Consumers vs. Stewards

In the Western world of the 21st century, it is a commonplace view to see humans primarily as consumers of the earth’s resources. In this “zero-sum” view, the addition of human life threatens the wellbeing of the planet and the other humans already here. The history of human civilization, however, does not support this pessimistic view. Instead, history tells us that where the right social, political, and economic institutions are in place, human creativity is unleashed. Even as our populations grow, human beings can be producers and stewards of creation, rather than merely consumers, and can actually contribute to the abundance of the world’s usable goods. Take copper, for instance. Copper was an essential resource for transporting telecommunications signals over wire. Respected sources warned the human race was in danger of using up the earth’s copper supply (incorrectly, as it turns out). Then fire optics were invented, and suddenly sand—cheap, abundant, easy-to-get—was the crucial resource for the telecommunications boom. In this and countless other cases, humans multiply available resources through the wealth-generating power of enterprise and innovation.

The Fear of Overpopulation

The fear of overpopulation of the earth has a long history. English cleric Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was a famous pessimist about about the prospects for a growing population. Inevitably, a country’s people would consume the available resources and famine would follow. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote. According to Malthus’s theories, human population would grow exponentially, whereas humanity’s ability to feed would lag. In short, if wars, plagues, or other catastrophes did not keep populations in check, periodic famines were inevitable.

Although wars and famines have occurred since Malthus’s death in 1834, they cannot be explained by his theory of overpopulation. While the world’s population has grown rapidly, food production has more than kept pace. Today, throughout the world, average caloric intake is far higher than it was in the nineteenth century.

Malthus’s doomsday predictions have never materialized. That has not deterred other voices from proclaiming the dangers of overpopulation in similarly apocalyptic fashion, however. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, triggering a new wave of population control advocacy and furnishing a handy term to encapsulate the supposedly explosive danger that human fertility posed. In 1975, The Environmental Fund echoed Malthus and Ehrlich: “The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000….World food production cannot keep pace with the galloping growth of population.”

Similar forecasts have warned of the imminent consumption of the world’s resources. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior determined that American oil supplies would be exhausted by the early 1950s. In 1970, Harrison Brown of the National Academy of Sciences wrote in Scientific American that the earth’s supply of copper would run out by the year 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would all be gone by 1990.

Despite recurring fears of “overpopulation,” the near-term reality is slowing growth and emerging decline. The global fertility rate has fallen to about 2.3 births per woman, less than half its level in the 1960s, and is below replacement in most regions. The UN’s 2024 revision now projects the world population to peak at just under 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s before edging down. Dozens of countries have already passed their population peak—around 63 as of 2024—with more expected to follow in the coming decades.

Adding Creativity to the Equation

A consistent theme of dire warnings about the horrors of population growth is that they all prove wildly inaccurate. The growth of agricultural output continues to outpace population increases. Oil has not run out. To the contrary, companies continues to discover new and better ways of extracting it from the earth, even as researchers explore and develop alternative technologies and methods for generating energy, including renewable energy.

As for metal resources, in 1980, Julian Simon offered Paul Ehrlich a wager to be decided in 1990. If Ehrlich’s fears about the population depleting world resources were true, then the price of raw materials would skyrocket as growing demand put increasing pressure on supplies. The two agreed to a basket of commodity metals including copper, nickel, and tungsten, and Simon bet that the price of these resources would decline over the course of the 1980s. Simon was vindicated: all five items in the basket did indeed decline. Ehrlich conceded defeat and paid Simon. The prices of metals fluctuate over the short term, of course, but the long-term trend has been for baskets of commodities to grow less scarce, either by humans discovering new and better ways to obtain them or by humans discovering better alternatives (such as sand-based fiber optics to replace the use of copper in telecommunication lines).

What prognosticators like Malthus and Ehrlich overlook in their apparently reasonable calculations is the extraordinary creativity and productivity of human beings. This creativity is manifested most obviously in technological advances, which permit enormous improvements in efficiency—and therefore in the capacity of a given natural resource to enhance human well-being.

To give just one example, in 1960, one American farmer could produce enough food for about 25 people; today the average farmer feeds 169 people. Meanwhile, the total number of acres farmed peaked in 1950 and has been declining ever since. We are feeding more people with less land and less labor than ever before. As Stephen Hayward, author of the Almanac of Environmental Trends, has noted, the environment in the United States has continued to improve over the past several decades, even with steady population growth. In an interview for the Acton Institute’s Effective Stewardship series, Hayward pointed to a particularly dramatic example of this trend in the health of the Great Lakes:

At the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, people said, “Well, the Great Lakes are like the American Dead Sea.” You know we had the famous fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in 1969.  In fact, there’ve been declines in toxic traces of chemicals in the Great Lakes up to 90% since the 1970s. You’ve seen a substantial recovery in wild life around the Great Lakes including endangered species, and in a lot of areas, you can go swimming in the Great Lakes again.

