https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/neo-malthusian-world-coronavirus-127947The Neo-Malthusian World of the CoronavirusLet’s start with China’s coronavirus, which constitutes the most significant geopolitical event since the 2008-09 Great Recession, threatening the reputation and perhaps eventually the survivability of some regimes. With world population increasing from 7.7 to nearly 11 billion people by 2100, with human beings in intimate contact with wildlife in developing countries, and with intercontinental passenger air travel having increased by leaps and bounds since the end of the Cold War, pandemics will continue to be a natural accompaniment to a neo-Malthusian world.
Super-storms, earthquakes, droughts, floods, and bushfires are common in the history of the earth. But never before have they occurred in places inhabited by vast urban conurbations, in environmentally fragile places where human beings were perhaps never meant to live in such large numbers in the first place. Because world population has soared five-fold since 1900, even normal climatic and seismic variations – never mind climate change – will take an ever-larger toll in lives and material property as we increase in numbers to almost 11 billion. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017 - together costing a quarter of a trillion dollars in damage - in addition to the vast suffering from perennial floods in Mozambique and the 2011 earthquake in Japan that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, are just a few of the many examples of natural events interacting with historic population growth that requires unprecedented energy and infrastructure to sustain.
Moreover, with 40 percent of the human population living within 60 miles of a coastline, a rise in sea levels will be increasingly catastrophic. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 which killed an estimated 225,000 people was one example of a natural event joined to massive population increase over a relatively short period of time. Tens of millions of people in the Nile Delta and Bangladesh, living at sea level by the Mediterranean and the Bay of Bengal, could be threatened by melting polar ice sheets in the course of the century. As the planet heats up, geopolitics will become more tumultuous.
Indeed, with no major carbon emitter coming even close to meeting the spirit of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius, we are facing an increasingly hotter planet, again, with more and more people on it, most recently symbolized by massive crowds of Australians fleeing into the sea to avoid the heat from bushfires in the southeastern part of the continent.
It may only be a matter of time before we have an environmentally driven regime change in a geopolitically pivotal country. The right-wing Nicaraguan junta of Anastasio Somoza fell from power in 1979 because of a train of events that began with his inadequate response to the earthquakes of 1972. The 1992 Cairo earthquake rattled the regime of President Hosni Mubarak because of the dramatically efficient response of the Muslim Brotherhood in distributing relief supplies. Current Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, governing a poverty-stricken and polluted country of 100 million people – up from 60 million in 1992 – is even more repressive than Mubarak: an example, perhaps, of an environmentally driven hard regime that essentially has no answers to the conundrum of keeping order without risking anarchy.
Islamic radicalism is organically related to these neo-Malthusian trends. As populations in the Arab world and Iran have soared over the decades, leading to a historically unprecedented migration to the cities and shantytowns, religion is no longer unconsciously part of the age-old pattern of traditional village life. It has had to be reinvented in the grim anonymity of badly urbanized environments in starker and more abstract ideological form.
The combination of urbanization, climate change, increasingly nutrient-poor soils, and in some cases the creation of new middle classes will drive sub-Saharan African migration gradually northward to Europe in the course of the 21st century, keeping populism there on a permanent low boil. As conditions get harder, on account of the interplay of rising temperatures and rising populations, many Africans will, concomitantly - by virtue of middle-class status for the first time in modern history - have the economic wherewithal to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. This is to say nothing of refugees from African and Middle Eastern wars which are themselves partially propelled by environmental and demographic background noises. To repeat, climate change and growing populations do not cause wars and upheavals: but they do interact with political, ethnic, and sectarian causes, making them worse.
Social media is not directly related to population growth and urbanization, but it does intensify their effects, by abetting crowd psychology. The more urban - the more refined and sophisticated we are compared to country dwellers - the more conformist and motivated by the herd instinct we become in everything from fashion to politics: though everyone declares the opposite. The neo-Malthusian 21st century is - and increasingly will be - a century of crowd formations, potentially driving politics to extremes and placing the political center under threat.
More people need more energy. For much of modern history up to the present, that has meant hydrocarbons polluting and warming the atmosphere. That, in turn, has led to political pressure for cleaner energy. The natural gas revolution is a bridge to that cleaner future. Though, this is arguably a positive development, it, too, is indirectly related to population growth as the race for technological innovation must stay ahead of the increasing planetary demand for it.
Developments in clean energy have been changing the power relationships in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia can no longer depend on U. S. military support to the degree that it used to, partly because of the natural gas fracking revolution in the United States. And that revolution was necessitated by a growing American population’s need for cheaper and cleaner fuel. Geopolitics will continue to change in many direct, indirect, and ambiguous ways as we as a species increase to almost 11 billion before leveling off.
The original Cold War was a static conflict about ideology, which began and ended in Europe, even if the violent battles were tragically fought in the developing world. The developing world at that time was undergoing its own neo-Malthusian changes to which the ideologically oriented superpowers were largely ambivalent. But the recent past of the developing world is the present of our own: in which disease and political disorder are not matters of only the poorest quarters of human habitation. Thus, do not expect the outcome of these new great power struggles to be as linear as the Cold War, which was in fact a tailpiece of World War II. Intellectuals prefer to see history as merely a battle of ideas and ideologies, which are, in turn, products of their own highly evolved urban environments, divorced from nature as they are. But what lies ahead of us will be an interplay of ideologies and nature itself.
Through it all, however, the webwork of planetary interactions among humanity will intensify, precisely because of the common neo-Malthusian problems we all face. So just as there will be unending conflict, there will also emerge an increasing consciousness that we will share as a species. Populism and neo-isolationism have been reactions to this overarching trend. But they may in the fullness of time prove to be epiphenomena. A common destiny in which we eventually prove Malthus wrong once again may be the result – but only after dealing with problems that he alerted us to. For the moment, the face of humanity wears a mask over its nose and mouth.