Original subtitles

Two and a half years ago we found Dr. John Calhoun knee deep in mice

in the mouse heaven he designed

for the National Institute of Mental Health near Washington.

Dr. Calhoun wanted to find out what would happen to a mouse colony

given everything mice need except living space.

given everything mice need except living space. He builds an enclosure, which he calls a rodent

He builds an enclosure, which he calls a rodent

universe, in a disused barn.

I don't know if you've ever been anywhere

where there was a lot of rodents

in an enclosed space but it's real heavy on the rodent smell.

When you came up the stairs it was just their office area

which I remember as being rather cramped and, y'know,

just desks and file cabinets and stuff and then you open the door into the main area.

So there was a glass observation window for each of the

little mini rooms so you could go up the stairs

and lie down on the roof and watch the rats from above,

which was fun.

He put rats into this enclosure, which was

effectively four separate pens. He wanted to control space, to control the

ways in which the rats accessed one another,

the way in which they would bump into each other

No jumper connects pens one and four.

Therefore, there are two end pens and two centre pens; two and three.

He supplies ample bedding, he supplies ample food, he supplies ample water.

These rats want for nothing.

The rat population started to grow.

Now, in the wild it would have spread out

or there would have been predators present

but here there were no predators and no possibility of spreading out.

There's a number of ways in which the way that he sets his experiments up

lends themselves to being applied quite easily to the urban situation.

He was creating essentially an urban environment for his rats, it was like rat city.

They reached a point after a given number of doublings

in which behaviour began to change radically.

This is where the experiments really get

pretty interesting.

MUSIC PLAYS

Like you I live in a world filled with other people.

It seems impossible to find a place on Earth

untouched by human hands. How does this human world affect us?

How did we get here and where are we going?

JARRING MUSIC

As with any story it's best to begin at the beginning.

In this 16 cell mouse habitat, utopian conditions

of nutrition, comfort and housing

were provided for a potential population of over 3000 mice.

The mouse universe simulated the present situation

of the continually expanding population of humans.

Human beings evolved as tribal animals, living in small groups of

maybe 100 to 200 individuals.

You might meet 40 up to 200 people maximum

in the course of your lifetime.

There was very little competition, there was

very little pressure, if people

were getting too close your group could go some place else.

When the group that's introduced is rather

small, each individual can move around

and associate with his physical environment.

And he sort of incorporates this into himself,

this is a part of him, his ego boundaries.

This is what I am.

Within the first 100 days the mice went through

the period Dr Calhoun called 'strive'. This was a period of adjustment.

Territories were established and nests were made.

If a particular tribe was successful, it would

split off and another tribe would develop and in that way

we fanned out to cover the whole land surface of the planet.

Hunting and gathering societies have very few parts.

Pretty much everyone follows the same roles and the same occupations.

There were lots of reasons why it made more

sense for women and men to have similar interests.

You couldn't really move too many people around easily.

We didn't have agriculture, we didn't have possessions

We relied upon each other on a daily basis.

In the early primitive hunter group they had about 15000 years to solve their

In the early primitive hunter group they had about 15000 years to solve their impasse of when they were stuck by the carrying capacity of the environment.

impasse of when they were stuck by the carrying capacity of the environment.

And then about 10,000 years ago, the story goes, we came up with agriculture.

We had for the first time in our long history a food supply. A food surplus.

Agriculture brought with it larger accumulations of people living in one place,

with the ability to support people who weren't directly engaged in hunting and gathering

or farming for themselves.

This kind of agricultural existence that we

had now developed changed our personalities.

Because of this accumulation, people were

no longer living this egalitarian, carefree existence.

There was hard work and possessiveness and royalty and poor people, maybe slaves.

Suddenly relationships between men and women were changing very dramatically and leaders

Suddenly relationships between men and women were changing very dramatically and leaders evolved, hierarchy evolved.

evolved, hierarchy evolved.

So you get a few people on the top, you get

most people on the bottom, and more and more of our resources went into

maintaining the system of domination.

This dominant male maintains Pen 1 as his territory

to the near exclusion of all other males.

He moves freely about Pen 1.

He examines and enters the artificial burrow which houses

his harem of adult females.

More hierarchy, more male leadership and a

clear idea that women were possessions.

They weren't partners, they weren't fertility

goddesses which we see in the Palaeolithic,

suddenly they become property for men.

Hierarchy didn't simply come about because people accepted it, it came about because

Hierarchy didn't simply come about because people accepted it, it came about because circumstances made it necessary.

circumstances made it necessary.

And those circumstances were probably rising populations.

Villages grew into towns and in towns specialists developed.

Men making weapons and jewellery and clothing

and all kinds of arts and crafts and scientific developments were occurring

in these towns and the towns grew into great cities

and although I'm covering 10,000 years in 10 seconds

that gave us eventually the urban world in which we live today.

At the time of Christ, the world's population was about 300 million,

and the number only doubled over 17 centuries.

200,000 years to reach a quarter of a billion people.

That's almost zero growth for 99% of the history of our species.

Ancient governments would usually encourage growth of population.

Food for the cities, sons for the army, taxes for the state.

Cities begin to grow, cities become the place where,

through economic necessity, huge numbers of people flock.

The industrial revolution

that came at the beginning of the 18th century, more or less;

coal fired it up in the first place and then

it was followed mid 19th century by oil.

We've had enormous growth in just the last couple of hundred years.

The population grew 10 fold more or less in parallel with oil.

We had the agricultural revolution on the back of cheap oil.

I think the role of cheap oil has been understated

in the explosion of food production that we've had.

Oil provides an enormous flood of easy energy,

the equivalent of billions of slaves working round the clock you could say.

They're approaching population densities

the likes of which humanity has never seen...

and it's getting worse.

CLICKING

A higher population density means that a society has to be more complex

simply to integrate the large number of people.

There is this increasingly urgent problem

of "How do you house all the people which are now moving to the cities?"

A kluge is a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem, you can think MacGyver or duct

tape and rubber bands. Something that gets the job done but not necessarily

the most efficient or elegant fashion you could possibly imagine.

They start building tower blocks into which you can stack more people,

so you start seeing the first skyscrapers.

As cities grow in terms of sheer population,

they grow up and so when a city is growing out a little bit it

gets denser and denser at the inner core.

They talk about these using the language of

the bee hive. Hives where you can pack a great number of people

and that they'll live together very much in the manner of bees,

co-operating, being productive.

Many people mistakenly think this is indicative

of humanity's decoupling from nature. What could possibly go wrong?

CLICKING

The basic driver of all these problems is the attempt to have infinite economic growth

on a finite planet.

This is a grotesque error, one that we'll rue in the long run.

We have very successfully conquered our planet

and by conquering the planet we met at the other end.

FRANTIC TRAFFIC SOUNDS

The next period lasted about 250 days. The

population of the mice doubled every 60 days.

This was called the 'exploit' period.

When I was born there were 3 billion people in the world.

This lego block represents one billion people.

World population has tripled in my lifetime,

and I don't think that's ever going to happen again. At least I hope it doesn't.

And our teacher told us 'we are 3 billion people'

and she said the Indian population and Chinese population

will grow to become one billion, but everyone understand that that's impossible.

Yeah, that's impossible everyone said.

We told our parents, they said "of course that's impossible,

they will starve to death. That won't happen."

My grandfather was born in New York City in 1914.

In the previous 100 years, the world's population

had grown from 1 billion to 1.6 billion.

Since my grandfather was born the world's

population has gone from 1.6 billion to more than 7 billion.

