MORE ABOUT POPULATION, FAMILY PLANNING, AND SAVING THE PLANET

Recent commentaries in our local paper have offered different views about the use of artificial contraception, in the one instance based on a conservative theological position, while the alternative view offered a more progressive position.  If the decision to use contraception or not were purely a theological matter, had no ramifications beyond such esoteric matters as when a fetus becomes a person, or what a dead Pope believed, people could agree to disagree—though one side would probably condemn the other to hell—and life could go on.  Unfortunately, whether to use contraception or not impinges on the single greatest crisis humankind has ever faced.  The crisis is global warming and the overall destruction of our environment, the root cause of which is an exploding population.  If we do not get the world’s population under control soon, the chance of saving our world from global warming and a host of other environmental ills will be irretrievably lost.  If we do nothing, the apocalyptic vision of Mad Max may become a grim reality.

The Earth’s population stands at 6.7 billion.  At present rate of growth, by 2050 that figure could nearly double at 12 billion, according to the UN, and conservative estimates say no less than 9 billion.  Yet the current 6.7 billion is well beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.  Approximately 1 billion people have no access to clean water, not to mention sanitation.  Billions live on two dollars a day.  Hunger is rampant throughout the world.  Approximately 25,000 children under five die from hunger and hunger-related diseases every day.  And let’s not be smug.  Hunger is not just for “those” people “over there,” wherever “there” is.  In the United States, 37 million people face hunger on a continuing basis.  Food banks everywhere are under siege with more requests than food available.

But no component of life exists in a vacuum.  As a central tenant of Buddhist thought stresses, everything in this life is connected to everything else.  This concept is one the western world has been slow in appreciating, and even now, appreciates far too little.

Connected inextricably to population growth is the growth in carbon dioxide emissions, which continue to rise in spite of multiple efforts around the world to reduce them.  While a few myopic individuals still question global warming, the worldwide scientific community is in solid agreement—based on overwhelming evidence that grows daily—that global warming poses the single greatest threat to our planet since humankind appeared.  The Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, a group that has the job of assessing threats to this country, as well as the current Director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, agree.

As the Earth warms, polar ice melts, oceans rise from that melting ice and from expansion due to higher water temperatures.  People living on low-lying islands in the South Pacific are now being evacuated from their lands.  Rising sea levels pose a massive threat to some of the poorest people on the planet, for example, Bangladesh.  Rising temperatures also threaten food resources as arable lands turn to desert.  The Sahara is currently expanding both north and south, gobbling up land that once produced food.  The Gobi desert is expanding, even as water sources for western China and Southeast Asia are melting away.  Many now argue that even as the population expands in a world beset by environmental problems, clean water will become scarcer and ultimately more valuable than oil, or any other resource.

Arctic warming is also triggering the release of methane gas from the seabed, a global warming gas that’s twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide.  This is particularly worrisome because scientists believe that in the past, methane caused rapid rises in global temperatures, leading to dramatic climate changes and mass extinctions.  Since millions of tons of methane are frozen under the Arctic Ocean, scientists see a major catastrophe brewing.

General Hayden points to another component connected to population growth that poses a threat that will not be easily addressed.  In an April, 2008, speech, Hayden said, “There are many poor, fragile states where governance is actually difficult today, where populations will grow rapidly: Afghanistan, Liberia, Niger, the Democratic Republic of Congo.  That group—the population is expected to triple by mid-century.  The number of people in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Yemen is likely to more than double.  Furthermore—just beyond the raw numbers—all those countries will therefore have, as a result of this, a large concentration of young people.  If their basic freedoms and basic needs—food, housing, education, employment—are not met, they could be easily attracted to violence, civil unrest, and extremism.”

