As Gazans continue to
rain rockets on Israel, a much greater “security issue”
exists in the drastic population rise in both Israel and around the world, an
American environmental expert warned in Tel Aviv this week.
“People don’t
understand that there are much greater security problems than who you are
fighting next door,” said Prof. Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population
Studies at Stanford University’s biological sciences department and president of
the school’s Center for Conservation Biology.
Ehrlich was speaking at a
seminar on “Population Increase and the Impact on Environmental Resources” on
Tuesday night – hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Porter School of Environmental
Studies, together with the Israeli Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences
and Ben-Gurion University’s Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert
Research.
The global population is more than 7 billion, a number that has
doubled since the publication of Ehrlich’s book
The Population Bomb in 1968,
noted Prof. Marcelo Sternberg, of the Israeli Society of Ecology and
Environmental Sciences.
Ehrlich argued that while most people are worried
about issues such as the debt crisis in the United States – issues that “could
be solved with pencil and paper” – politicians are “utterly ignorant of how the
world works.
“We just had an election in the US where no single important
issue was touched,” he said. “You can’t just tell nature we’re going to blow
through 2 or 3 degrees [of temperature rise] and negotiate without
you.”
As the population rises both in Israel and around the globe,
sprawling urbanization brings continual land degradation and changes in
precipitation patterns arise from the greenhouse gases that “we have injected
into the atmosphere,” Ehrlich said. Meanwhile, not only is explosive population
growth a crisis in and of itself, but the “non-linearity” of the results of said
growth are disturbingly problematic, he explained.
“Every person you add
of this next 2.5 billion is going to do infinitely more damage than the last 2.5
billion,” he said, stressing that the additional people must move to more
marginal lands that require extra development and further transportation of
water and other natural resources “We’re already seeing the edges of that
disaster,” Ehrlich said.
In Israel, examining the repercussions of
population growth involves “juxtaposing two sets of values that many of us hold
dearly” – those of Zionist population expansion and those of environmental
concerns, according to Dan Rabinowitz, from Tel Aviv University’s sociology and
anthropology department.
“When they are brought together they make us
feel uneasy and maybe push us toward a debate and toward conclusions that are
not easy ones,” Rabinowitz said. “I think that the population policy in Israel
and its nemesis – demographic driven Palestinians – are examples of
this.”
Territorial concerns often overshadow larger issues such as
long-term viability in situations like the Israeli-Palestinian case, Rabinowitz
explained.
“Nationalism generally and nationalizing projects of state
building in particular might [generate] an inherent tendency to use resources in
uncalculated and unsustainable ways,” he said.
Both immigration and
pronatalism emanate from the nationalist nature of the Zionist and Palestinian
national projects, Rabinowitz said.
More than 11 million people now live
in Israel, including inhabitants of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, five
times the population before the 1948-49 War of Independence, he added. During
that same span, the Jewish population jumped from 600,000 to 6
million.
“Zionism was and still is powerfully linked to the modernizing
mission of Europe, bringing process to the dormant East if you like – with
technological development and a constant growth, exponential growth, in the
standard of living serving as a very compelling medium, almost a mantra, a
fetish,” Rabinowitz said.
Due to pro-natalism policies, discussion of the
dangers of population growth rarely enters the environmental debate in this
country, according to Rabinowitz.
Despite the ever-increasing population,
Prof. Uri Shamir, of the Israel Institute of Technology- Technion’s civil and
environmental engineering department, said that a new master plan of the Water
Authority will allow Israelis’ thirst to be quenched for the next several
decades.
“Israel can meet the water needs of the increasing population
until 2050,” Shamir said. “Many places in the world are facing mounting water
challenges, so Israel’s experience is relevant as an indication of what does and
will happen, what can and should be done, and what should be avoided, and what
some of the responses and solutions might be.”
With population increase,
Israel’s rich biodiversity also faces increased risks and will continue to be
degraded, warned Prof. Tamar Dayan, of Tel Aviv University’s zoology
department.
“The ultimate reason for threats to biodiversity worldwide
and in Israel is population growth,” she said.
Some of the effects of the
population explosion can be mitigated, however, by policy and lifestyle changes
in arenas such as planning, construction, transportation, agriculture,
afforestation, pollution control and natural resource management, Dayan
said.
“They can actually be managed intelligently if we so choose,” she
said. “If our government so chooses there is an opportunity for real action at a
national level that can mitigate these effects.”
Lifestyle changes and
altering “paradigms in areas of technologies” is also crucial, as is looking
upstream in addition to downstream – examining what kinds of waste are being
produced, in addition to what to do with that waste afterward, said Sinaia
Netanyahu, chief scientist at the Environmental Protection
Ministry.
Although Ehrlich said there is a very small chance that world
society can avoid collapse due to its booming population, he stressed that it
was still worthwhile to try combating the damage that has already
occurred.
“My view is 10 percent [chance of salvation], but I think it’s
more worthwhile to make it 11 percent,” he said.
“One of the things we do
know is that human societies can change in complex ways and extremely rapidly in
ways we don’t understand.”