My Bacteria Neighbors
Consider two beakers of a culture medium, with modest populations of
bacteria in each. I'm a bacteria and I live in one. Mine is growing at
a 1 percent growth rate per minute, but the beaker is only 1/10 full of
me and my fellow bacteria, so doubling every 70 minutes doesn't seem to
be an unsustainable rate, at present. The one next to me is growing at
a rate of 5 percent per minute, with a doubling time of 14 minutes, and
as a result is already 90% full, facing total saturation in a very short
time.
My bacteria neighbors see their impending doom, and have for several
minutes experienced the horrible consequences of over-crowding, and made
some half-hearted attempts to reduce their terrible growth rate.
Already a few of them are climbing up the sides of the beaker, and, by
herculean efforts, are making it over into my beaker, where I welcome
them with open arms. They are strong, determined bacteria and I find
their slightly different ways interesting, and their different views
about things stimulating and enlightening. The few who make it over
from the over-populated beaker don't seem to have a strong, immediate
impact on my life. On the contrary, they enrich it. They are so
grateful to be with me, they work extra hard trying to do well, and fit
in, and learn my language. I enjoy being with them.
A little later, however, the neighboring beaker fills to the top and
hordes of my neighbors start coming over, and the deluge starts to have
adverse impact on what used to be a pretty good life we were enjoying.
Now I have a terrible dilemma. I loved the new-comers, when there were
only a few of them, but now they are stressing out my systems and I join
efforts to stem the tide, reluctantly and with great sorrow, because I
know the plight of those left behind in the filled beaker.
This is a terrible moral dilemma for me. The new bacteria I love, but
their NUMBERS are causing to my beaker the same thing that is happening
to theirs. Is the solution to continue accepting the overflow? How
long will it be before my beaker fills up and conditions here will be
the same as in the other one? I notice that the crowding in the other
beaker is leading to anarchy and loss of control. My neighboring
bacteria are no longer in a position to figure out how to solve their
problem, and the same thing is starting to happen to those of us in my
beaker, as we spend more and more of our time and resources trying to
accommodate the newcomers, and less and less time thinking about the big
problem, the root cause of which is destroying both our beakers. Will
letting the overflow continue at high rates give those left behind a
false hope that salvation lies in switching beakers? Does it deceive
what few leaders are left in the full beaker into thinking they don't
have to deal with their own internal growth problem? Will our provision
of at least a conceptual (if not factual) escape valve keep them from
facing up to their problem and taking the drastic actions that are
needed to preserve their society? I think so.
So I join a new Society to Limit the Number of Bacteria Allowed to
Switch (SLNBAS) from the filling beaker to the one not yet so full. Out
of nowhere I come under criticism from some in MY OWN beaker. Some of
them are recent immigrants, and their criticism is understandable. I
send them to talk to not-so-recent immigrants who tell them that things
here are not so good as we thought they would be when we were in the
other beaker, that the large numbers of recent immigrants are not being
accommodated very well, to the detriment of the not-so-recent
immigrants.
Then, even more surprisingly, I find that a few of my fellow bacteria
don't like the looks or speech of the new residents and oppose the
immigration, not because of over-population effects, but for their own
reasons. I'm really baffled by this, for most of the immigrants are my
friends and neighbors, and I love them dearly.
Then others of my group criticize me because restricting the immigrants
deprives them of a cheap labor pool in the not-so-full beaker, cutting
into their profits, their affluent ways of life. I try to point out to
them that in the long term their affluent ways cannot last if our new,
much higher, growth rate persists. They will be as swamped as everyone
else. They say they don't care about the future, they want their profits
now, and besides, science will somehow find a way to avoid the
consequences of overpopulation which happened to the other beaker.
A comment about this bacterial immigration story: "Seems too
dramatic.... Is it that the only workable practical issue you can
envision to attack this problem on is immigration.?" Response: No.
Immigration is only part of the problem. In the long term it's a minor
part. It hardly matters in the long run where all the population grows,
as the Earth approaches saturation. Inevitably excess populations in
one part of the globe will seek to move to less populated areas, like
water flowing into a valley. I understand it and would do the same
myself. (In fact I already have, by moving to a small, hardly growing
town in Florida.)
I'm trying to point out that excessive immigration is not a good idea,
if we have any hopes of stopping global population growth. It makes too
many people who are relatively free of the immense population pressures
in some parts of the globe spend so much time and energy on dealing with
the consequences of their own population growth that they don't have
much left to deal with the bigger picture.
There is more to it than that, of course. Immigration isn't the only
source of overpopulation in the U.S., but it is a big one. If we want
other nations to stop population growth, then we ought to lead the way
by stopping ours first. I'm not proposing that we solve our population
problems through limits on immigration only. But limiting immigration
to historic levels in the U.S. seems to me to be a saner policy than
opening the borders to what is currently almost a flood of new
residents.
-- Ross McCluney
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