Slowly the indicator crept up to the grandest

grand total in the history of the United States. And there it was.

The signs show the dramatic increase of America's

population in under 200 years, and experts

reckon that at the current rate of birth acceleration

a 300 million total is possible by the turn of the century.

My grandparents had two children, my father, and my uncle. My father had three children,

my uncle had four. My brother and sister each have one child.

So for my two grandparents 100 years ago there are 11 people alive today.

This is called the exponential function.

ARCADE GAME SOUNDS

FAST ROCK SONG

It's that exponential growth and then up until the industrial revolution it keeps on

going up and up and up. But with the industrial revolution the rate

itself increases even more, and so we go from something like

a growth of .02% to a growth of 2%.

4 billion people more in the world, and at

the same time the industrialised countries grow much richer

and these 4 billion extra landed somewhere here,

and 1 billion of them were very successful.

The emerging economy, the top of the emerging economies.

We noted it in Sweden this year because China acquired the Volvo company.

In 1971 the world's population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent. In 2011, the growth

rate was 1.2 percent. It seems like the population of the world

is growing slower than it was, but in 1971 the

world's population was just under 4 billion.

A growth rate of 2.1 percent meant that 79 million new people were born that year.

In 2011 the growth rate was 1.2 percent, but there are so many more people in the world

that the number of new people born each year is

almost the same. 147 new people are born every minute.

8850 every hour. 212000 every day. That adds up to 77 million a year.

By the end of this film there will be 15000 more people in the world than there are now.

But they couldn't care less what the figure is or will be.

That's for the grown-ups to worry about.

His main concern is not millions of mouths to be fed, just one. His.

The demographers missed the baby boom after

World War 2 and they got ridiculed a bit for that,

and so they kind of stepped back from this idea of making predictions,

and they make projections and there's usually a high, a medium which

is sort of what they expect and a low projection

of what future population scenarios are.

Population keeps growing while family size shrinks, and the growth only stops thirty

years after a country have hit 2 children per woman, because they're building

up the middle-aged people and the old people in the population.

Population growth is measured and projected using something called

the 'Total Fertility Rate' or TFR.

The 'total fertility rate' is just the number

of children that women have in all their reproductive life.

Let's say from the beginning she starts having children to the end.

The TFR for a stable world population is 2.33 children per woman.

This is called 'replacement rate'.

High income countries, upper middle income countries,

High income countries, upper middle income countries, lower middle income countries, and low income countries.

lower middle income countries, and low income countries.

This pile here has two children per woman. Two children per woman here, and also here:

Vietnam, Mexico, Bangladesh, down to almost 2 children per woman.

So this means that in just one or two decades more the population growth will stop here.

The problem we have with population growth is entirely here in the two poorest billion.

There isn't vaccination for all children, so children are dying,

so people have good reasons for having many children.

Looking back at the historical record, and certain insights

from mammals of a kind to which man traces his lineage,

has lead to a conclusion that the optimum world population is 9 billion.

They say 9 billion by 2050. That's the UN estimate,

and the UN has historically underestimated

where we're going to, so we may be at more than 9 billion by 2050.

I don't think anybody thinks that's a good idea.

Up to 2050 we cannot avoid another additional 2 billion.

But what will happen with these ones?

I have no doubt that they will catch up here.

That means more energy use, more consumption.

In 2011 the world's TFR was 2.46 with a population of over 7 billion people.

The UN Population Division projects that we

can expect 9.3 billion people on the planet by 2050.

That medium projection relies on the world's TFR falling to 2.02, a drop of 18%.

At replacement level, 2.33, their high projection

is almost 12 billion. In 40 years.

If we bring fertility rates down by 6%.

If women have on average 2.1 children, you

can end up with that 9 billion people out to the year 2300

but if you add just a third of a child more, you end up with 36 billion people by 2300.

That is the power of compound interest, if you will.

These 3 billion, which is like Vietnam today, Peru today...they want to move here.

Here we will get 2 billion extra. If these ones remain in poverty when we reach 2050

then they will continue to grow, but if they get access to school, health care,

family planning, perhaps an electric bulb in their room,

they will also get 2 child families and then in 2050 we can stop at 9 billion.

The third period consisting of 300 days found the population of mice levelling off.

This was called the "Equilibrium" period.

There's nothing we can do about this 9 billion,

if we are not going to kill people at a scale that hasn't happened in modern history,

and I'm talking about centuries and thousands of years.

We have to plan for 9 billion and don't think that people should live in poverty because

then they will continue to grow,

and don't even think that people who just

have a bicycle don't want washing machines.

And how are we doing with the 7 billion people we have now?

Badly.

At this time, some unusual behaviour became noticeable.

In order to consider physical space and the crowding together, you cannot separate it

from the ability to deal with the social organisation.

If you've watched these animals in the wild and studied them,

which he had, you know what their normal behaviour is.

You know how they normally react, you can tell

whether what they're doing there is normal or not,

how much it deviates from the norm.

And as the population grows you can see the changes

Desmond Morris was one to make the point that

we actually don't know how humans behave in nature,

because we haven't been in nature

for as long as we've making these kind of records.

Cities are abnormal phenomena in the sense that for 99% of human history

they haven't existed.

There was this sense there that people already

had that if you crowd mammals together they'll behave aggressively,

that people in crowded environments will

become more violent, will become stressed.

God almighty, sorry man, please, we're filming.

No, please, I'm sorry man, that's in shot.

Thanks. It's on the door, we're here till 5.

This is his bubble, and when another mouse comes in to that boundary it's as if he was

hit physically. His anxiety builds up. There may be an overt

fight as a reflection of the stress of this individual space bubble being invaded.

One rarely sees more than one rat at a time eating or drinking.

As the breeding population reaches a certain level of density

he starts noticing aberrant behaviours.

It reached a point where they could no longer

function as rats.

In the centre pens 2 and 3, rats frequently

drank beside each other as they do here in pen 3 at the lower left.

Note how this female comes over to drink beside another as do these two males.

The act of drinking becomes associated with the presence of others.

He starts noticing something called 'pathological togetherness'.

Despite the fact there's plenty of food hoppers and water bottles available

all the rats will congregate around one of

them, they won't spread out and keep themselves to themselves.

They start displaying these really unnatural and peculiar responses.

Human beings evolved living in huge areas

as a tribe of 60 or a big tribe of 200 people.

When I looked then at the population of London

or New York I realised that the population

density of our species had increased by a 100,000 times,

since our original tribal life.

And it was that tribal life, that was where

we evolved and that's how our personality was formed.

The mice have programs, they're like little computers and this is basically genetic with

a much smaller element of learned behaviour.

Too high a contact rate disorganises the program

so that it gets washed out, so it's disconnected or doesn't express itself,

this is where you get the lack of involvement.

Well, that's one of the consequences of over-crowding,

is that you break action chains and the very simple example is

a woman leaves her apartment going to the

grocery store or to the drug store with certain

things in mind that she's going to buy. If she gets too many interruptions of the

wrong type she's going to forget she went to buy,

and if she gets enough of them she's likely

to forget that she's even going to go to the store.

All life is made up of action chains, some

of them are incredibly complex.

You imagine going down the street and saying

'good morning', 'hello, how are you?' to every person you passed.

It would be crazy. It would be a ridiculous situation.

So what we do is we make all but our little tribe into non-people.

And we're able to continue as tribesmen which

is how we evolved within the super tribe of the city

and that's what enables us to survive in these

huge conglomerations.

DISORIENTATING MUSIC

Each animal became less aware of associates

despite all animals being pushed closer together.

