LETTER OF THE MONTH

Could ZERO growth be the answer?

So, Martinborough’s sewage woes continue, and have seriously clogged up the council’s, and town’s, plans for continued growth. Sewage and the matter contained therein does clog things up, true. 

Studies will “help the council decide the level of growth they wish to enable.” Karen Krogh goes further with this dire warning: “a town which cannot grow will inevitably decline.” 

It could well be true that one sign of possible decline in a town is a declining population, but is it equally true that a non-growing population must thereby mean a decline in its coping, its happiness or its wealth? 

What evidence is there for such a claim? Many successful small towns in rural Europe have not grown significantly in a hundred years. What is self-evidently true is this: Martinborough’s growth must be a major cause of the town’s inability to manage its waste – the population approximately doubling in fifty years, along with its ordure. And you might well think too that this extra population and their extra money all contributing to the rates should mean individual household rates declining. Yet rates here have rocketed astronomically. So down the toilet goes that fond imagining, along with the sewage.It seems to me at least that growing populations, far from being a supposed boon to a town, or country, bring considerable difficulties to communities which must then provide, within the ability of local landscape, for the basic human needs of this growing population. What are Wellington’s woes but a similar example? Though of course the present government is trying to cure this problem by making much of the town redundant and assuming the affected folk will just move along.The same growth fetish certainly applies to the entire country. Rates of growth of the New Zealand population over the past thirty years have averaged around 1.3% (at times over 2%); this average if continued means a doubling of the population within fifty-three years (the population has indeed doubled in the last sixty years). 

Let’s consider power, the most important single factor in any advanced economy. New Zealand says it promises to see “net zero” emissions (meaningless weasel words) by 2050 and to achieve 100% renewable generation. Now, to supply the whole of New Zealand homes, agriculture, transport and industry when divesting from fossil fuels we will need an approximate doubling of our power output. 

As renewables are around 87% of present generation capacity, we will need to see a greater than doubling of all our renewable assets to accomplish this. More than two Waikato River plants, two Manapouri schemes, two Benmores, two Aviemores, two Clydes, two Wairakei thermal plants, two Tararua wind farms, two etc etc. But that’s just to stand still. In 53 years with a doubled population we will then need FOUR Manapouris, four Benmores, four Aviemores, four Clydes, four Wairakeis, four etc etc etc etc.
Does anyone apart from me see the problem?
We live on a planet of finite and fixed size, already too small to meet humanity’s burgeoning material appetites. Our future energy demands, which are massive, will have to be provided by the continuing bounty of the sunshine (and winds), the tides, the Earth’s deep heat and for some countries, its fissile elements – we can no longer burn the many million-years’ old sunshine and its buried carbon and keep a survivable planet. Indeed all our future needs will have to be judged on the same logic. 

I was born in 1946, the planet’s population then was about 2.5 billion. It is now over three times this figure at 8 billion. Yet many folk, including many environmentalists, still refuse to accept that the world is seriously over-populated. According to some calculations, New Zealand is also over-populated – it gained this dubious status when our population rose to five million people, our combined ecological footprint then started to exceed our native ecology to provide for us. To deny overpopulation today must then imply that in 1946 the planet was seriously underpopulated. 

Yet would anyone reading this who can go back to those days freely accept the premise that this was the case? There were certainly enough people to fight a terrible World War and kill around 70-85 million (presumably surplus) people, and invent an atomic bomb that could yet kill the rest of us. I am part Scottish. The Scottish Enlightenment, which helped change the world, took place in a   population of one and a quarter million souls.                                                                                 
Martinborough’s faecal woes may appear as an ironical parochial storm in a toilet bowl but as a salutary exemplar of a truly existential issue, it does the job (pun intended). Just stop this nonsense now; incontinent, thoughtless, relentless population growth, allied to humanity’s exponential growth in our material demands, is the logic of the cancer cell and the ultimate result will be the same: we will kill the organism, Gaia, on which we live and, for the present only, appear to thrive.               
                                                                                                                                
Dr John K Monro