THE LARGE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

The media finally have the message: People care about the environment. It’s nearly impossible to turn on a television channel—especially   PBS—without seeing David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Greta Thunberg, or Bill Gates, of all people, urging us to take care of wildlife, conserve natural resources, and reduce our carbon footprint. As a fervent environmentalist for many decades, of course I am delighted to see that viewers care about these issues and that research on possible fixes is proceeding.

Why, then, am I hesitant to applaud this progress? It’s because I see scarcely any mention of population as part of our environmental  problems. In the 1960s the world population was about 3 billion; today, about 8 billion.  So much damage results from that growth: The huge population easily transmits diseases such as covid-19. Supplies of water are scarce in some areas, while the changing climate causes torrential rains in other areas. We convert large areas of forest or wetlands to space for growing coffee or other desirable foods. There is simply too little useable space for everyone.

In the 1960s population biologists such as Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin began pointing out the necessity of limiting population size. Many of us responded by limiting the size of our families and joining Planned Parenthood. All over the world, people realized the danger of overpopulation. China even instituted a draconian  “one child” program that led to forced abortions and other undesirable results and was eventually discontinued. The world population size that had grown 2% annually in the 1960s now grows at about 1%. That decrease is very encouraging, but 1% of 8 billion is still 80 million, about ten times the size of New York City. Can the planet sustain adding ten New Yorks a year? I think not.

Today, however, the ubiquitous TV programs about nature and climate change seem almost oblivious of how much population size affects the environment. Is it because corporate sponsors discourage it? I don’t know the answer but am suspicious.

Some United States economists actually warn that the country needs more babies. Presumably this is to increase consumption of goods to stimulate the economy, and to provide a larger pool of workers. That’s the dilemma: Stimulating the economy depends partly on population growth, while helping the environment depends on shrinking it. While a larger population may actually be desirable in some ways for some countries, would it not make more sense to encourage more immigration from crowded countries than to boost the number of births? Immigrants are desperately trying to enter some countries to escape terrible conditions in other places. Most are willing to work, to buy goods, to help the economy.

Currently, anyone who encourages limiting population size is likely to be accused of racism or “anti-natalism.” In recent years far-right politicians have taken advantage of religious opposition to abortion to attack Planned Parenthood. The women who began that group around 1900 as a way of helping poor immigrant women control their lives are said to have favored genocide of Blacks. Margaret Sanger, the main founder, was one of eleven children in an Irish family. She personally experienced the sad results of women not being able to control their reproduction. She is criticized greatly now as being a eugenicist, but her goal of helping women voluntarily escape the burden of having too many children is still laudable.

Planned Parenthood and similar groups are attacked by people who oppose abortion. However, the best way to avoid abortion is to provide contraception. Many women in rural or poor areas of the country have no access to free contraception. As a result they are faced with the terrible choice of having an abortion or giving birth to an unwanted baby and adding to the population size. If women have access to education and contraceptives, they become free to better control their lives, to find jobs, to have children in the number and when they choose to. Individuals and society both benefit. Bill and Melinda Gates have seen how important population control is for Africa, and have invested in programs to help women, but who will sound the alarm for America?

Calls for social justice also complicate the overpopulation issue. One proposal for lessening the wealth gap between rich and poor suggests giving each baby born in the US $20,000. Invested over the years, that could help pay for college, a starter home, and other advantages that wealthier people have. Unfortunately, it might also encourage having more children.

Important as population control is, there will always be opposition to it for a variety of reasons. However, the need is overwhelming. Sooner or later, world population size will fall. If it is not decreased by voluntary means, nature will control it for us by delivering pandemics, storms, wildfires, lack of enough food and water for everyone, and so on. We need  to act soon.

 

 Copyright © April 12, 2021 by Carol Leth Stone (a.k.a. RovinCrone)

IN FAVOR OF LIFE

Like most frugal RVers, I spend a great deal of time in various Wal-Mart stores.   Standing in a long checkout line is an easy way of observing people, especially families.

Too often, a tired-looking parent is trying to shop while keeping at least three children in line. The children may be hitting each other, sobbing, or begging for candy. (Even worse, they may be unnaturally quiet, as if they have been abused.) The parent is badly dressed.

In contrast, some times I see a happy, healthy child or two with a mom and dad who don’t seem overwhelmed financially or otherwise by being parents. The entire family is decently dressed in inexpensive clothing. (There may be wealthy people who bring their kids to shop in Wal-Marts, but I haven’t seen them.) Why can’t more families be like them?

