“Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline“, written by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, published in Europe by Robinson in February 2019 (hardback, 288 pages)

Empty Planet kicks off with a short history of population growth before a strident attack on demographic doom-mongers. (As an aside, it is surprising that these chapters contain no graphs.) They scoff at the classics, such as Thomas Malthus (see my review of An Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition – “wrong” and “hopelessly flawed” in their words), The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich (“a predictive failure”), and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth and its update (“a doomsaying blockbuster”). They are equally critical of more recent dispatches of despair, such as Joel Bourne’s The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World. And do not get them started on the predictions of the United Nations Population Division (UNDP). Their medium variant model suggests a plateau of ~11 billion people by 2100, while the high variant model suggests ~17 billion people by 2100 without stabilization in sight. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is all wrong, say Bricker & Ibbitson.

Why? If you follow this topic, this will not come as a surprise: urbanization and the empowerment and education of women. Those two factors are causing birth rates to plunge around the world to replacement rates (2.1 children per couple) or below. And it is happening much faster than UN forecasts predict. The bulk of the book supports this argument through both a review of the numbers and numerous interviews with academics, public officials, and, on the ground, with men and especially women around the world in Belgium, Korea, Kenya, Brazil, India, China, and other countries.

The overall picture is the same everywhere. When people move to cities, children become a costly liability. With reduced childhood mortality, removal of the influence of nagging families, and religion generally waning, many couples have fewer children and have them later, focusing on education and career instead. But what does emerge from the interviews is that the particulars may differ per country. In Brazil, for example, teenage pregnancies persist, but women stop having children earlier as well and often choose voluntary sterilization when they undergo a caesarean section.

“[…] don’t get them started on the predictions of the United Nations Population Division […] Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is all wrong, say Bricker & Ibbitson”

One of the interesting trends the authors highlight is that the decrease in fertility rate seems to be a one-way street only. Once women become empowered, fertility rates do not rise again (the post-WWII baby boom is considered an unusual blip). After countries have been campaigning for couples to have fewer children (from China’s disastrous one-child policy to India’s “complete families”), some governments are now panicking and pushing pro-child policies. Sweden serves as a case study of how these initiatives are both expensive and not very effective.

Because here is the thing – and this is what Bricker & Ibbitson focus on foremost – there is an economic and social price to pay for declining fertility rates. An ageing (and longer-living!) population that requires pensions and expensive healthcare puts incredible financial pressure on a diminishing, younger workforce. The authors show their progressive side here, arguing that continued immigration is the only solution. Although they are not blind to how it sometimes goes awry, they take Canada as a successful model. At a time when nations around the world are closing their borders and reverting to nationalist and protectionist thinking, the authors rail against the many myths and outright lies that are being spread about immigrants.

“[…] the authors rail against the many myths and outright lies that are being spread about immigrants”

Early in the book, the authors accuse the UNDP and other demographers of “recency bias”, the belief that, because things have gone a certain way in the past, they are bound to go the same way in the future. You could throw this back at them when they assume that fertility rates will continue to decline globally in lockstep with urbanisation. (And, oh my, do they open themselves up for that when on page 113 they write that they believe fertility rates in Kenya will continue to drop “because much of the rest of the world is precedent”.) But I think this is too easy. The impact of female education on fertility rates is well documented and also explainable.

However.

What of the environmental cost? They remain largely mute on this topic, although they are outspoken enough to write in their final chapter that “reducing the size of the human population is the best prescription for protecting the seas” and that “the solution to producing less carbon dioxide might ultimately be producing fewer humans”. Might? Might?

In my opinion, overpopulation is not a problem of the future, of whether we will land at the projected 11 or 17 billion people. It is a problem now. It has been a problem for the last several decades. Empty Planet makes a convincing argument that the world population will likely plateau at 9 billion or so, but that is still more than enough, thank you very much. Already, the planet’s support systems are creaking and we have plenty of signs of an ongoing biodiversity crisis (see e.g. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History), not to mention the impact of climate change (see my review of The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future). And that is with 7.6 billion people of which only a part is affluent.

“Empty Planet makes a convincing argument that the world population will likely plateau at 9 billion or so, but that is still more than enough, thank you very much.”

With increasing urbanisation and concomitant affluence, the existing population will put even more pressure on non-renewable resources. To think, as the authors seem to do, that we can safely proceed urbanising because the population bomb has been defused ignores the natural resource crisis. It is not just peak oil anymore. How about peak everything? From mineral resources (see Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet) to rare earths to flippin’ sand (see my review of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization – particularly relevant to urbanisation I would think). It is here I feel the authors suffer a bit from recency bias themselves. Beware the cliff, Bardi would say (see my review of The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Slow but Collapse is Rapid). Perhaps they chose not to focus on these matters in this book. And from the above quotes it seems we are on the same page. But by barely acknowledging this in Empty Planet, it is easy to come away with the impression that they grossly underestimate just how problematic existing population levels already are.

