In 1800, a thousand million of us were alive
but only 2 percent of us were urban.
In 1950, nearly three thousand million of us were alive
and 29.8 percent of us were urban.
Today, over six thousand million of us are alive
and half of us are urban.
City life was always attractive, but
it used to be that cities were very bad places to live, at least in terms
of mortality rates. City disease killed us faster than we could reproduce
and only continual replenishment from the countryside let them persist.
Today, though, urban mortality rates are better than rural mortality rates.
Urban dwellers also have different opportunities and different consumption
patterns than rural dwellers.
Regardless of income level, urban dwellers have fewer kids, eat
more and better food, and consume more energy and durable goods.
Of course, all that demand has environmental costs as well.
“Consumption Patterns:
The Driving Force of Environmental Stress,”
J. K. Parikh, S. Gokam, J. P. Painuly, B. Saha, V. Shukla,
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development,
1991.
“Impact of Trends in Resources, Environment and Development
on Demographic Prospects,”
N. Keyfitz,
in
Population and Resources in a Changing World,
Kingsley Davis, Mikhail S. Bernstam, and Helen M. Sellers (editors),
Stanford University Press, 1989.
Given a choice today, we flee the countryside because urban prospects
for income, education, medical care, and services (like entertainment)
are higher. Urban mortality is lower, and urban fertility is much lower.
Over 40 percent of our urban growth since 1960 has not been because of
increasing urban birth rates but via flight from rural to urban areas.
“Fertility and Family Planning in African Cities:
The Impact of Female Migration,”
M. Brockerhoff,
Journal of Biosocial Science,
27(3):347-358, 1995.
“People Who Move:
New Reproductive Health Focus,”
R. Gardner, R. Blackburn,
Population Reports,
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Population Information Program,
24(3):1-27, 1996.
Most sources report mortality of about 20 million.
The figure of 30 million comes from the most comprehensive study so far:
Hungry Ghosts:
Mao’s Secret Famine,
Jasper Becker,
Free Press, 1996.
Here are a few more examples.
From 1769 to 1771, a famine in British-ruled Bengal killed one in three of
us there; perhaps 10 millon people died.
The usual cannibalism followed. The government response? They raised
taxes.
The Annals of Rural Bengal,
Volume I,
The Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient Principalities
of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore,
W. W. Hunter,
Smith, Elder, and Co., 1868, pages 19-48.
What should have been an equally bad famine occurred in roughly the
place in 1866 (mainly in Orissa, but also Bengal), yet only one million died.
The railroad and abandonment of a government ban on speculation
in food made the difference.
However, a much wider famine, affecting not only Bengal but much of the
rest of India, occurred in 1896, once again killing millions.
The Famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal:
Availability or Entitlement Crisis?”
Malabika Chakrabarti,
Orient Longman, 2004.
From 1846 to 1852, a potato blight in Ireland helped kill over a million of
us.
(The figure of one million deaths is widely reported,
although it’s only estimated since mortality records weren’t kept in
Ireland until 1864.)
We let whole villages be swept away by starvation, cholera, typhus,
and politics.
A Death Dealing Famine:
the Great Hunger in Ireland,
Christine Kinealy,
Pluto Press, 1997.
Major famine was nothing new to Ireland, though.
For instance, about a century earlier, in 1741,
about 300,000 had died, perhaps 13 percent of the population,
or about one in seven or eight people.
From 1943 to 1945, heavy rains destroyed part of Bengal’s
rice crop. Although its rice supply was still a million tons higher
than it had been in 1941, between 3.5 and 3.8 million of us, mostly
kids, died. We killed them with patchy infrastructure, profiteering,
hoarding, denial, disease, disinterest, and politics.
Poverty and Famines:
an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation,
Amartya Sen,
Oxford University Press, 1981.
Today, despite having
more food globally than all of us alive need, we let famine continue
in the horn of Africa—particularly Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan,
Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti. We’re still trapped in a mirrored hall of
political desire. Ignorance, disinterest, shortsightedness, power-hunger,
and wishful thinking let us see only what we wish to see. It doesn’t
matter how powerful our technology becomes if we choose not to use it.