Dr. Calhoun concluded that the mice could

not effectively deal with the repeated contact of so many individuals.

People used to say it was a concrete jungle, but jungles aren't like that.

This is a zoo where we're kept in small cages in this urban environment.

It's probably fair to say that we're inherently

maladapted to the large kind of urban landscapes

in which most people live today.

Something about the urban environment is changing

the way people behave. One of the theories at the time is that there's

a miasma effect. When you bring all these people together,

not only do they become a vector for one another's diseases,

and of course you have epidemics of cholera and typhoid in cities,

but also they become a vector for one another's vices.

After being attacked, this socially withdrawn male 29

makes a pan-sexual approach to male 16

who he recently saw attacked. Note how one assumes the female role.

Males exhibit sexual behaviour towards other males;

you have rat homosexuality. They begin mounting the young.

Associated with his social withdrawal is pan-sexual

mounting of a juvenile male.

Gangs of males will attack a single female, mounting her repeatedly

Here male 78 forcefully grabs estrous female 123

and holds on. I call these 'frog mounts'. They may last

minutes rather than the normal 1 to 3 seconds.

Females occasionally exhibit pan-sexual behaviour.

Here female 47 attempts to mount dominant male 35 who resents her approaches.

Though living with many males she rarely conceived.

Here is an animal which doesn't have a society

in the sense that people do and nonetheless seems to be behaving in a

way that people do when they're in cities.

It's 1962. There is increasing concerns with

overpopulation. There's concerns in particular with urban decay.

Newark, New Jersey became a city of race riots, violence, looting and hate.

For five days it was a battle ground and a looter's paradise. Similar riots in other

American centres, with hatred near danger point between white

and black extremist groups.

Journalists and writers, fiction writers in particular,

see this as a consequence of the mass of people,

which is to say it's not just there were more people and therefore there was more crime;

something was happening in the cities that was changing the way people behaved.

Complex societies have many different kinds of parts,

we have many kinds of technologies,

we have many social roles and institutions,

people specialise in these roles, people specialise in occupations.

Dr. Calhoun noticed that the newer generations

of young were inhibited, since most space was already socially defined.

Violence became prevalent.

These males here on the floor who are withdrawn,

they are highly stressed animals, but the stress comes from each other because

of this peculiar violence that they exhibit, which leaves them as this animal

with his tail all chewed up... but they do it to each other.

These are highly stressed individuals.

As the chaos within these enclosures becomes

more and more pronounced, you'll have rats which move away from the group,

sit up on a little perch by themselves all day

and only come down to feed at night or

when there is no-one else around.

Increasingly, even this becomes difficult to do.

He calls it 'social autism'.

The way that man differs is that he learned

something very early in his cultural history and this was to develop new roles.

This is what we mean by complexity: an increasing

number of parts and an organisation to make

those parts work together as a society.

In this way the population can increase, the number of

people in a particular area, provided you can develop codes to say how

you operate in social contact,

so that you interact with these people and not those people.

He died before the internet and before social networking

and blogging and all of that.

In an interview in 1970 Dr. Calhoun said:

"Very shortly the entire world population will be bound together into a single complete

information network." "It will require developing new information

prostheses to link these people's brains to a common pool of information

as well as to each other."

"Computers are only the beginning."

People have created their own little worlds and decided who gets to be part of them

and how they relate and what their role in all those little worlds is.

And all of the gaming that goes on online where people get on and game and take on a

persona and interact under that persona.

That's the ability I have as human being.

I can spend an hour and a half as the hero of a movie

because I have the ability of symbolic thought.

I can make myself into that hero and enjoy

his escapades and suffer when he suffers.

And so a movie is nothing but symbolic thinking writ large.

A new kind of space, a conceptual world of

ideas and progressive development of ideas.

So almost that the real world is full so the

leftover people inhabit a virtual world?

Yes, and they can create new roles in that virtual world.

When somebody creates a website,

they're creating a role for themselves, independent

of what society may be giving them as a role.

Since 2010, for the first time in history,

more than half of the world's population lives in urban areas.

Most of us live in towns and cities. Certainly in rich counties but also increasingly in

poor countries as well, and when you live in a town or a city, generally speaking,

you don't grow your own food, and in rich countries you have to go back

generations now to get to anybody in my family or your family who actually was a farmer.

We have literally lost our roots.

We've completely physically displaced people

from the ecosystems that support them, and that has been accompanied

by a psychological displacement; people no longer have any real sense,

as I had as a child of being part of the planet, of being deeply connected to the earth.

Once you've cut yourself off from the food and farming system,

you forget how valuable it is,

you forget how important it is.

75% of the US population is urban,

another 20% lives in cities of intermediate size down to

villages but mostly intermediate size cities,

and less than 3% is engaged in agriculture.

You can sense that they're all convinced that

food comes from the supermarkets.

If you have a city that's this much pavement,

inside that city there's a lot of people doing

things that require space outside the city

to support their life. This much forest area to absorb the CO2 that's

being emitted. This much crop area to produce the food for

all the people that are living in that paved area.

This much pavement still requires a massive amount of land outside of it

to support the people that are living on the pavement.

It's always made sense for animals to eat

whatever food they could get the minute they could get it

because they couldn't plan for the future. Now we have grocery stores that are open 24

hours a day 7 days a week and we still have that hunger and we eat far

more than we need to because our brains were calibrated to an earlier

era when food was not as widely available.

So many millions but only one earth...

Each man's need is that of his neighbour,

for all there is to share is the wealth of the world

If you take any population, could be an individual,

the population of a city or a whole country,

the ecological footprint is simply a measure

of the total area of productive land and water ecosystems needed

to produce the resources that that population consumes and to assimilate

the wastes that are associated with that consumption process.

If you were to take the entire human population

as it exists today, nearly 7 billion people,

and spread people out across the land surface

area of the earth, evenly, every individual would have a certain amount of space.

That space is approximately the size of this stadium.

That's the area in which you have to grow your food,

put your residence, have your recreational facilities.

Economics is about scarcity, so if something is not scarce

it kind of falls out of economics.

So as long as we we're living in a basically empty world,

empty of us and our stuff and full of other things,

then we could probably get away with just leaving resources

out of the picture because they were super-abundant.

When I was born in 1962, humanity used about

half the planet's capacity. Today, we are using at least 40% more than

what Earth can regenerate, so what humanity uses in one year,

it takes the biosphere one year and four to five months to regenerate.

What's the fish catch limited by today? Is it limited by fishing boats and fishermen?

No. We've got too many fishing boats, more than we need.

It's limited by the remaining fish and their

capacity to reproduce, so it's the natural resource which, in the

full world, has become the limiting factor.

Someone was talking about conservation there to which Charlie said:

"If you don't use the oil, someone in China will be happy to use it."

And he's right. What's the point of conservation?

Unless the whole world signs onto it, what's the point?

China's not going to sign onto it.

And that's the tragedy of the commons, right there.

That is a kind of tragedy of the commons, yeah.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Imagine a pasture where any shepherd can bring his sheep to graze.

The pasture is an open access resource, free

for any member of the public to use.

One shepherd realises that if he brings more sheep than anyone else,

he can benefit from using more of the pasture at no extra cost.

He can bring as many sheep as he likes, whenever he likes,

giving him a short term profit.

If he didn't, somebody else would, right?

In the end, the pasture is destroyed by overuse and everyone suffers the consequences.

We have open access resources, they really are scarce.

Nobody has an individual incentive to grab less, because we all share in the downside

in the end, so we kind of rush to disaster.