With that rant off my chest, let there be no mistaking that I think Empty Planet is not an important book, because it is. And perhaps the answer to Coole’s question (see my review of Should We Control World Population?) is “we do not need to, it is already happening”. Though I might not share the authors’ optimism regarding humanity’s future, Empty Planet is convincing, passionately – sometimes controversially – argued, and soundly researched. A thought-provoking book that makes many interesting points, it comes highly recommended if you are interested in matters of demography and overpopulation.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Empty Planet paperback, hardback, ebook or audiobook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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“The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future“, written by David Wallace-Wells, published in Europe by Allen Lane in February 2019 (hardback, 310 pages)

The Uninhabitable Earth expands on the essay published in New York magazine in July 2017. The piece quickly attracted criticism from climate scientists for being rather cavalier with its facts. Amidst the many responses, a useful summary is the piece published by science education NGO Climate Feedback in which 17 prominent climate scientists evaluated the essay. To its credit, New York magazine was quick to publish an annotated edition.

The near future sketched in the first half of The Uninhabitable Earth is one of a planet tortured by epic wildfires, rising sea levels, megadroughts, famines, acidifying oceans, polluted air, and rising temperatures amidst which hundreds of millions of climate refugees wander a planet in the throes of collapsing economies and emerging conflicts. In short, Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.

He is not the first to sound a desperate alarm, and his book joins a budding subgenre that some critics disparagingly label “climate porn”. James Hansen, the well-known climate scientist who has chastised colleagues for not speaking up out of fear of being labeled alarmist, has done so before (see Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity), while others have declared the fight over (see Too Late: How We Lost the Battle with Climate Change or Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future). Some climate scientists are annoyed by what they perceive as scaremongering, arguing that frightening people will result in fatalism rather than galvanizing them. I guess people will respond in different ways, and recent climate protests suggest that his approach certainly works for some. Either way, Wallace-Wells does not mind being called alarmist, his (touché) defence is that he is alarmed, and you should be too.

“[…] Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.”

Now, Wallace-Wells openly states he calls on predictions, on science that is in flux as new findings come to light. Even if he gets some of the details wrong, the overall pattern is pretty clear. As I have written elsewhere (see my reviews of The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions and The Oceans: A Deep History), the findings from palaeoclimatology leave little doubt as to what happens when you keep pumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The author brings together many poignant observations. Global warming is not a moral and economic debt that has been accumulating since the Industrial Revolution – about half of all fossil fuels have been burned in only the last three decades. And our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy, allowing us to live in a temporary mirage of “endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy” (I told you he was poetic).

“[…] our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy”

The Uninhabitable Earth is not a book of solutions though, and Wallace-Wells spends a good part of the second half of the book railing against what he thinks will not work. Against the hallucinatory fantasies of Silicon Valley who hope to escape into a virtual reality, uploading their consciousness into computers. Against as-of-yet hypothetical technofixes such as carbon capture and storage or negative emissions technology. Against ecological nihilism by burned-out environmentalists such as Paul Kingsnorth (see Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist). If you want practical advice, you are better off reading There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years.

The Dutchman in me can appreciate his in-your-face polemic style. This is why I am surprised he overlooks one vital aspect: overpopulation. As soon as this topic comes up, Wallace-Wells seems blindsided. Part of him is excited for his daughter and the world she will inhabit, one which will be “doing battle with a genuinely existential threat”. This seems mildly perverse given the litany of terrors he lays out in this book. And those who abstain from having children over their concerns for a world ravaged by climate change “demonstrate a strain of strange ascetic pride”.

“For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission.”

One problem I have with this line of argumentation, that our lifestyle and economy are wrecking the planet, is that it ignores numbers. Yes, our ancestors were not despoiling the planet, but I would argue it was not for want of trying, but for want of numbers. Now, I have no data to back this assertion up with, so I am going out on a limb here, but how much damage do you think a population of 7 billion stone age hunter-gatherers would have inflicted on the planet? Or 7 billion people trying their hand at farming some ten thousand years ago? I would not at all be surprised that if you work out the numbers, the reason our ancestors did not bring about climate change has more to do with their lack of numbers than with a lack of impact of their lifestyle.

And Wallace-Wells comes so close when he observes that most emissions have only happened in the last three decades. Could it be that the doubling of our world population has something to do with this? For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission. It is a thorny topic (see my review of Should We Control World Population?), but if you want to talk solutions, addressing it should be a vital part of a multi-pronged approach he envisions to avoid the bleak future sketched here.

The Uninhabitable Earth is lyrical and stirring, but also controversial and not without its flaws. Is taking the predictions of climate change impacts to their logical extremes a valuable exercise? I am left feeling conflicted. I can sympathise with the urge to want to grab people by the scruff of the neck, but whether it ultimately is constructive is something I am not fully convinced of.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however. This review has been slightly edited since its publication to emphasize that I consider the author frank rather than alarmist.

The Uninhabitable Earth paperback, hardback, ebook or audiobook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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