Is population control part of the solution?
Copyright 2001, Environmental News Network
October 17, 2001
By Erica Gies
A friend recently asked me what I thought was the most serious environmental problem facing the Earth today. I began to hem and haw that all environmental problems are intrinsically related because the Earth is composed of a web of ecosystems when it hit me that most environmental issues do have a single root cause: the hyper success of a certain rapacious species. Many biologists agree that the Earth is undergoing its sixth mass extinction — the first caused by a single species.
Of course, demographers, urban developers, farmers, and other good people have long been concerned with the number of people our planet is capable of supporting. But perhaps a more important issue is what our current population is willing to do to sustain and improve the quality of life for ourselves, our children, and other species.
Demographers estimate that world population, currently at around 6 billion, will plateau in the next 70 years at 9 billion. A plateau sounds reassuring. Rubbing elbows with 50 percent more people than exist today seems less so. Should we strive to decrease the level at which we plateau? How would we go about this?
One suggestion is that each couple have no more than two children, because these offspring will ultimately replace their parents. However, this must be a choice. China's attempt to curtail its population with the infamous single-child rule has had tragic and ironic consequences. All the parents who killed girl babies to try again for boys have created a shortage of Chinese wives for all those fine sons, a cultural as well as practical problem in this insular society. Earth Summit participants agreed that the most humane, beneficial way to decrease our population is by educating women. Most educated women have far fewer children than their uneducated sisters. Also, parents struggling to conceive might consider adoption rather than costly, invasive, often emotionally devastating scientific procedures. The world is full of children who need good homes.
While these ideas may seem counter to nature, which drives all beings to reproduce, we have used our powers of reason and opposable thumb to eliminate population controls that hold other species in check. For example, today's medicine defeats many diseases that felled our grandparents. And advances in agriculture have fended off starvation as a device to control population. Although people are still starving in some parts of the world, that is a failure of transportation or generosity, not of production. As a result of these successes in limiting human suffering, should we now put our minds to preventing the suffering of future humans by limiting the amount we welcome into the world?