Yet the procreation that results from such conjugal acts has collective effects. The children ensure the future of our species and the vitality of our cultures, eventually creating our workers, scientists and artists. But our private acts also supply the sociopaths and scoundrels that haunt our societies. The sum total of our individual behaviours constitutes the behaviour of our species and directs the course of our history. Whether or not the idea feels comfortable, the "I" is also the "we" and the "me" is also the "us". The belief that individuals are separate from a social collective is an illusion.
But the most complicating issue facing us today is the likelihood that our acts of "concentrated benefit" are producing too many children, and our individual and collective well-being is beginning to suffer under the weight. The reality of limits decrees that populations cannot increase indefinitely. And the recent shortages in food and the rising cost of resources such as oil and minerals may be signalling that we are approaching the limits of our production and organizational capabilities.
The Chinese became aware of this problem and tried to limit population growth by instituting a mandatory "one-child" policy. True to Grohman and O'Connor's law, the ingenuity and diligence of those with their own particular agendas subverted the plan – so many female fetuses were aborted that the coming generation of Chinese will now be short millions of women. The implications will be troublesome for the Chinese society, and the control program has now been compromised with the proviso that their "one-child" policy will allow a second if the first is a girl.
Globally, however, the reproductive zeal of humanity seems undeterred by the reality of limits. If we cannot control our population by humane means, then our numbers will probably be set at sustainable levels by nature's dispassionate means.
The "father" of modern ecology, Sir James Lovelock, suggests in his last book, The Revenge of Gaia, that the maximum human population for sustainable life on the planet is about one billion people. Optimists suggest about two billion. In either case, this issue of our numbers has added an entirely new ethical dimension to The Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury.