Principles

Our December speaker was John Seager, President of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth), who flew in from Washington, DC, to address us. His talk was titled “Too Hot – Too Crowded – A Planet in Trouble.”

However, it was not a gloom-and-doom rant. To the contrary, Seager stressed that, unlike some problems, the impact of growing population on the environment is one we know how to fix, we can do it at reasonable cost, and it’s something people actually want.
Tracing population trends, Seager noted that human numbers until about 1800 were a pale shadow of today’s, and have exploded since. The main driver has been improved sanitation and public health, which has stopped children dying like flies. And that’s good news. Of course, it does mean more stress on the environment; carbon emissions correlate directly with population levels. And meantime, while most of the added population is living well in comparison with past epochs, there are still a billion people surviving on less than a dollar a day. (Let your teenager try that.) And, for those people, population pressure is part of the problem.

Seager allowed that technology is part of the solution, enabling us to make a bigger pie. But it would also help to have fewer forks—and better manners, “improving the terms on which people interact.” He also emphasized that this is not a uniform worldwide problem, with the situation differing radically from country to country—while some poor countries do have exploding populations, some, notably Russia, are imploding, and most of the advanced rich nations are also facing population decline.

         Given the opportunity to do one thing, Seager said, he would give every female at least a primary education; because educated women are better equipped to control their reproductive fates. A quicker, cheaper fix would be to boost family planning help. Seager stressed how dramatically responsive birth rates can be to changes in the cultural environment. U.S. fertility was 3.654 per woman in 1960; then came the pill and women getting more education and jobs, and by the ‘70s it was down to 1.7. And Mexico, by dramatically improving female literacy, drove its fertility rate down, from near 7 in 1970, to 2.4.
         Seager stressed that his organization’s efforts are not about telling people what to do; thus he eschews the words “population control.” He sees it as giving people the tools to control their own lives. And hundreds of millions of people (mostly of the female persuasion) actually do want smaller families. But women living in poverty tend to be ill-educated, powerless, and unable to access contraception.
         Some major poor countries, notably India and China, are on a path of economic growth, which should mean more women wanting and getting education and reproductive control, driving down birth rates—a virtuous circle further helping to lift them out of poverty. The challenge, Seager said, is to get these people out of poverty without aggravating global warming. The goal, he said, should be “contraction and convergence”—recognizing that economic growth and poverty reduction will have to mean increased greenhouse emissions in formerly poor countries, the rich nations will have to find ways to reduce their own emissions, to converge down to the rising level from the formerly poor ones.

Too Hot, Too Crowded-

A Planet in Trouble!