Green meanies

Further to Chris Hedges' warnings about how we're breeding like bunnies all the way to extinction, population expert Betsy Hartmann argues that, instead of punishing women in poor countries, what's needed is ''effective and equitable environmental and climate policy.''

Raising alarms about overpopulation distracts us from the real environmental tasks at hand. It also undermines the provision of good quality, voluntary family planning services, instead legitimizing top-down punitive policies that hurt women.

Today's population alarmists are stuck back in the 1960s when high rates of population growth made it look as if the world was experiencing a population explosion. But much has changed since then. While world population is projected to increase from 6.7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050, the rate of growth has slowed considerably. The average number of children born to a woman in the Global South is now 2.75, and the UN predicts this figure will drop to 2.05 by 2050.

Moreover, the few countries that still have relatively high birth rates, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, have the least impact on environmental factors such as global warming. From 1950-2000, the entire continent of Africa was responsible for only 2.5% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Though it is impossible to predict exactly what world population will look like further in the future, most demographers agree we are on the path toward population stabilization with families all across the globe having two children or less. In fact, demographers tend to be more concerned these days about declining population growth and population aging than they are about too many people.

In addition to ignoring the numbers, the focus on overpopulation obscures the ways different economic and political systems perpetuate poverty, inequality and environmental degradation. It places the blame on the people with the least amount of resources and power rather than on corrupt governments and rich elites. The biggest security threat facing the world right now is the economic crisis, caused by a small coterie of greedy financiers and lax governments, ours in particular.

And here comes the punchline:

The population controllers also have blinders on their eyes when they attribute the cutting down of forests, the polluting of water supplies, and the extinction of species to too many poor people, rather than the unchecked power of large corporations to monopolize resources and ravage the land. Missing from the picture is the question of technological choice: for example, reducing the population of automobiles and investing in public transport worldwide would do much more to curtail climate change than imposing limits on family size.

So it's completely up to us here in the land of minivans and fresh blueberries in February, large houses and air conditioning, to change radically .

I wonder if we can.

A friend and I were talking this past weekend about how we have no choice yet we still don't see it. 

But ot's a perfect storm now, a convergence of many factors: the economy, especially the fiscal mess to the south of us, the environmental crisis, the inevitable drying up of the world's oil and fresh water, major shifts in the mediascape plus the presence, if not the participation, of generations raised with communication and organizing tools unlike any that have come before.

If Gutenberg helped launch the Industrial Revolution by allowing people to exchange information and share ideas, imagine what might happen at relative hyper  velocity superspeed online, and with who-knows-what doohickey gets invented tomorrow.

I'm not sure whether to be excited ... or afraid.

Comments

[Pete Murphy]

"Missing from the picture is the question of technological choice: for example, reducing the population of automobiles and investing in public transport worldwide would do much more to curtail climate change than imposing limits on family size."

What's really missing from this picture is an understanding of the link between overpopulation and its economic consequences - rising unemployment and poverty. Cutting per capita consumption of products, like automobiles, as advocated in the above quote, will also cut per capita employment.

The biggest obstacle we face in changing attitudes toward overpopulation is economists. Since the field of economics was branded "the dismal science" after Malthus' theory, economists have been adamant that they would never again consider the subject of overpopulation and continue to insist that man is ingenious enough to overcome any obstacle to further growth. This is why world leaders continue to ignore population growth in the face of mounting challenges like peak oil, global warming and a whole host of other environmental and resource issues. They believe we'll always find technological solutions that allow more growth.

But because they are blind to population growth, there's one obstacle they haven't considered: the finiteness of space available on earth. The very act of using space more efficiently creates a problem for which there is no solution: it inevitably begins to drive down per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment, leading to rising unemployment and poverty.

Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"

[Sebastian Stoker]

If the numbers are not all that important then the ideology behind it is. The problem is that the world economic system is based on perpetual growth (product sales, new house starts, profit, all must increase significantly from year to year). And achieving this is a no-brainer - just increase populations.

Canada is doing untold damage - to the environment, the economy in the long run, and its national identity and political stability - by boosting its population through poorly managed immigration. The federal government's goal seems to be to amass workers and consumers to fuel our consumerist society. It has no concern that it is creating underclasses, social unrest and tension, burdening provincial and municipal governments, and forcing urban sprawl onto land best used for farming.

[Mark]

"So it's completely up to us here in the land of minivans and fresh blueberries in February, large houses and air conditioning, to change radically. I wonder if we can."

Is it really so difficult? I cut my emissions in half with two steps: 1) take public transit or work from home three times a week; 2) cut my annual miles flown from 35,000 to 5,000. On top of that, I neither heat nor cool my home (I live in Northern California, one of the few places where it's even remotely possible.) My CO2 footprint is perhaps 50% higher than the world average and the impact on my life is negligible.

[Antonia]

That's good Mark but not good enough, although you do have most of us beat on the heating/cooling thing.

Here's me:

I work at home. No commute.
I live a 6 minute walk from the subway, and the same distance from great grocery stores (including organic ones), drugstores, hardware, everything I need.
I don't eat meat -- an environmental biggie.

Etc.

But even that is not enough.

We need a complete revolution, much bigger than most of us can imagine.

[Sebastian Stoker]

I agree Antonia.

Some of this has to be legislative. I have a big argument with the pop-culture drive for eco-consciousness, as it encourages people to zero in on minutia, and cast people as villians, and does not look at the big picture.

People should be looking at their own lives - what kind of car? do they have? How many kids? Are they composting? How often do they shop for fun? - rather than zeroing in on what is the new Worst Thing and vilifying other people.