It's no coincidence that most of
those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive
wealthy white men: it's about the only environmental issue for which
they can't be blamed. The brilliant Earth systems scientist James Lovelock,
for instance, claimed last month that "those who fail to see that
population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are
either ignorant or hiding from the truth.
It's highly unlikely that life as we know it - or
want it - can continue for long unless we rein in population growth.
Too many measures indicate that the great mass of us burning fossil
fuels, gobbling up renewable resources, and generating toxic trash is
overloading our life support ecosystems. In the central North Pacific
Ocean gyre, swirling plastic fragments now outweigh plankton 46 to one.
It's the great taboo, I hear many environmentalists say. Population
growth is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet, but we
are afraid to discuss it.
It sounds like a no-brainer. More
people must inevitably be bad for the environment, taking more
resources and causing more pollution, driving the planet ever farther
beyond its carrying capacity. But hold on. This is a terribly
convenient argument - "over-consumers" in rich countries can blame
"over-breeders" in distant lands for the state of the planet. But what
are the facts?
All measures to thwart the degradation and
destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut
population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current
rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people,
according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase.
If you write about the environment you become used to a measure of
unfriendly criticism. In the main, it's pretty innocuous stuff -
charges of miserabilism and so on. But since concentrating on the issue
of human population growth, I have found the criticism noticeably
darkening. The other week, after helping to launch a campaign
encouraging couples to "stop at two" (children, that is), I received an
email accusing me of "real, hard-hitting fascism" and adding: "The
Nazis . . .