Other countries are on a similar track.  The Philippines has one of the fastest birth rates in Southeast Asia.  With a current population of about 90 million, the population is expected to be 100 million within seven years.  A baby is born every 23 seconds in Egypt.  The population has doubled in thirty years, and almost a third of Egyptians are under 15.  President Mubarak says the population explosion is “swallowing up all the benefits of economic growth,” and has become a “burden on the state’s public expenditure budget.”  As opportunities for the young dry up, the potential for violent extremism grows.

Another simple fact cannot be ignored.  If population continues to grow, giving us ever more carbon footprints, changing to compact florescent bulbs and recycling will be little more than sticking our fingers into a dike that is disintegrating.

Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, says, “…if we believe that the size of the human ‘footprint’ is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed.”  Rapley goes on to suggest that a number of between 2 and 3 billion is probably close to the carrying capacity of the planet.

Surely saving the planet should be enough impetus for us to engage in serious family planning, including contraception.  But other issues cry out for family planning and the use of contraception.  The UN Population Fund reports that 190 million women become pregnant yearly, and that 50 million resort to abortion, with 68,000 women dying from unsafe abortions.  A 2004 study in Pakistan found that 890,000 abortions were occurring in the country annually.  If women around the world had access to family planning, millions of abortions and deaths would be eliminated.  We also have ample evidence that when women have control of reproduction, children are more likely born into circumstances of better health and better education.

Ban Ki-moon points out that “The rate of death for women as they give birth remains the starkest indicator of the disparity between rich and poor, both within and among countries.”  He goes on to say that family planning remains out of reach for many, especially those who most need it.  Not surprisingly, the Bush administration has refused to send money authorized by Congress to the United Nations Population Fund, at this point a total of $235 million.  A record 181 UN member nations contributed to the fund in 2007, but not the U.S.  We should be ashamed. 

I can only shake my head at a theology propagated by old, celibate men living in some medieval past, or right-wing conservative churches that condemns women and children to death, which is exactly what denying contraception does.  What kind of God would want children to be raised in abject poverty and hunger?  Would want 25,000 children to die daily from lack of food?  Would want to see the destruction of the planet because we selfishly refuse to control our population?  Certainly not the God of love and compassion I believe in. 

I had hoped the new president would address this complex, pressing issue.  Sadly, because we are good at putting things off, I’m already hearing how environmental efforts will have to wait.  Not enough money.  Though we can spend a trillion dollars a year on war, even though we have no enemy to speak of.  (The insanity of our nuclear arsenal is but one example, since new climate models indicate that setting off as few as 55 nuclear weapons will plunge the world into a nuclear winter that will kill most of the world’s population.)  I have even less hope that our government will address the root cause of the problem, population.  As Professor Rapley puts it, “So controversial is the subject that it has become the ‘Cinderella’ of the great sustainability debate—rarely visible in public, or even in private.”

Should we worry?  The New Economics Foundation think-tank said recently that the world has now moved into “ecological overdraft,” the point at which human consumption exceeds the ability of the earth to sustain it.  One quick example.  Under current pressures, the oceans will be completely fished out in less than thirty-five years.  How will this massive source of protein to so many be replaced?

Are we inevitably doomed?  The answer is “no,” though after eight years under Bush, we are much closer to a “yes” answer than we might have been had we started seriously addressing these problems in 2000.  The World Wildlife Fund News Centre in Switzerland says, “The world has more than enough sustainable energy and technology to curb climate change, but only if key decisions are made within the next five years.”  Climate Solutions: WWF’s Vision for 2050 has been praised by numerous scientists, but it also says we have only five years to plant the needed seeds of change.  After that, all bets are off.  And one missing component of WWF’s analysis is population, which, I would argue, is the most important component of all.

Will we move fast enough on the only issue that really matters?  Or will we be like the Easter Islanders, who must have seen at some point that they were destroying the very resources that permitted them to live, but who continued destroying those resources  nonetheless?  And disappeared from history.  We’ll know the answer in a very few years.

(This is an expanded version of an article published in the Cumberland Times-News, where word constraints did not permit a full development of ideas.)