The environment especially requires government regulation and government oversight

because without government regulation and government oversight, the environment suffers,

and when the environment suffers, the truth is we all suffer.

We already have governments and things are falling apart,

so the idea that you have to have government rule in order to keep things from falling

apart, I think historically it goes the other direction.

Perhaps you have to privatise things in some way if you're dealing with land

so that people can have control over part of this once-common resource.

The tragedy that Garrett Hardin described didn't actually happen, historically.

Those commons were self-sustaining, the people

involved did agree among themselves on regulations

and enforce them. The commons eventually got destroyed because

outside forces came in and took the land away, and that was the end of the commons.

It has been pointed out, quite rightly, that traditionally, commons systems do work

because there are social or political controls

that keep people from exploiting the commons,

but when you get rid of those, as we have in the USA, for example,

you end up in a real mess.

We are in the tragedy of the commons because

we've set up an economy whereby all the benefits go to individuals

but all the costs are dumped on society.

A land of dark and primitive contrast...

plenty and scarcity, richness and poverty.

Here lived Africa's peoples, buried in their jungle,

too backward to realise the inheritance it offered,

the untapped resources of their vast continent.

Human need crying in the wilderness, the only answer:

the magic of the witch doctor.

Superstition, age-old fears, recurring plague.

In Africa, in its jungles and in its villages,

wealth lay wasting.

The birthright of African children is being sold.

It's being sold internationally.

Governments are selling land and they're selling resources.

They're partly being sold because they need to

invest in their health and education systems,

so they're in a kind of vicious cycle.

They're inviting in those foreign corporations

to own and control their resources and to set their economic priorities, so pretty soon

you find that your whole economy is designed and operated not to meet the needs

of your own people.

They are selling, on 99 year leases, land

that has historically provided cattle grazing,

land that has historically provided local maize

land that has given communities security.

But it is also then the advice that the countries get

that says the way to grow your economy and maximise

your wealth is to organise your resources for export.

Other people will grow our food for us, we're so rich,

we'll just be able to buy it from them.

This is a new form of colonisation which is

very clearly the colonisation of essentially everybody

by a small elite class that controls these corporate institutions.

This is a really rather terrifying fact, and that land is in many cases lying fallow.

One of the things that stunned me when I was working in Asia in development

was to hear economists saying "don't worry about your agricultural sector"

"in an advanced country that's a very small piece of GDP,"

"use that land for its higher value use, like a

golf course, housing development or a shopping mall,"

"or an export processing zone, or whatever,

but you're just wasting it on agriculture."

Now they were telling everybody that

so then you ask who's going to grow the food,

and it's part of this disconnect from reality,

whereas if you say well, whatever percentage food is of GDP, I still need to eat.

It's a common economic delusion that as long as the price is right, you will always get

what you need. Paul Ehrlich said that economists would not

worry if they were in a bus going over a cliff

because they would be confident that the sudden

market demand for parachutes would generate a supply

before they hit the bottom.

Economists simply don't believe in limits,

they believe that if the price is high enough there will always be a solution.

We can eat down the food chain, but we cannot eat recipes.

We are already short of food, but we will become more and more short of food,

so those with the means are buying up, are insuring against, the loss of food.

in July 2008, the government of Madagascar agreed to give half of the country's farmland

to a subsidiary of the Daewoo corporation of South Korea,

for free, for 99 years.

Daewoo announced plans to export maize and palm oil.

A manager at the company said:

"Food can be a weapon in this world...we can

either export the harvests to other countries

or ship them back to Korea in case of a food crisis."

In March 2009, the government of Madagascar

was overthrown by a coup d'etat and replaced.

The new government cancelled the deal, saying that

it was in violation of Madagascar's constitution.

In response, Madagascar was suspended from the

African Union and had foreign aid withheld

by the World Bank for over two years.

If everyone was to aspire to a Western-style diet,

and the average Western-style diet is an Italian diet,

both in terms of the number of calories and the amount of meat that's consumed,

there isn't enough land on the planet to feed everybody,

whether that's 8, 9 or 10 billion, it doesn't matter.

There isn't enough land.

There are people arguing that there is enough

food to go around in the world, the problem is the way it's distributed.

I forget how many people you could feed with

the grain that goes into making one Big Mac,

but it's a lot of people.

The world now produces about 2 kilograms of

food per person per day. So if it was shared equally, each person would

have each day about a kilogram of fruit and vegetables,

about half a kilogram of cereals and pulses and about half a kilogram of protein in the

form of meat or fish or eggs. It would take a pretty good trencherman to

get their jaws around 2 kilograms of food a day,

and even in the rich parts of the world people don't consume at that level.

The reason why people starve in a world that has enough food is because they don't have

the money or the power to buy it.

We have a globe where some parties have much

more power than others, and some parties have much more power to regulate

and to determine the rules that they want others to live by.

If we distribute food through a market, it means that

dogs and cats in the USA eat better than peasants in poor parts of the world.

It's not about the food in the long term, it's about money and it's about power.

No rich person ever starved. The use of resources became unequal.

Although each living unit was identical in structure and opportunities,

more food and water was consumed in some areas.

In 2011, 20% of the world's people consumed 80% of the world's resources,

leaving 20% of the world's resources for 80% of the world's people.

One thing that differentiates us from Calhoun's experiments as I recall them

is that there was never a resource scarcity.

In 1970 a scientist named Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize

for his ongoing work to increase food production around the world.

Using pioneering techniques of genetic modification, Borlaug designed strains of wheat,

corn and rice which fed over a billion people worldwide.

The Green Revolution, as it was called, is hailed even today as the triumph of man

over the limits of nature.

Worldwide, we have doubled the amount of crops

that we grow over the last forty years -- we needed to

because the world population doubled -

but we are taking three times more water

out of our rivers to do it.

Water's basically a renewable resource.

The river flow we see today, no matter how much we use today,

is going to come back in rainfall tomorrow and we're going to get more river flow.

But there are peak limits to even a renewable resource;

we can't use more water than a river naturally provides.

You may think about how much you drink or how much water you use to flush the toilet,

but the real demands on water round the world for you to get through your day

are food and drink and perhaps growing cotton for your clothing.

I worked out my water footprint.

It is a hundred times my weight in water every day.

That's what's needed to get me through my life.

If you imagine that among 7 billion people,

that's a huge demand on nature's water cycle.

MUSIC PLAYS

Once upon a time this was considered the Rio Grande or Rio Bravo,

which means brave or violent and nowadays it is tame and it is small.

Northern China, the Yellow River doesn't reach

the sea in anything other than tiny amounts.

Central Asia, running out of water. The Aral Sea will dry up.

The Nile no longer reaches the Mediterranean Sea.

The Colorado, like the Nile, like the Yellow, no longer reaches the mouth.

You go to Pakistan, the river Indus, another great river, being completely dried up

for much of the year because all the water is being taken out

to grow crops.

You're taking a video of a farmer here who

basically lost his way of life due to a lack of not only water quality, but quantity.

They are now pumping water underground so much that it is getting contaminated.

The water table is going down. Gaza is a strip right next to the Mediterranean Sea;

the underground rocks where the water is held

are being invaded by salty seawater.

What there is that you can draw is such a

poor quality, it's salty, it's kind of like sprinkling salt on your ground,

and so every time you water, you're making

your land worse.

So the only water resource that the Palestinian people of Gaza have

to fill their taps, to grow their crops,

is a water resource which

is becoming, year by year, more and more salty, more and more saline.