As in many aspects of life, timing is almost everything. If a woman conceives when she is very young, she may be unmarried, still in school, or just beginning a career. She is unlikely to afford to raise a child. Bringing a baby into her life at that point may be a disaster, but in a few years it can be a joyous event. Simply postponing pregnancy can give both her and her children a much better chance of a good life

Nobody is in favor of abortions, except as a last resort. We pro-choice advocates don’t want death; we want life. The best way to prevent abortion is to provide accessible and affordable contraception to any woman who wants it.

Today the so-called pro-life movement fights contraception as well as abortion. Planned Parenthood clinics are under attack everywhere, and federal funding is endangered. As a result, desperate women will simply resort to using coat hangers or dangerous drugs to induce abortions themselves. They will endanger their lives rather than continue a pregnancy they find unbearable. Many of those who are forced or persuaded to carry their babies to term will give birth to children they can’t afford. Much as they may love those babies and try to make a good life for them, they are greatly handicapped in doing so. How much better it would be if they could wait a few years!

In some cases, babies whose mothers are unable to care for them end up in abusive situations, perhaps in bad foster homes. There are simply not enough good homes available to take care of these children; certainly the self-righteous pro-life advocates are doing little  to provide help. Further, in the current punitive political climate it is likely that Planned Parenthood and Medicaid funds will be cut, increasing the burden on parents and on society.

Society and individuals have much to gain from helping women plan their pregnancies, instead of implicitly blaming them for having sex. Sex is a normal part of life for most women, not something evil to be punished. If they become pregnant, giving birth at an appropriate time benefits everyone.

In the words of the Planned Parenthood founders, we need to make every child a wanted child. We need to choose life.

 

                                                                                                                                                   

THE DEMONS OF OUR NATURE

Steven Pinker’s new 800-page book, The Better Angels of our Nature, is a real shocker. Pinker’s main point is that, evil as the present may appear, things in the past were much worse. In gruesome detail, he describes the horrible things humans have done to each other throughout history. After the first 100 pages, I stopped reading and looking at the illustrations of tortures, and skimmed the remainder of the book.

Pinker ends the book with some cautious optimism about the future. Perhaps we will continue on a path toward more humane and rational treatment of each other, guided by rationality and the need to survive.

I am skeptical. When we can push a button to destroy a city without seeing the carnage that results, are we any better than medieval executioners who watched their victims slowly dying on the rack? Are we not simply objectifying those we kill, treating them like avatars in a video game? Are we not still murderers?

We are slowly ruining our planet, also. Population biologists like Paul Ehrlich have warned since the sixties that for survival the world population must be controlled, but for some reason I can’t fathom, it has become politically incorrect to urge women to use birth control. At the same time, “pro-life” groups have fought against Planned Parenthood because their clinics offer abortion in addition to contraception. Apparently these groups are willing to allow unwanted children to be born to parents who cannot afford them, and some women forced to bear children resulting from  rape or incest. To me, that attitude is truly evil.

Sometimes we seem to be lurching back into the Dark Ages. As recently as the 1950s, when I was in high school in a conservative area of rural Michigan, the theory of evolution through natural selection was widely accepted in most of the country. No one was forced to believe the theory, but we were expected to know the scientific evidence that supported it. The Scopes “monkey trial” was just an amusing bit of history. Today creationists all over the country make it difficult for biology teachers to present the theory that unifies their field and that has been accepted by the scientific community since the late nineteenth century.

Voltaire,  that brilliant philosopher of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, spoke through his Candide that this is not at all the “best of all possible worlds.” After traveling the world and experiencing much of the depravity Pinker describes, Candide went home to “make his garden grow.” He recognized how much irreparable evil and ignorance surrounds us, and contented himself with trying to live his own life with honor and decency. Voltaire himself fought against religious intolerance and injustice throughout his life, at times being banished from France or imprisoned.

I am as saddened by the stupidity and evil of modern life as I am horrified by the wickedness of the past as described by Pinker. As we sang in the sixties, “When will we ever learn?” Voltaire had it right, though. We may not be able to change quickly or on a large scale, but as individuals we can work for social justice and for rational approaches to life; and perhaps if our species survives for a few more centuries we can change into the beings we are capable of becoming.