The 30,000 kilogram gorilla

[snousle]

Wow, this is one of the most provocative things I've read in months. Not sure if I really believe it, but if it's true the implications are astonishing. I can't find the text of the essay on teh intarwebs, but it's so interesting as to be worth typing it all in by hand. From an essay by Melanie Moses in the Feb. 5 Nature:

Applying [the Metabolic Theory of Ecology] to human social systems sheds light on the well known but little understood decline in fertility rates that occurs with economic development. As societies consume more energy, people become wealthier but also have fewer children. Today that energy primarily takes the form of fossil fuels. The average human uses up only about 100 watts from eating food, consistent with predictions based on body size. But in North America, each person uses an additional 10,000 watts from oil, gas, coal, and a smattering of renewable sources, all of which are delivered through expansive, expensive infrastructure networks.

The decline in fertility rates with economic growth, called the demographic transition, has puzzled human life history theorists for decades: that the people with the most resources have the fewest offspring apparently contradicts basic Darwinian expectations, particularly as the gain in fitness resulting from improved offspring survival is far too small to compensate for the drop in birth rates. But MTE shows that this pattern is not unusual. In fact, across contemporary nations, the decline in human birth rates with increased energy consumption is quantitatively identical to the decline in fertility rate with increased metabolism in other mammals. Put another way, North Americans consume energy at a rate sufficient to sustain a 30,000 kilogram primate, and have offspring at the very slow rate predicted for a beast of this size.

The essay goes on to suggest a new approach to finding our way out of the energy-hungry lifestyle we are trapped in, which is surely dooming the planet to destruction. The author recognizes something that has been obvious to me for a long time - that encouraging personal conservation is an utter waste of time, since the forces that lead people to consume lots of energy are far stronger than any individual will to conserve. But it's not like anyone else has come up with anything better. Her ideas on network-centered analysis may be wrong, but they represent a new way of thinking about the problem that at least gives me a glimmer of hope.

Comments

[mellowtigger]

Interesting. I think that might be a good theory for predicting what particular value a birth rate might reach while decreasing, but the mechanism for causing the change may have little to do with energy levels and more to do with personal authority.

I had to go digging out an old textbook, "Sociology" by John J. Macionis...

p.412, "With its focus on raising the standing of women, the 1994 Cairo conference on global population broke new ground. Past population control programs have simply tried to make birth control technology available to women. This is vital, since only half of the world's married women use effective birth control. But even with available birth control, population continues to swell in societies that define women's primary responsibility as raising children.

Dr. Nafis Sadik, an Egyptian woman who heads the United Nations' efforts at population control, sums up the new approach to lowering birth rates this way: Give women more life choices and they will have fewer children. In other words, women with access to schooling and jobs, who can decide when and if they wish to marry, and who bear children as a matter of choice, will limit their own fertility." (emphasis original)

[twobraids.livejournal.com]

So, as a guy that has completely eschewed offspring, I should be allowed the same energy consumption as an infinitely sized gorilla. Finally, I can stop feeling guilty for the energy inefficiency of the yurt!

[snousle.livejournal.com]

I like the way you rationalize!

Nothing promotes energy guilt like having to cut and haul the energy packages up the hill yourself. By the cord. Somehow the effort doesn't seem like nearly enough - even though we own most of our kilowatts, being made aware of them is a shock I've never quite recovered from.

[men-in-full.livejournal.com]

Large families are pretty much an agrarian thing. For tens of thousands of years we (h.sapiens) were pre-agrarian hunters & gatherers, and h&g people usually don't show big spikes in population. Human populations for a long time were very small.

Agriculture caused the first big spike (and IMO was probably accompanied by radical changes for the worse in the position of women.) The next big one came in the 20th century, when immunization and anti-malarial measures made it possible in less-developed parts of the world to have far more children make it maturity.

Now, as I see it, people in relative positions of economic security are in a way going back to pre-modern, pre-agrarian population levels - which were never very large to start with. It may be that over a *long* range history of the world, a "population boom" is really an outlying blip.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Good points - even if MTE predicts current fertility levels with accuracy, it is fairly meaningless if it doesn't capture historical levels as well.

[stivalineri.livejournal.com]

I wonder too if a more technological society also poisons itself more - the way estrogenic chemicals have leached into our water and the food chain - decreasing male potency, and causing more miscarriages and reproductive complications for women. I seem to remember that the Roman aristocracy had a lot of fertility problems, perhaps tied to the use lead in glass and together with other metal alloys used in their dishes and cups.

[(Anonymous)]

Heh. So if we norteamericanos do decrease their energy consumption, should we also expect an accompanying rise in population growth?