At some point not far away that will be too salty to grow crops.

The salt will kill the crops.

It will be too salty to drink.

What does Gaza do then?

When you are using a non-renewable water resource

like a groundwater aquifer, that's recharged very slowly, it's exactly like peak oil.

You have peak water limits when you over-pump groundwater aquifers.

In the mid-1950s, King Hubbert predicted that

US oil production would peak about 1971

and that the US would become a major purchaser

which could lead to an international oil crisis

by changing the balance between producers and consumers.

That prediction proved to be rather startling and somewhat distressing.

This is as of 1972.

So this curve gone like that and that little

peak there is the year 1970 and we were down

in 1971 and we've had four more years since then

and we've been going down about 5% per year ever since.

The US started to become a major purchaser, the balance between producers and consumers

changed, the OPEC oil crisis happened in 1973, the

price of oil went from $1.90 a barrel to $30 a barrel in eight years

and the world as we know it changed.

Now, this complete cycle for the world, I'll give you a timescale on that.

Bear in mind, that started in 1857.

Here's where we were about three or four years ago.

This was proved reserves in here which

would add up to about here. The estimated peak would occur about 1995

and then we'd go into the decline.

Our civilisation has been built around the

idea that there's always going to be more energy available next year than this year.

And it's been true. We've always been producing

more coal, producing more oil, producing more everything.

The nature of the problem is not that we're running out of oil.

The nature of the problem is that we have

expanded the economy on growing oil production for a hundred years now

and the population has exploded with the growth in oil production.

So you have a gradually declining production of oil

while you have constantly increasing demand,

and the gap that opens between there becomes

a chasm into which the economy falls.

The current economic model sees growing populations often as a positive

and doesn't factor in the fact that a growing population

is increasingly clashing against the ecological limits.

Usually we value things in terms of money, but in fact the ultimate value is energy,

because energy is the source of money.

We shovel coal for ten hours, we get a paycheck, we go and eat a meal.

But instead, we eat the meal first

and then there's a backlog of coal that we have to shovel.

- Exactly. - And all that's happening is we're backing

it up to the point where there aren't enough years in the human lifespan

to work for long enough

to pay off the debt we've accumulated for the things that we're taking.

There's not enough coal to shovel,

or not enough hours to shovel the coal.

It depends on how you want to look at it.

When you have a debt-based money system as we do now, it drives economic growth,

not in a good way but in quite a destructive way.

The simplest sense system guarantees that

in order for there to be money in the economy for the economy to function,

we have to have the debt as well.

My assumption is that this is no longer possible

due to the complexity of getting at resources

and the complexity of serving debt and therefore also creating more debt,

which will be hampered by the risk that is inherent to new debt

because it's just on top of a lot of other existing debt.

In terms of how money is created, at the simplest level,

the numbers in your bank account are not actually money.

It's effectively a representation of what

the bank promises to pay you at some point in the future.

So because this isn't actually money and it's in a digital form,

there is no law that makes it illegal for banks to create this type of money.

So the numbers in your account can actually be

created by a bank just at their own choice,

and when the bank makes a loan, these numbers are created out of nothing.

So, where we are now, every single pound in your own bank account,

and in everybody else's bank account, was created by commercial banks

effectively out of nothing, at the point when they make a loan.

So in other words, all money is debt.

ARCADE GAME NOISES

BREAKS INTO SONG

We've now built this system that has almost everything we do

built with money we have to pay back, so work we have to do in the future,

resources we have to use in the future.

On the most recent figures there's 2.7 trillion of debt

and only 2.2 trillion of money,

so we're already past the point where we could

repay the debt. If we took all our money now and used it to

pay off the debt, we'd be left with absolutely no money and

yet we'd still owe around 500 billion to the banks.

There are two ideas in our culture that have captured the public imagination

in the last thirty years that are very dangerous.

One is the idea that if you wish upon a star, your dreams will come true.

It's a good idea for seven year-olds, it helps them sleep,

but it's not good for adults who need to know

the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen.

The companion to that is the idea that it's

possible to get something for nothing,

and that's why Las Vegas is so popular, because

now everybody wants to believe you can get something for nothing.

That really doesn't comport with the way reality works.

Unfortunately, you combine these two ideas, that when you wish upon a star you'll get

something for nothing, that's sort of where we're at.

Dr Calhoun explains what the overcrowding did to Mouse City's inhabitants...

The last thousand animals born never learned to develop the social behaviours,

they never learned to be aggressive, which is necessary in defence of home sites;

not engaging in any stressful activity, and only paying attention to themselves,

they groomed themselves well so they looked like very fine specimens.

Dr Calhoun called these individuals "the Beautiful Ones".

Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping.

They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight.

All appeared as a beautiful exhibit of the species, with keen alert eyes

and a healthy well-kept body.

HIGH TEMPO MUSIC

These mice could not cope with unusual stimuli.

Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact very stupid.

The North American land mass is actually sinking,

and they attribute this to the burgeoning waistlines in the USA.

Now whether or not that's true I don't know,

but I did read this in the American National Enquirer.

The main Malthusian idea I want to challenge

today is the idea that resources are finite.

The main problem with resource pessimists such as Malthusians

is that they continually mistake social limits for physical limits.

The space issue is just a complete red herring.

Go to somewhere like Australia, there's no-one there.

You could have billions and billions of people

in Australia alone, so the space thing just doesn't work.

We tell people "Live for the day"; in fact, that day might not even be very long.

Dr Calhoun called the last period the "Die" phase

leading the population into extinction.

Although the mouse utopia could house 3000,

the population began to decline at 2200.

For animals up to a year of age

who've come up in the latter history of the colonies,

there's essentially no evidence of conceiving.

This is part of the "overliving" phenomenon. And

it's these individuals who are not conceiving are the ones which are not stressed;

they are the Beautiful Ones who lack involvement.

They never learned to court so there was no mating.

Being no mating there were no progeny.

The older animals whose behaviour was already

becoming disrupted, they eventually reached an age too old to reproduce

Reproduction totally ceased and the animals have just aged and died.

Calhoun repeats this experiment several times

and each time the same range of behavioural pathologies

are exhibited, they're reliably exhibited.

The population begins to die off and does so inexorably.

It dies off, to extinction, each time.

Eventually, the entire mouse population perished.

Dr Calhoun's experiment is a classic example

of the typical population and its growth when left unchecked.

So, in effect, by providing absolute abundance of all necessities,

the base requirements of existence, these populations bred themselves to a point

where behavioural change was so endemic that the populations crashed to extinction.

I see population not as a driver

but as a natural follow-through from the age of cheap energy,

this 300 year period when we have been using

up half a billion years of stored sunlight

to give ourselves more energy than any other

group of human beings has ever had in history.

Everything that we do in our society comes from energy.

Our wealth comes from energy, our ability to innovate comes from energy,

our ability to progress comes from energy and specifically from fossil fuels.

There's nothing abstract about it.

The way we do food production, agriculture, farming.

The way we do commerce, retail, buying and selling things.

The way we do manufacturing. The way we inhabit the landscape.

The way we do transportation around the landscape.

These are the complex systems that we depend

on for everyday life and as we go down the arc of oil depletion

these systems are going to not only destabilise

but reinforce each other's instabilities.

If you look around you, everything that you see was either brought there by oil,

is made out of oil, the things we eat are made out of oil

because pesticides are made from oil, herbicides

are made from oil and natural gas makes the

fertiliser and oil makes the tractors and the trucks run.

The last hundred years of oil production is

what enabled the population explosion

and when oil declines the population must decline.

