Environment and Society. Paul Robbins

high-growth countries?

      Exercise 2.3 Too Few People?

      As of 2012, the Birth Rates in Japan and Germany were 9 per thousand and 8 per thousand respectively. These are very low rates and portend an overall “baby bust” as people have fewer children every year. Can you think of problems that might emerge in these places from having too few children? What challenges might such countries face in the next 20 years? How might they be solved?

      References

      1 Boserup, E. (1965). Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. Chicago, IL: Aldine.

      2 Chambers, N., Simmons, C., Wackernagel, M. et al. (2002). Sharing Nature’s Interest. London: Earthscan.

      3 Commoner, B. (1988). The environment. In: Crossroads: Environmental Priorities for the Future. (ed. P. Borelli), 121–169. Washington, DC: Island Press.

      4 Demeny, P. (1990). Population. In: The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (ed. B.L. Turner, W.C. Clark, R. Kates et al.), 41–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

      5 Ehrlich, P.R. and Holdren, J. (1974). Impact of population growth. Science 171 (3977): 1212–1217.

      6 European Commission and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. (2018). Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) 2018. https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/air/links/data-sources/emission-database-for-global-atmospheric (accessed 28 July 2021).

      7 Hartmann, B. (1995). Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. Boston, MA: South End Press.

      8 International Monetary Fund. (2021). World economic outlook. https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/datasets/WEO (accessed 28 July 2021).

      9 Malthus, T.R. (1992). An Essay on the Principle of Population (Selected and Introduced by D. Winch). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

      10 Newbold, B.K. (2010). Population Geography: Tools and Issues. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

      11 Parayil, G. (ed.) (2000). Kerala: The Development Experience. London: Zed Books.

      12 Perz, S.G. (2007). Grand theory and context-specificity in the study of forest dynamics: Forest transition theory and other directions. Professional Geographer 59 (1): 105–114.

      13 Population Reference Bureau (2008). World Population Data Sheet. www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2008/2008wpds.aspx (accessed 7 October 2009).

      14 Robbins, P. and Smith, S.H. (2017). Baby bust: Towards political demography. Progress in Human Geography 41 (2): 199–219.

      15 United Nations. (2019). Revision of world population prospects. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. https://population.un.org/wpp/ (accessed 28 July 2021).

      16 World Bank (2012). World development indicators.http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators (accessed 14 August 2013).

      17 World Bank Group. (2014). Energy use (kg of oil equivalent per capita). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE (accessed 28 July 2021).

      18 World Bank Group. (2018). Forest area (% of land area). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS (accessed 28 July 2021).

      Suggested Reading

      1 Ehrlich, P.R. and Ehrlich A.H. (1991). The Population Explosion. New York: Simon and Schuster.

      2 Kates, C.A. (2004). Reproductive liberty and overpopulation. Environmental Values 13 (1): 51–79.

      3 Lambin, E.F., Turner B.L., Geist, H.J. et al. (2001). The causes of land-use and land-cover change: Moving beyond the myths. Global Environmental Change – Human and Policy Dimensions 11 (4): 261–269.

      4 Mamdani, M. (1972). The Myth of Population Control: Family, Caste, and Class in an Indian Village. New York: Monthly Review Press.

      5 Patel, T. (1994). Fertility Behavior: Population and Society in a Rajasthani Village. Bombay: Oxford University Press.

      6 Robbins, P. (2016). After the baby bust: The politics and ecology of zero population growth. The Breakthrough Journal, 6. https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-6/after-the-baby-bust (accessed 10 March 2021).

      7 Sayre, N.F. (2008). The genesis, history, and limits of carrying capacity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98 (1): 120–134.

      8 United Nations. (2011). As world passes 7 billion milestone, UN urges action to meet key challenges, UN News Centre. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40257#.UNtVYndnhnU (accessed 8 August 2013).

      9 Warner, S. (2004). Reproductive liberty and overpopulation: A response. Environmental Values 13 (3): 393–399.

3 Markets and Commodities

      Keywords

       Cap and trade

       Coase theorem

       Externality

       Green certification

       Greenwashing

       Market failure

       Market response model

       Monopoly

       Monopsony

       Transaction costs.

      Source: sima/Shutterstock.

      Chapter Menu

      The Bet

      Managing Environmental Bads: The Coase Theorem

      Market Failure

      Market-Based Solutions to Environmental Problems

      Beyond Market Failure: Gaps between Nature and Economy

      Thinking with Markets

The Bet

      Can using more stuff lead to the availability of more stuff? Can human population growth be good for both nature and society? By the end of the 1970s, when population-centered thinking was dominant, such questions were counterintuitive and hard to even ask. At that time, Paul Ehrlich was the most prominent spokesperson for the population crisis and was typically identified as the paramount and persuasive neo-Malthusian of the time (Chapter 2). His book, The Population Bomb (1968), was a cornerstone of the thinking and rhetoric of many environmentalists.

      It may have seemed surprising, then, for Ehrlich to be challenged to a very public bet in 1980 by a thinker largely unassociated with environmentalism, at least in the public mind. The wager came from economist Julian Simon, who had long maintained that human population growth improved living conditions and environmental quality, because 1)