Analysis of a FB post that says the following:
"Hidden Fact: Overpopulation is a myth. In fact, there is so much room on Earth that, if everyone lived as densely as New York City, the entire world population of 7.8 billion people could fit into into the state of Alaska and give them all an acre of land and everyone would fit nicely. Overpopulation is a lie just like everything else. The lie that we are overpopulated is spread to induce fear and scarcity over the masses, and to justify ways to 'lower' the population. It is a statistical fact that 50% of humans live on less than 1% of the land, and if a fraction of lawns were turned into gardens, food scarcity would be non-existent." [sic]
My radar pings hard when I read such broad and unsubstantiated claims, so I did some digging.
Fact checks
Claim: Everyone in the world can get an acre of land in Alaska.
The land area of Alaska is 571,951 square miles. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska] And 1 acre is 0.0015625 square miles. Thus, Alaska is 366,048,640 acres. That is significantly less that 7.8 billion. In fact, that would be 21 people per acre, so we could not "give them all an acre of land" as claimed.
Conclusion: This claim is false by an order of magnitude.
Claim: The world population can live in Alaska if population density matches NYC.
The population density of New York City is 27,013 people per square mile, which is 42.2 people per acre. [https://www.topviewnyc.com/packages/the-population-density-of-new-york-city] Compared to the 21 people per acre required to fit everyone, the 42 people per acre is about twice as dense as needed, leaving half of Alaska unpopulated. Of course, this doesn't consider how much of Alaska is habitable, but since that isn't the point of the post, we'll ignore that.
Conclusion: This claim is true.
Claim: Turning lawns into gardens would eliminate food scarcity.
In the US, which is the most lawn-loving country, there is 128,000 square kilometers of lawn, which is 31,629,489 acres. [https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Lawn/lawn2.php] In the US for 2 August 2021, the planted acreage of crops is 644,269,947 acres. [download of zip file from https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-room/efoia/electronic-reading-room/frequently-requested-information/crop-acreage-data/index] This means that there is about 20 times more acres of crops planted in the US that there is acres of lawns.
Note that this does not even address the land required to raise animals for food.
For convenience, I have converted the data download to a Google Sheet for easy reference here. The total planted acres can be found at the bottom of the county_summary tab (and some other tabs). Note that the first two tabs have lower acreage because they are looking only at the produce listed at the top, not all products.
Conclusion: This claim is false by an order of magnitude.
Claim: 50% of the population lives on 1% of the land.
I did not investigate this claim, and I'm not really sure exactly what point it is trying to make. Without making a claim about the other 50% of the population, this is meaningless. For example (an exaggeration), if the other 50% of the population lives on 99% of the land, who cares about the first 50%? And what is meant by "lives on the land" anyway?
I also am a little skeptical when a claim is made by stating that it is a "statistical fact". Generally, that kind of argument is a power move to reduce the likelihood of a factual challenge. It is used to take ground in the argument. Since the claim is meaningless, it appears to be used just to make a strong-sounding statement with no substance to win a point.
Conclusion: This statement doesn't really make a point (at best) and is nonsense (apparently).
Merits of the framing of the argument
The argument being made takes as an implicit assumption that overpopulation is only defined by land resource usage. The tactic of this post by making only land resource arguments is to frame the issue in an argument that can attempt to be won on this single issue while ignoring other constraints the create overpopulation concerns.
In this case, we see that even the claims above do not support the land-resource argument used to frame it.
The post completely ignores other resource constraints, which I will not explore here. These other constraints include but are not limited to:
Water supply and drought
Labor (including immigration limitations on labor)
Transportation
Usability of land
Geopolitical issues (food hoarding, interception, etc.)
Trade policy
Income inequity (that limits ability to buy food)
These are just a quick list off the top of my head. There are surely many more constraints that make it clear that this is not and should not be treated as a one-dimensional argument.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? First, this is a factually misleading post. No, actually, this is a post that intentionally lies about the facts to try to win an argument. The lies and appearance of truth of the post are designed to manipulate the reader into believing the point, when in fact the post presents no credible reason to be believed. It is purely an attempt to flood the reader with opinions that they don't have time to verify (due to sheer volume of these types of factually false posts) in order to plant doubt and shift the viewpoint of the reader in favor of an agenda supported mostly by lies.
Here are my questions and concerns:
Who is using these lies to support this agenda?
What is the end game?
Is the agenda even the point?
Is the poster just using manipulation to condition us?
Is the goal to spread uncertainty and doubt about "facts" to leave us confused or apathetic?
Why are people so willing to spread such lies so easily? Just because it sounds good or fits their opinion or fits the opinion of their political leaders?
Here's the deal for me: If a post, whether I support the position or not, uses lies to try to win an argument, then it is wrong. There can be no middle ground here. Lies to support anything should by themselves invalidate the argument. If you can't use truth to win the argument, then you lose the argument. Period.
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
John 8:32 (NIV)
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