Simplistic Nostrums Don't Cut It

More Full Than a Craft Beer Bar

Consider the following testimonies.

Citation One:

Feeding the masses will be a problem if the population continues to soar.  The news on the population front sounds bad: birth rates are not dropping as fast as expected, and we are likely to end up with an even bigger world population by the end of the century. The last revision of the United Nations' World Population Prospects, two years ago, predicted just over 10 billion people by 2100. The latest revision, just out, predicts almost 11 billion.

 

That's a truly alarming number, because it's hard to see how the world can sustain another 4 billion people. The current global population is 7 billion. But the headline number is deceptive, and conceals another, grimmer reality. Three-quarters of that growth will come in just one continent: Africa.  The African continent has 1.1 billion people. By the year 2100, it will have 4.1 billion - more than a third of the world's total population. Or rather, that is what it will have if there has not already been a huge population dieback in the region. At some point, however, systems will break down under the strain of trying to feed such rapidly growing populations, and people will start to die in large numbers. 

Citation Two:

Everything has been visited, everything known, everything exploited.  Now pleasant estates obliterate the famous wilderness areas of the past.  Plowed fields have replaced forests, domesticated animals have dispersed wild life.  Beaches are plowed, mountains smoothed and swamps drained.  There are as many cities as, in former years, there were dwellings.  Everywhere there are buildings, everywhere people, everywhere communities, everywhere life . . . . We weigh upon the world; its resources hardly suffice to support us.  As our needs grow larger, so do our protests, that already nature does not sustain us.  In truth, plague, famine, wars and earthquakes must be regarded as a blessing to civilization, since they prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.  

Spot anything wrong here?  The first citation comes from international correspondent, Gwynne Dyer in a recent edition of the NZ Herald.   The second comes from Tertullian, writing about 200AD, quoted by Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009), p.246f.]

Clearly someone is wrong--or both are.  When Tertullian was working, the estimated global population (note estimate only) was between 190 to 256 million people at the time.  Yet to Tertullian and his contemporaries the earth was full, too full, of people.  So full that plagues were a blessing in disguise. 

What is wrong with his  assessment?  It was wrong because it was one-dimensional, and therefore simplistic and trite.  Subsequent centuries have demonstrated that with technological development and economic growth the earth can support a vast increase in human population.  And still it has only scratched the surface.  Today's global population is 6.8 billion people, a 2.5 thousand percent increase from Tertullian's day.  Yet the larger proportion of the earth's surface remains wilderness and uninhabited. 

Tertullian might be excused the error, since he was ignorant of the historical explosion in knowledge, technology, and economic growth that in our day brings emphatic testimony to us moderns.  Dyer's assessment, therefore, represents the greater error.  It is even more simplistic, trite, and ignorant because he has two millennia of human history to prove just how wrong Tertullian and others were.  Yet he recites the same simplistic nostrums as if they were proved beyond reasonable doubt. 

In other days, Dyer has written about the wonder of the green revolution in the latter decades of the twentieth century when genetic engineering produced a significant increase in agricultural output of such staples as wheat, corn, barley, rice  and other grains vital to support human life.  Where once doomsters such as Paul Ehrlich was announcing the population bomb and warning that mass starvation was just around the corner, in fact grain production increased so rapidly that his proclaimed doom never transpired.  Dyer knows this--but has apparently concluded that such technological and economic advances will not re-occur.  

The biggest impediments faced today to growing vast new supplies of food and sustenance are governmental and political ones.  Beneath it all runs a strong luddite stream.  Here is just one example.  Grass carp have been found not to reproduce naturally in the NZ wild.  They do not despoil waterways, but actually keep them clear of invasive grasses.  They are beautiful to eat--a wonderful food.  New Zealand could produce a limitless amount using judicious farming technologies.  But the resistance to this wonderful opportunity is strong: it comes from those who view change with fear, who have the view that the world is about to end in some great catastrophe.  It is better to do nothing than risk calamity. 

In the long run it is only Christians (better taught than Tertullian on this matter) who relish the divine command and responsibility to multiply  fill the earth and make it bring forth and bud. (Genesis 2:15,16; 9:1-4)  But when a culture or civilisation turns away from God deathly patterns begin to form and emerge.  Those who love God, love His creation; they love life.  They look forward to a world more joyous, merry, bounteous and full than a craft beer bar on a Friday night.