By 2050, the supply of oil will have fallen

to support no more than half the present world

population in their present way of life.

I stress present way of life.

If we, for example, ran out of energy and

went into a technological decline, we'd be back down to a low energy level,

then we'd have to drop the population back to a level that could subsist like that.

We're simply going to have to blunder our way forward

to a period of time when there are fewer people on the planet

and in the meantime there are going to be too many for a while.

We've had a big population bubble on top of all the other bubbles we've been blowing

Is it a problem? Yes. Will it solve itself? I'm sorry to say yes it will.

There are four very familiar cures for overpopulation and they ride horses.

Tensions are inevitably going to increase as expectations are not satisfied

and as countries find it increasingly difficult to supply even the basics of life.

We saw a marked example of that in 2008 when global food prices spiked

with the increase in oil prices.

So much damage has been done to the ecosystem

itself that I doubt that everybody's going to be happy.

I doubt that everybody's going to be fed even

as consumption levels fall in the most advanced societies.

If they can figure out how to live differently, you can support more people,

but if you don't figure out how to adapt to this reduction in the critical oil supply

which drives more or less everything, the only conclusion from that is fewer people.

You talk to the average person and they'll say "Oh yeah, there's a solution,

"there's algae and there's cellulose and all these things can replace oil"

when really they can't.

In theory maybe someday solar can, but biomass

never will other than a small contribution.

The 5% of the human race that lives in the USA

uses 25% of the world's oil and about 33% of the world's other natural

resources and industrial products.

That doesn't happen because the rest of the

world doesn't want it. It happens because we take it.

We are the imperial power right now, as Britain was a hundred years ago,

as Spain was 200 years before that and so on.

Perhaps you should switch off your camera for a moment.

Did I tell you about when the CIA came here? Did you know that?

That was a funny thing.

I had a call from the "US Office of Naval Intelligence", London office.

A man said "we're having an important conference

in Washington with the military and we'd like you to make a peak oil presentation."

The American military is out right now asking for alternatives.

They want to know how they're going to fuel their jets in the future.

There was a recent report that forecast there

could be a 10 million barrel a day shortfall

by 2015. That was a report from the US military.

The problem with that kind of shortfall is that militaries cannot run unless they have

substantial supplies of oil. The US military is the largest consumer of

fossil fuels in the world and if they don't get those fuels they'll come grinding to a

halt unless they go out and secure them.

If you look at the map of Latin America and identify where the resources are located

in terms of minerals, oil or gas and you cross-map with military stations of

some countries which are not from Latin America, you'll see that there's a match.

How concerned do you think Americans would be about human rights in Iraq

if it had 10% of the world's broccoli?

This is what I mean about America being an imaginary country.

People don't think they live in that kind

of country, they don't think they live in a country where

the oil in their gas tanks is being bought by blood.

Now that's the world we actually live in, but people don't see it that way.

That's a foreign thought to them.

I don't really see a point in getting and

craving more and more things all the time without ever being satisfied.

It just gives me the impression that that's the will of some hollow, empty creature

that just has this infinite hole in its heart, that just demands more and more and more

trying to fill this unfillable void.

I'm Dr.Jon and this is Nurse Brittney and

we'd like to welcome you to The Heart Attack Grill,

the home of the quadruple bypass.

After the various layers of cheese and onions

and tomatoes and American beef, and the entire thing is lard-dipped,

is a solid two pounds of meat.

♪ There is a creature that has to feed ♪

♪ It stops at nothing to fill its need ♪

Now, if you're over 350 lbs., you're gonna love it,

because we've got a special surprise for anyone like that.

♪ The creature tells of evil gnomes ♪

♪ Coming to destroy our homes ♪

♪ Provided with so much distraction ♪

♪ The people can't be moved to action ♪

♪ And when the people are all dead... ♪

♪ The parasite cannot survive ♪

♪ Unless its host remains alive ♪

♪ It has amassed such awesome wealth ♪

♪ Maybe it can eat itself. ♪

One of the most unusual examples of changing

balance in a natural community occurs in Scandinavia.

Here, a species of rodent called "lemmings" inhabits the bleak tundra.

A lemming is a small animal that reproduces very quickly.

Lemmings breed from spring to fall, and, in favourable years, even in winter.

Lemmings have a very strange population control system,

I hope not like ours, but what happens with lemmings is

they breed and they breed and they keep going nicely and then they have a lemming year

and when a lemming year comes, it's just an accident of the food supply

and suddenly, they overpopulate to a point where, in the wild,

they're just like Calhoun's rats in his experiment where he overcrowded them.

As more and more individuals are born, the food and water supply begins to diminish.

Every three to four years, the populations in some localities grow to great densities.

And then something amazing starts to happen...

The myth of them jumping over a cliff is simply

a symbolic way of describing it but what happens, if you look at these lemmings

as I have, is they become completely stressed out of their minds

they're dashing here and there, they succumb

to disease, the whole society breaks down because they've been too successful.

Individuals begin to migrate away from centres of dense population.

They group together and move in detectable waves across the countryside.

Wherever barriers block their passage, they tend to crowd in rising numbers,

until a kind of panic reaction drives them over the obstacles.

I actually imported some, in a lemming year, to study them.

They were animals in total disharmony, is the only word I can use.

I've studied lots of species of rodents and when I saw these lemmings in a lemming year

it was like looking at an animal in crisis.

Its movements, its behaviour, everything about

it was agitated, distressed, and what had happened was that the overpopulation

that had destroyed the society had increased the level of stress to the point

that you see in a suicide in the slums of a city

and that's what I was seeing in these lemmings.

Once again they begin swimming. They act under

the same impulse that forced them to cross smaller bodies of water.

Swimming until exhausted, all of them drown.

They can't take the stress the way humans

are able to. We're brilliant at taking stress.

They can't take it and their whole society collapses

and then they go back to the old level again.

Something in the environment stimulates this activity.

If we were to plot the growth and decline

in population of the lemmings, we would see that as several years go by,

the population growth curve would look like this

with a rapid drop-off occurring around the fourth year.

This growth curve is a classic example of a population cycle

in the ever-fluctuating balance of nature.

The problem for human beings is that

if we're not careful, we'll have a lemming year.

By and large, the tendency for the entire species

is to really be focused on the short term problems.

People, for example, think about the eventual oil shortage.

We don't know exactly when it's going to happen

but it's clear that oil is a finite resource, and lots of people are worried about that,

but at the end of the day they still might get into their SUVs,

they might drive back and forth to their country houses if they have one or whatever

and so people can have these long term views but then the short term decision is

"what should I do this weekend?" and well, it would be fun to get into the

SUV and drive off to the mountains.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, everyone

assumed that the energy crisis was just going to keep on going,

that we had entered the age of scarcity, that

it was going to be solar energy and economic

contraction and getting by with less from then on.

Everybody was blind-sided by what actually happened because nobody thought that

the governments of the industrial world would be stupid enough

to take the last big stocks of petroleum they had,

the North Slope of Alaska, the North Sea,

and pump them like there was no tomorrow.

That's what ended the energy crisis in the 1970s. They basically turned on the stops,

pumped them dry, to get a couple of decades of political success,

to make everybody happy for that short term.

By doing so, they flushed our chance of having

any kind of less-than-traumatic transition.

I gave public lectures and printed papers in the 1970s saying

the best estimate of when world oil production would peak

was about 2010, plus or minus ten years. I remember saying that fortunately that gave

us 30 or 40 years to plan a smooth transition out of the age of cheap and unlimited oil

towards an age when oil would be limited and more expensive.

