Our Cage is Too Crowded

The Aesthetic of Living in an Overpopulated Country

I invoke the reader to help me with a little experiment.

Please watch this video for 3 minutes and take note of how you feel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUN664s7N-c

Then watch this video and do the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg1mpD1BICI&t=16s

Which place makes you feel serene and peaceful? No matter how much of a city dweller you may be, I am hoping the nature videos are more to your liking. The nature depicted in these videos are from places few ever get to experience anymore. In study after study, we find out that we need beauty around us and yet we do everything in our power to make sure it is out of our reach.

Human evolution mostly happened when we were in small hunter gatherer groups. For most of human history, we knew the people in our village and we had open space to roam in without having to take a car, taxi or subway to get there. Death came to us by accidents, tribal enemies and unknown poisons. There was little chance of communal spread of disease and social distancing was the norm in a world of so many less people.

Only for the last 100 years of our 200,000-year existence, have we lived in skyscraper apartments, tenements and slums to accommodate the addition of nearly six billion of us in that same time frame. Six billion more of an apex predator with an insatiable appetite for goods and services forces the creation of the aesthetic of an impersonal, often crime ridden cityscape. To bring it closer to home, there were only 108.5 million of us in the US 100 years ago. Now there are now over 331 million of us. The US now has ten cities with populations over 1 million each. Added together, the populations of our largest cities; New York, Los Angeles and Chicago equal 15 million, more than live in the entire state of Illinois. As we keep answering population growth with more development we need to consider not only the overshoot of our resources but the damage it is doing to our psyche.

Crowding humans on top of one water source is an ecological mistake to be sure, but it is an aesthetic one as well. Two-thirds of us live in the urban environment, with little choice but to continue to live where the jobs are located.

When populations explode the optics change. Given the temporary ability to import food, water and energy and all needed material goods, overcrowding still leads to a noisier and less aesthetic existence. Density creates feelings of anonymity and alienation as well. This affects our society in many negative ways. It may be time to revisit the famous rat experiment which is the reference to the phrase, “There are too many rats in the rat cage.”

Between 1958 and 1962, ethologist John B. Calhoun conducted a series of experiments demonstrating the collapse in behavior when Norway rats multiplied, controlling for food and water. He termed this a “behavioral sink”. It describes the dysfunction as depicted in everything from cannibalism to the rat equivalent of PTSD ( post- traumatic stress disorder) when the living space of these intelligent rodents became too crowded.

We are communal beings, more like honeybees than solitary bees. We need to trust each other and that doesn’t happen when we live with thousands of strangers all needing to look out for themselves. Psychologists tell us that we need to feel socially relevant in our communities. The opposite in happening in our cities today. We are not hard wired to be stuffed into traffic jams in noisy, polluted concentrations of anonymous ever-growing populations because we just can’t say no to growth.

Just like the rats of this famous experiment, we are exhibiting our dysfunction every night on the evening news. Suburbs are no longer the panacea to overcrowded cities they once were. As our country grows over a million a year, mostly due to immigration, suburbs attract the kind of developers itching to cram apartment complexes into any open space they can find. One of the most egregious examples of this happened in a nearby suburb. A grocery store that used to have a 150-year-old oak in its parking lot was slated for development. Though many fought this trajectory, the tree lost the battle. Now one can spent $1,000 a month to live in an apartment overlooking either a parking lot or a freeway. Rest assured they will be full of renters, happy to have found a place to live very soon.

I am not the first one to describe our artificial, overcrowded environments as a cause of many of our troubles. Many including Stanford professor, Paul Ehrlich, referenced the rat experiments in his work. Researchers from Oklahoma State University, John Winters and Yu Li developed a measurement tool which revealed that happiness is reversely associated with living in large metropolitan areas. I am glad people find research dollars to measure these things, but I for one don’t need anymore research. There is plenty of research on the books already. What I need is for people to realize that we cannot design our way out of the misery caused by answering overpopulation with density. We are encouraging the kind of answers that will help us to become even more dysfunctional while also driving ourselves toward the cliff of resource collapse. To create a world more like the nature video and less like the city video, we must answer the demand for density with less demand.

There are many who will not like being compared to rats but keep in mind that the Human Genome Project revealed that we share ¼ of our genes with them. More importantly these much-maligned critters further demonstrate their adaptive intelligence by being around on planet earth for 66 million years. We should be so lucky.