New research suggests divorce negatively impacts environment

By Trevor Stokes,
Staff Writer
If people who are divorced want to reduce their environmental impact, a new study has one suggestion: fall back in love.

The research quantified how electricity and water use increased when households split up and housed fewer people.

The connection between divorce and environmental impact initially surprise many environmentalists.

“People’s first reaction to this research is surprise, and then it seems simple,” said Jianguo Liu, lead author of the research and Rachel Carson Chair in Ecological Sustainability at Michigan State University.

“Our challenges were to connect the dots and quantify their relationships,” Liu said. “People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change, but divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered.”

Highlights from the study, published Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, include:

n In 2005, U.S. divorced households used an additional 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water compared to married households. An extra 38 million rooms were also needed in divorced households with requisite heating, cooling and lighting.

Divorced households had 33 percent to 95 percent more rooms per person than married households.

Divorced households that became average-sized married households would form 7.4 million less households.

In Alabama, divorces rates decreased from an averaged high of 6.9 per 1,000 people recorded in 1979 and 1980 to 4.9 per 1,000 people in 2004, according to state statistics. That rate, however, is still above the national average of 3.7 per 1,000 people.

“I was surprised that anyone would do a study like this,” said Nancy Muse, vice president of the Shoals Environmental Alliance.

“There are so many obvious causes of environmental degradation, this is a less obvious one,” said Muse. “I think it is significant to know that broken homes increase the need for living space.”

Some were not as excited by the research.

“I won’t waste my time on this study,” Terry L. Anderson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center, a nonprofit, environmental think tank, wrote in an e-mail response.

“It is the most absurd extension of Paul Erlich’s (sic) thesis – we have finite resources and are consuming them at a rate that will lead to the demise of humans – than I have ever seen.”

Paul Ehrlich, a professor of population studies at Stanford University, has been a pioneer in issues such as overpopulation and how it impacts public policy.

“It’s not too surprising that divorced families and divorced couples would be using more resources,” said Adam Snyder, executive director of Conservation Alabama. “The same would be said for having children, them growing up and then moving out.”

The new research stemmed from a 2003 Nature report from Liu’s group that showed globally the number of households increased faster than population size.

“Even in areas of declining population, there were still a large number of households,” said Liu.

Ehrlich, an author on the 2003 Nature study, said, “People are finally starting to pay attention to the fact that the size of the population and the characteristics of it are enormously important to all of our environmental problems including climate change.

“It’s doubly important bringing attention to the population problem which has been neglected for the last 20 years and bringing attention to some of the complexities of how one deals with the problem,” said Ehrlich.

For Liu, the results reveal complexities in environmental policies. Governments across the world may need to start factoring in divorce when examining environmental policy, Liu said.

“One could imagine regulations on household size in many countries,” said Ehrlich.

“We have now crowded the planet to the point where just everybody doing whatever they damn well please is no longer a viable option.”

Trevor Stokes can be reached at 740-5728 or trevor.stokes@timesdaily.com.