I've got a concise summary here of how we've used the 40 years to prepare for the age of

limited and expensive oil.

Perhaps the most chilling conclusion from

his mouse city studies, says Dr Calhoun, is that once this change in social behaviour

occurs, it apparently cannot be reversed.

It's this fact of apparent irreversible phase shifts

that give some of us a particular concern over the fate of the human situation.

A state change happens. Calhoun calls this a behavioural sink.

Even if you take one of those rats out and put it into a more benign environment,

it never exhibits normal behaviour again.

Almost all physical environmental systems

have that kind of tipping point, the point where what had been quite stable

suddenly changes state, dramatically.

There seems to be something about the human

species, a natural predisposition to continue to expand,

a natural tendency to discount the future, not to pay much attention to warnings that

things are going awry.

The most obvious examples are the destruction

of human societies like Easter Island. They must have been aware that things were

going downhill very rapidly but they didn't do anything about it.

The same thing appears to be happening here.

If industrial civilisation is on its downslope,

then everything that most people in the industrial

world have staked their futures on is dust in the wind.

Everything that they've hoped, everything

they've dreamed, everything they've planned...

their retirement is gone. Their investments will be worthless.

Their goals for the future, their hopes for

their children are dust and ashes.

The situation we face is pretty sad. We kind of blew it.

It seems to be in the nature of human beings

to carry everything a bit too far

and then to have to reset the operations of daily life.

We're talking about the death of a civilisation,

we're talking about the death of a dream, a vision of human possibility, of what humans are,

what they can hope for, and we're talking about the death of a lot

of hopes, and a lot of plans, a lot of securities

both in the financial sense and more broadly,

and ultimately, a lot of people.

Even, I think, towards the end of his life,

Calhoun was concerned that that was the direction we were heading in.

Having seen how his rats behaved, he was concerned that similar things may happen to us.

We see worldwide the breaking down of social roles,

the increase in contact both as a result of the breakdown of social roles and because

there are too many people, that this might lead to an over-riding of

our controls, of our total culture, and we'd be set into a process which would

either fix us rigidly forever into some sort of global tribalism

without any adaptation to change or there would result perhaps eventually some

decline very much like we've seen here.

MUSIC PLAYS

♪ Man is now able to fly through the air like a bird ♪

♪ He is able to swim beneath the sea like a fish ♪

♪ He is able to burrow beneath the ground like a mole ♪

♪ Now if only he would walk on earth like a man ♪

♪ This would be paradise ♪

♪ Man is now able to fly through the air like a bird ♪

♪ He is able to swim beneath the sea like a fish ♪

♪ He is able to burrow beneath the ground like a mole ♪

♪ Now if only he would walk on earth like a man ♪

♪ This would be paradise ♪

♪ Now if only he would walk on earth like a man ♪

There was no way that the stresses that constant

interaction placed on people and on rats was sustainable,

but it was also the case that you were stuck with this situation.

How do you get yourself out of it?

We like to say that we're revolutionists here,

but a particular kind of revolutionist which you now spell differently.

Now, we all know what this symbol is, this is "prescription".

So we're concerned with the prescription for

evolution, the design of the future, the design

of evolution, so we're revolutionists.

It's easy to look at Calhoun's work and simply see him as

a demon of rodents, that he's just someone who's out there to make their lives bad,

that he's some kind of rodent sadist. Calhoun wasn't simply interested in generating

aberrant behaviours in rodents.

He wasn't trying to upset rats and mice. That wasn't his aim.

Later on he began conducting experiments to

see "we know how to generate these pyscho-pathological behaviours.

What can we do by reversing that? Or...

What changes can we make in the rats' environment which can generate

more positive behaviours?"

One of the things he began doing was designing

enclosures which would encourage cooperation.

He designed a food hopper that required cooperation,

required that the rats learn to cooperate.

Rather than just individual foraging, one

of them had to come and stand on the pedal while the other one got the food or drink.

Calhoun realizes there's something remarkable happening here.

Rather than see each other as potential combatants, the rats began to see each other as

a necessary means of obtaining their own nutrition.

So this way he begins to train the rats to

get on with one another effectively. He builds an environment where rather than

being constant conflict, the rats are in constant cooperation.

My recollection of what happened with the Norway rats is that they developed a way of

dealing with it that allowed their society to continue and

to grow, and allowed them to continue to interact with each other

and to be rats.

If we can focus on just the good environment,

the biological environment, the physical environment,

we will miss a great deal of what man is or

could be, with a concern for increasing human potentiality,

and again, we like to say, we like to put "mental", that's the human capacity,

back in "environmental."

Trying to change people is much, much too hard.

Change the world instead. It's easier.

You just change the environment in which we all operate

and we'll happily do different things.

As prosperity increases, what we've seen worldwide is in general, fertility rates fall.

So the economists' argument is that if we allow economies to grow

eventually people will decide that they don't want as many children.

I think broadly speaking that's probably true,

we've seen it happen over the last 100 years

pretty much everywhere around the world.

Calhoun died in 1995, so I don't know if he

knew of that argument. I think he would approve of the idea that

if you make countries richer they lower their birth rates spontaneously.

It's a nice solution in two ways: One, people have better conditions; two, the

birth rate lowers so that conditions don't become even more strained.

Now that's a pretty difficult experiment to run.

It requires making the developing world wealthy.

If you can solve that, pretty much everything else is going to fall into place.

Politicians have had it easy for decades,

especially when there were abundant natural resources

because they could just talk about 'a rising tide lifts all boats.'

As long as we have economic growth, you don't

have to worry about a fair distribution of wealth.

So, for example, in North America, particularly in the last forty years,

by deliberate political choice, we've emphasized the individual, selfish behaviour...

I've seen in a dozen newspaper articles how selfishness makes the world go around

and everybody else benefits if you're as selfish as possible, and so on.

And the argument is that if we don't consume,

then the attempts by people in poorer countries,

Bangladesh, for example, to get out of poverty

by building a textile industry, is disrupted.

That is indeed the problem and I think...I don't think there is an easy answer to this.

The fact is, we cannot continue to support the attempts by Bangladesh to get its people

out of poverty by setting up a textile industry.

I think something like 90% of the exports of Bangladesh

are processed cotton in one form or another,

so if you and I stop buying as many t-shirts,

it does affect the ability of people in that

country to feed themselves.

Sometimes I think that this concern about

the environment, besides being real, it's also like a way to continue a belief

that all people in the world will not live at the same level.

That was always the belief in West Europe about other people.

First, we said they are racially subordinate, because they are genetically stupid.

They cannot do it. And then when that was disproved, they said

"oh, no it's culture, you know... they are Hindus, they pray, or they are Buddhist,

so they will never make it." And now we say "Okay, okay they are genetically

capable, and their religions can be compatible

with a good life, but the environment doesn't allow it."

There's always something. This thing with the environment is real.

But people aren't going to exercise the option of dying today

for the world to be better tomorrow. No one is going to do that.

The environment is just one problem which we're focused on now, and this may be a real

trap, because we only look at the physical-biological

aspects of our surroundings, where if we focused instead on what is a much

more essential comprehensive problem

and that is evolution and the designing of evolution.

Dr. Calhoun, I want to give you the opportunity

to go back to something we touched on earlier

and that was, you said 'standing room only',

and you said you wanted to come back to it.

When certain tolerable limits are reached,

this will establish the necessity for controls.

Now among animals, these controls are fairly

automatic, they go through the adrenal and pituitary systems.

