Preface

Thank you for sharing my interest in understanding the contested questions associated with the size, growth rate, behavior, and spatial distribution of the human population. I have been teaching human geography, population geography, and ecological economics for over 20 years at the University of Denver. Demography is typically regarded as the study of the human population and this book will explore many basic demographic principles; however, in my 20-odd months of teaching, students have been much more interested in questions related to the interactions between demography and society, the economy, and the environment. Consequently, this book is a book on Population Geography rather than Demography. The academic discipline of geography is transdisciplinary in nature and lends itself to holistic thinking about the dynamic nature of human–environment relations, the impact of demography on social and economic processes, and big questions about the inexorable and interacting social, economic, and environmental problematics that are getting increasingly difficult to ignore.

I am writing this introduction on October 2020. We (the human population) are essentially 10 months into the global COVID-19 pandemic. We have become increasingly aware of a great deal of important demographic concepts because of this pandemic. To wit—Does the virus have differential impacts as a function of age? (e.g., contagiousness, mortality rate, symptom presentation)?; How can one compare the effectiveness of national policies for prevention of the spread of the virus when countries vary dramatically in total population size? (e.g., case rates per capita, death rates per capita, number of tests per capita, positive test percentages, age structure of the population, etc.); How has the pandemic impacted the economy and how can economic activity influence the manifestation of the pandemic? Answering most of these questions must be predicated on an accurate knowledge of the size, spatial distribution, age structure, and mobility of the human population. Hopefully, it is clear that there are good reasons to conduct a census of the population on a regular basis. Demographic information is vital to the rational functioning of a civilization. In this book, we will look at the historical development of censuses of the population and the state of the art of characterizing the size, distribution, mobility, and demographic characteristics of the human population in the digital age.

My interest in population issues in general and population geography in particular predates the COVID-19 pandemic. I grew up in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles, California (Laurel Canyon) during the 1960’s. The movie “Soylent Green” and the chest pain I experienced with deep breaths during smog alerts had a significant impact on me and my nascent perception of the human–environment–sustainability problematic. A famous 1971 public service announcement (PSA) (Video 0.1) featuring what appears to be a Native American with a single tear flowing down his cheek as he looks upon a littered American landscape undoubtedly influenced me also (this PSA is one of the most famous ever made despite the fact that the “Native American” [aka Iron Eyes Cody] was likely of French origin; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Eyes_Cody).

I later moved to Santa Barbara during my High School years and was deeply influenced by the works of Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and Garrett Hardin. Needless to say, my early childhood experiences primed me to be significantly influenced by perhaps manipulative PSAs, apocalyptic movies, and neo-Malthusian jeremiads. Nonetheless, this was the era in which the Environmental Protection Agency was established along with the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. This suite of environmental problems was even more poignant in the smoggy air of my adolescence in Los Angeles.

As a young man, I came to believe that almost all these kinds of problems were driven by overpopulation. I ran tables at Earth Day for Zero Population Growth right next to the Planned Parenthood table and learned that empowering women helped address the population problem and solved other problems as well. As my understanding of our social and environmental problems grew, I became increasingly convinced not that “It’s the economy stupid” but rather, “It’s the stupid economy.” Our prevailing neoliberal, free market, capitalist, economic system demands infinite growth to function, and so far, that growth has come at the expense of other species, nonrenewable natural resources, and damage to our environment. Neither our population nor our economy can grow on like this. We know it is unsustainable. I believe our value system is broken and we need to attribute a much higher value to the natural world as a commons in order to support not only our economy but also our very existence. To wit, we spend over 8 billion dollars for costumes and lawn decorations for Halloween. Eight billion dollars for ONE single day. The entire ANNUAL budget for the national park service in the United States is roughly 3 billion dollars. Most of the Halloween purchases will be in a landfill within a month. This distorted value system is a clear and present threat to achieving the sustainable development goals outlined by the United Nations.

I am writing this preface from an office at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University where I am a visiting fellow on sabbatical. The worldometer website (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/), which I use to track the pandemic, reports that over a million (1,006,379) people have died this year from the coronavirus. How does this tragic number compare to global human population growth? Has the coronavirus pandemic slowed or even stopped human population growth? Not even close, the global population stands at roughly 7.8 billion (in fact “two” is likely the number of significant digits for which we actually know the total population of the planet). The population growth rate of the entire feline population is a seemingly low 1.1% per year. That nonetheless results in an increase of the human population of roughly 85 million people per year. For every corona virus death in 2020, there will likely be 85 new humans on the planet. These facts suggest that we need to ask some hard questions about how human civilization can exist going forward. This book will explore these questions using facts and provocative discussions about the trade-offs that must be navigated if we are going to succeed in achieving a just, equitable, sustainable, and desirable future.