Category: Population

Picture Prehistoric Life in the Desert
© Richard Grossman MD, 2010

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
Loren Eiseley

Living in the desert is challenging. We spent the week after Christmas in Baja California camping on the beach. Fortunately, our tents were comfortable and meals were cooked for us. Pedro, a Baja native, gave us a glimpse into a very different past.
The afternoon was cool with sun shining through broken clouds and a rare rain in the offing. As we climbed up the steep, rock-strewn path we were careful to watch our step. Although vegetation is sparse, most of the plants wear spines or thorns for protection. A little stumble could result in a painful jab.
Despite their armor, many desert plants are edible. Pedro assured us that the common prickly-pear cactus fruit tastes good, and even the pads are edible—after removing the spines.
We reached a cave that Pedro told us had been the winter home for a band of Pericú people, the extinct indigenous tribe of southern Baja. Small and stark, a single red ochre pictograph decorated the cave. We imagined a dozen people huddled in the chill admonishing their toddlers to stay away from the edge. A midden of shells lay below, showing that the Pericú enjoyed the ocean’s bounty.
On top of the mesa we found their summer home. There was little to mark it except for another heap of shells and four round depressions in the rock. Grinding holes, Pedro commented. When asked about their use he looked embarrassed.
Pedro explained that there is a type of manna—the pitahaya fruit—that ripens in late summer. It grows on the organ pipe cactus (pitahaya dulce) that resembles a clump of spiny fingers pointing skyward. The size of a tennis ball, pitahaya fruit has the color and a bit of the flavor of watermelon. Although rich in energy, the tiny seeds pass through without being digested.
European missionaries recorded that the indigenous peoples were hungry except during the brief pitahaya season—perhaps wishful thinking on the Europeans’ part. Lacking any means of preserving fruit, how could people prolong this short season of plenty? Baja natives came up with an unlikely solution that your mother would not approve of.
The indigenous people developed a system to harvest the nutrition in pitahaya seeds that disgusted missionaries. While enjoying the abundance of the harvest, people collected their poop in special places. When it had dried, the seeds were separated, washed, and then pulverized in those circular rock depressions. After grinding they make an edible paste high in fat. Their “recycling” of calorie-rich pitahaya seeds illustrates how desperate they must have been to get enough nutrition.
Baja California is a desert peninsula: the sun is brilliant, the growing season long and vacant land plentiful. What is lacking is enough fresh water; not much grows with only five inches of rain a year. Without plentiful seafood this place could not support humans.
Every living system has limits to the number of plants or animals it can sustain. Biologists call it “carrying capacity”—the number of plants, animals or people that an area can support given the quality of the natural environment. Ingenuity can extend the environment’s ability to support people, but not forever. We are subject to biological and other limits.
When a habitat’s carrying capacity is exceeded, it becomes degraded and the population will be forced to decrease. Carrying capacity in the desert is dictated by the supply of water. Many people think that the ultimate limitation here in the arid Southwest will be water, just as it was for the Pericú.
We have exploited the resources of our planet for so long, and found so many ingenious ways to increase its productivity, that we often forget about limits. The desert reminds us of the finiteness of biological systems.
Humans are cleverer than most animals in cultivating nature. There is no evidence that the Pericú had formal agriculture. Nevertheless, some seeds must have escaped from the pitahaya gatherers and landed near their habitations, thus increasing future harvests. Accidental seeding may have been one of the ways that agriculture got started in other parts of the world.
Planting seeds and controlling water are two of the first steps to growing crops. Agriculture freed people from spending so much time producing food, and eventually led to our abundant lives. We must not lose track of our dependence on water, however, nor forget that the earth can support only a finite number of people.

This article may be copied or published but must remain intact, with attribution to the author. I also request that the words “First published in the Durango Herald” accompany any publication. For more information, please write the author at: richard@population-matters.org.

Be Thankful 1-2010
© Richard Grossman MD, 2010

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I was riding in a taxi in New York City. The radio was tuned to music on a Spanish language radio station.
“Your accent doesn’t seem to be Spanish,” I remarked. “Are you Hispanic?”
“No, I’m from Haiti. But I like Spanish music.”
My driver had come north many years before, he explained. He had been an accountant in Haiti and had earned good money there, he said, by Haitian standards. “But I like it better here.”
The tragic earthquake of January 12th struck at the heart of Port au Prince, capital of Haiti. Badly constructed buildings crumbled with the terrible shaking, trapping many thousands of people.
Almost three quarters of the people in Haiti live on two dollars or less a day. This unbelievable poverty makes it the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and among the poorest in the world. Building codes are not part of such poverty. Migration to cities is common all over the world, including Haiti. It is ironic to realize that many people who were injured or killed in Port au Prince might have been safe if they still lived in traditional wood homes rather than modern concrete structures.
This devastated city has become the focus of the media, with minute-by-minute reports of horror. A few minutes watching CNN displays graphic accounts of private tragedies—bodies unceremoniously being spilled from a dump truck into a common grave, a beautiful eleven-year-old girl caught in a splintered building who was freed but died of injuries, people breathing through cloth to mask the smell of death.
We are privileged to live in an amazing age. We can see and hear immediately such personal stories of devastation. Highly skilled teams of helpers started to arrive within days with sophisticated equipment and trained dogs to free trapped people. Internet is used to send and receive word of friends and relatives in the affected area.
Those of us who live in a rich country (such as the USA) at this time in history often don’t appreciate how lucky we are. We have grown up with expectation of comparatively easy, relatively safe lives. Most people of the world do not share our good fortune, although the worldwide media make the disparity between rich and poor obvious.
The contrast between rich and poor was brought home to me by one of Durango’s expert doctors. He told me that he is sad that he cannot get to Haiti to help. I don’t think that he fully understands what would await him: scores of injured people and no organization, no laboratory tests, no x-ray machines, no medications, no casts for broken bones. Many people are dying alone, surrounded by collapsed concrete and the stench of death.
In addition to not being able to practice in any way that he is accustomed to, he would be using precious food and water that is needed by the Haitians.
Tragedy visited people in the past, too. In rich countries our expectations and ability to respond has changed immensely.
The explosion of the Indonesian volcano Krakatau in 1883 is an example of a catastrophe. Lava and superheated gases killed nearby people instantly. Tsunamis triggered remote devastation. The short-term death toll was over 100,000 people. In the long term the climate was two degrees Fahrenheit colder for five years because clouds of gas and ash shot into the stratosphere.
How has the world changed in the century and a quarter from Krakatoa to Haiti? Most of the world is financially much better off than a century and a quarter ago (although Haiti lags behind). What I perceive as the biggest change, however, is our acceptance of risk.
People died young in the nineteenth century. If you were involved in an accident, it was perceived as an act of God, not someone else’s fault. Accident prevention (including building codes) was undeveloped or didn’t exist at all. Medical care was rudimentary—just as it is in Haiti now.
One of the reasons that Haiti is so poor a country is that many of its most industrious people leave—such as my taxi driver. Another reason for poverty is the high fertility rate. The average woman will bear four children during her lifetime. The percentage of couples using contraception is low.
A tragedy such as hit Haiti is a horrendous way to reduce population. Acceding to people’s wishes to limit their fertility by providing modern contraception is much more humane.

This article may be copied or published but must remain intact, with attribution to the author. I also request that the words “First published in the Durango Herald” accompany any publication. For more information, please write the author at: richard@population-matters.org.