If a pregnant female house mouse smells the odour of a strange mouse, a stranger,

she re-absorbs her embryos.

The embryos that are inside her go into reverse. They disappear.

It's an abortion of an extraordinarily natural kind.

The rat populations would level off.

The cities didn't. The cities seemed to get more and more dense.

Humanity, unlike the rats, didn't seem to have this controlling capacity.

Most animals have some sort of breeding control system. Why haven't we got one?

That's the big question. Because so far, we haven't evolved one.

If you start a population off crowded, individuals don't develop any identity,

they don't develop any space bubble, so you don't get aggression, you don't get anxiety

so nothing interrupts reproduction and this is a trap that we could get into.

If we have sufficient intelligence, then that

alone should be enough for us to control our population.

Any programmes against contraceptive measures

are crimes against humanity. And I can't understand how anyone, religious

leaders and so on, seriously promotes anti-contraception policies.

That's a crime against humanity.

More and more, we seem to see that the Catholic

Church in particular is holding back, trying to make sure that

fertility rates stay high in these other countries

and that seems to me to be utterly wicked

and completely at variance with the moral principles that the church

would otherwise say it had.

Controlling women's sexuality and fertility

has always been a big project of men who are in power, and we can even see now

with what happens that the body of woman is still

a battlefield and that's what we are speaking to.

My personal belief is that everybody should enjoy sex.

You just have to have the capacity to enjoy sex

without necessarily having to reproduce if you don't want to.

In some countries still now you cannot ask

for family planning if your husband doesn't write you a small

note saying that he agrees, or you have to succumb to the pressure of

your mother-in-law who would like more grandchildren,

so it's all about other's desires, rather

than women themselves.

It's not easy to control fertility if you

are a poor woman in a village

with a huge desire to do it and sometimes

what happens is that When they find themselves with an unwanted

pregnancy, they go out of their way to terminate

with huge consequences for their health, sometimes even death, as a result of it.

If a woman cannot decide about her own sexuality,

her own reproduction, where do we expect her to exercise her own human rights?

It takes three measures to get population growth down:

First is empowerment of women

Second is empowerment of women.

Third is empowerment of women

And this empowerment of women is, like, 'Oh, well there you go then.'

The reason I talk about women needing to take control of contraception instead of men

is that women have a greater interest in having fewer children.

In some people's minds it means the disempowerment of men, you see.

There's no way we can test future population growth

so it just makes sense to find ways to slow population growth

that are consistent with our values and I argue that trying to help women not to have

unintended pregnancies is pretty consistent with, I think, just about everybody's values.

The more human beings the better, as long

as they're not all alive at the same time.

You don't want everybody alive at the same time.

Why? Because if too many people are alive at the same time,

you overwhelm life support capacity and diminish it.

What does that mean?

That means fewer people are going to be alive in the future.

We are a high quality species, we are not a high quantity species,

we shouldn't be, we should be a high quality species, and we should actually

think in terms of increasing the quality of life for everybody

rather than the quantity of people alive on the planet.

We need a better establishment to allow

interrelationships to protect us from too many contacts

but to allow us for those contacts which we do engage in to be more meaningful

for our own lives and more meaningful to others in a compassionate sense of each of us

being involved in helping the other to fulfil his role, we'll have many more roles,

and this is where the notion of compassion comes in is each of us helping others

to fulfil their programmes for development.

I think he calls it a compassionate revolution.

He has this sense that if people begin to get on better with one another

that'll be the first step towards dealing with these problems of elevated density.

When enough people want change badly enough,

it happens regardless of how strong the forces arranged against them.

We have to make the wise and right decisions

as mankind, and we ain't doing it now, but we have the resources.

We have enough sunshine, we have enough money,

we have enough scientific capacity, we can do it.

You watch a movie, a documentary, you are better informed, but the question is:

does that stay close enough to the forefront of your thinking to act on it?

People learn new information all the time, there's some evidence that human beings are

actually becoming smarter and better informed than they used to be that

the average person today knows much more than the average person 300 years ago

there's a much bigger fund of general knowledge, people are generally better informed

partly because of the internet, but that doesn't

necessarily mean that we act on that knowledge

so, we have this really large body of background

knowledge, but you still have to set your

priorities about what you're going to do and the structure

of the brain is that those priorities start with food and

move up to sex and it's going to be really hard to get people to worry about things

like the fate of mankind.

Most people who watch this film have some

interest in some mutual fund, or retirement fund,

or some kind of financial fund, presumably managed for their benefit.

That fund owns assets around the world, but you have no idea what assets you own,

you don't know what people are involved, you don't know how those people are treated.

The only relationship you have to those assets is what is the financial return.

So this becomes, in a sense, the ultimate perversion of society so even those of us

who are owners have no real idea of what we own or what the implications are.

We have therefore, to run our lives, to take into account our impact on other people

whether that be our next door neighbour or the cotton farmer in central Asia.

That means that we need to take responsibility;

capitalism says all we need to do is worry

about having enough money to buy the things that we want.

No. We have moral obligations to live

our lives to benefit the rest of humanity,

not just ourselves financially.

So, for the time being we have this one planet,

and we have this, you name it, doesn't make a lot of difference, we have

to divide what's there by 7 billion this year, by 8 billion,

by 9 billion middle of the century.

So you get your share of the planet which

is plus or minus one and a half global hectares;

so my challenge is, for my family, for my country,

how can we design our economies, our societies, our lifestyle, so that we have

a happy, decent, funny, fulfilling life within using

my fair share of the planet.

The future is not somewhere we're going, it's something we're creating.

So you shouldn't ask the experts to tell you what the future will be

like, you should ask yourself 'What do you want the future to be?'

The entire future of evolution depends on

the next 15 years, it's the people here now, who are involved now.

He had a positive message about the future

of humanity being something that was in our hands

and that we ought to steer, rather than let it

run adrift in the way that the rat populations had.

I'm convinced that a species that has been

as successful as ours in the past will not fizzle out

in a chaos of overpopulation. I just don't believe that.

As I was finishing this film, some interesting headlines appeared in the news.

Japan's population is predicted to fall by 1 million people

a year into the forseeable future.

By 2060, it will be two-thirds the size it

is now, with 40% of the population above retirement age.

Are they leading the charge towards a stable population at a lower level?

Or will their birthrate continue to drop to nothing,

just like Calhoun's rats?

The idea of a shrinking population is discussed

as if it is a catastrophe, usually for economic reasons.

Modern economies are based on the idea that continuing population growth

can service continuing debt growth, which leads to continuing economic growth.

It's easy to be blinded by all the big numbers and percentages,

by the projections and predictions.

We are talking about people, and ultimately about the entire enterprise of life.

What do we really want? A mirage of success based on theories and statistics,

or the best possible human experience in balance

with our planet and the rest of its inhabitants?

As individuals, shouldn't we strive to create societies which we believe in

not because they already existed when we were born,

but because they are worth preserving?

In the end, Calhoun's rats were locked into a

set pattern, unable to overcome the situation

into which they had been put.

As they circled the drain, none of them were

able to stand apart, to speak out, to help the others.

They had lived for too long in constant struggle with one another,

and between their biology and their psychology, they gave up and died out.

Humans might not be rats, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from what happened to them.

It means we have to do better.

Dr. Calhoun, as a human being, after going through this experiment,

what goes through your mind? Are you worried about the future of mankind?

You are highly optimistic but at the same time highly pessimistic,

and you wish to throw your intellectual weight to the optimistic side,

to opening up continuing evolution.

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