The lesson here is not that we should lightly dismiss our responsibility to care for the earth. The point, rather, is that we should view fellow humans as allies rather than as enemies in our campaign to preserve the beauty of the earth and meet the needs of its people. Those who hazard predictions about population growth leading to mass starvation and the spoliation of nature have consistently underestimated the capacity of human beings to deal with the challenge of increased population.

A War on Women and Girls

The battle between two visions of human potential—humans as creators vs. humans as scourge of the earth—is more than an academic debate. In some places, the zero-sum mentality has been used to control procreation, by force if necessary. The most widespread and abusive of these efforts was the one-child policy in China. Enacted in the late 1970s, the policy limited most Chinese couples to having one child. Beyond aggressively promoting birth control and levying harsh fines, the Chinese government used coercive measures, including forced abortions and sterilizations.

The one child policy produced dramatic demographic shifts, including rapid population aging and long-term decline in China: the United Nations’ 2024 medium-variant projection estimates China’s population will drop from 1.41 billion in 2022 to about 633 million by 2100. Beijing ended the one-child rule in 2016 and lifted the cap to three in 2021, yet fertility remains low. China’s “total fertility rate” in 2022 was ~1.09 births per woman when 2.1 is needed just to replace the current population. Only 9 million births were recorded in 2023. In response, authorities now offer cash incentives—for example, a nationwide childcare subsidy of 3,600 yuan (~US$500) per child per year up to age three—but births have not rebounded. China will face the consequences of past population-control policies for generations.

China is not an exception: many countries pursued anti-natalist population controls and now are scrambling to reverse them with little success. In the 1990s, for example, Peru’s family-planning program, partly funded by UNFPA and USAID, offered cash incentives and imposed coercive measures, including forced sterilizations of poor women. The campaign has ended, but fertility remains low and the human costs endure.

Across Africa, critics warn that external funding streams often push anti-natalist agendas that clash with local priorities. As Obianuju Ekeocha argues in Target Africa (2018), these efforts function as ideological neocolonialism, tying aid to reproductive targets.

An important and lasting cost of population control is a significant male–female imbalance in parts of Asia, driven by sex-selective abortion and neglect. In 2010 The Economist popularized the term “gendercide,” reporting that “more than 100 million girls” were missing. Recent data show the gap was wider in the 1990s–2000s and has narrowed, but it has not disappeared: China and India remain above the biological norm (~105 boys per 100 girls), and there are still hundreds of thousands of “missing” girls globally each year, as this chart (based on UN estimates) indicates:

In both China and India, more girls are aborted on average than boys. Layered on top of the large cumulative deficit (accumulated between 1980 and 2020), these yearly imbalances will distort cohorts and population pyramids for decades—fueling marriage squeezes, trafficking risks, and broader social strain.

Population, Poverty, and Prosperity

Although it is true that people’s needs may exceed the available resources in any given time or place, it is a mistake to see the problem as a function of population growth, per se. A single person living in a vast expanse of land might represent “overpopulation” if he lacks the knowledge, skills, or equipment necessary to meet his own needs for food and shelter. Empirically, there is no necessary relationship—negative or positive—between population size and material abundance. Densely populated Japan (875 people per square mile) is relatively wealthy, while the sparsely populated and resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo (129 per square mile) is relatively poor. Japan’s GDP per capita is around $32,000, while the DRC’s is $650 per capita.

These two examples point to the key to unleashing human creativity and productivity. Since World War II, Japan has enjoyed peace, a stable government, and a market system that rewards ingenuity and hard work. The Congo has been plagued by civil war, absence of law, and an economic system that reflects these dysfunctions. If we are concerned about the dignity of people, including their material well-being, then we would do well to focus our attention on encouraging institutions that promote human flourishing. Trying to curb population is, at best, a distraction from the vital task of uplifting the world’s poor.

Population Growth and the Idea of the Image of God

Seeing the person as a creative contributor to society and the world, instead of a liability and parasite, is not just a nice notion. We can see the amazing contributions of human begins all around us today and in the historical record. At the same time, the most substantial and persuasive account of man-as-contributor comes from the Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person. On this view, humans are made in the image of God. Being created in God’s image means that humans are not merely consumers of scarce goods but sub-creators, reflecting the creativity of the Creator Himself. However, essentially materialist economic philosophies, like those espoused by figures as different as Malthus and Marx, have tended to a view of wealth as a zero-sum game in which a bigger piece of the economic pie for one group necessarily means a smaller piece for the poor. Christians have solid prudential and theological grounds for resisting any economic model that undervalues or overlooks the creative capacity of humans, creatures made in the image of a creative God. For those committed to serving the poor, this theological vision affirms that human beings themselves—endowed with creativity and dignity—are the most vital resource for addressing poverty.