Scientist busts overpopulation myth

Geography prof revisits scenario from ’70s sci-fi film

By Lucille Hagège, The Suburban

That's one of the most striking scenes in Richard Fleischer's movie Soylent Green, a cult 1973 science-fiction film that helped popularize the idea that the earth's growing population would one day run out of food.

But McGill geography and environment professor Nigel Roulet says the overpopulation crisis we face today is very different from the one portrayed in Soylent Green, and other films and books of the ’60s and ’70s, because it has more to do with global inequity than with population growth.

“It’s not a simple question anymore. It can’t be analyzed in terms of whether we are going to have enough food to be able to save the population. But it's a combination of being able to support the population in total, to levels that people feel are desirable,” said Roulet, who said Soylent Green, screened shortly after his recent lecture at the Redpath Museum, sparked his imagination when he was a teenager.

Contrary to popular belief, there is enough food being produced on earth to properly feed the 6.55 billion people who live on it, says Roulet, and population growth rates have been declining as countries get wealthier.

But even if this food was equitably distributed to all the world’s population — which right now it isn’t — our ecosystem would not be able to sustain 6.55 billion people living the excessive, wasteful lifestyle of North Americans, he says.

The World Wildlife Foundation’s Living Index Report predicts that, if everyone on earth enjoyed the same economic and material advantages as Canadians, we would require at least two entire extra planet earths.

“The moral dilemma that we need to face to answer the question of whether we are overpopulated is... either we have inequities built into the system to maintain the standard of living we have, or we’ve got to find some other way of maintaining or reducing the standard of living to make the planet a more equitable place,” Roulet explains.

In the meantime, Roulet says a country can aim to reduce its “ecological footprint,” which is a measure of the total area of productive land or sea required to produce all the crops, meat, seafood, wood and fibre it consumes. In fact, individuals can calculate their ecological footprints too, by taking a short lifestyle quiz at www.myfootprint.org.

Roulet’s lecture was the fourth segment of Freaky Fridays-When McGill Scientists bust myths, a series of lectures at the Redpath Museum that examines popular legends from sea monsters to aliens. Science then meets fiction with the screening of a science fiction movie that contributed significantly to the cultural context surrounding the myth.

On November 24, McGill Earth and Planetary science professor Michael Riedel spoke about the mystery of the Bermuda triangle and screens James Cameron’s The Abyss.

There are three lectures left in the Freaky Friday series. For topics, times and location, check the schedule at www.mcgill.ca/science/outreach/freakyfridays or call Science Outreach Coordinator Ingrid Birker at 514-398-4086 ext. 4094. Cost is $5 at the door and proceeds will fund the construction of a giant origami Pteranodon to be suspended above the museums' dinosaur in the spring.