THE CROWDED PLANET ZERO POPULATION GROWTH OF GREATER BOSTON Volume 11, Issue 1 January/February 2001

Table Of Contents

Next Meeting

Contraceptive Coverage Bill Campaign Planning Meeting

The meeting will focus on planning and organizing our campaign to push for passage of the Contraceptive Coverage Bill. This bill will come up again this coming year in the State Legislature. We need people to attend meetings of the coalition of groups which are interested in promoting the legislation, people to lobby legislators, and people who will make calls and keep everybody informed as to what they should be doing.

This is an important meeting and a critical campaign! Please come and help out however you can.

Also on the agenda is a discussion of other projects that members can volunteer for. One project is public speaking at meetings to get the message out—that overpopulation is the driving force that is ruining our environment. We have positive solutions for the enormous challenges posed by rapid population growth and wasteful overconsumption. Speakers are needed to get this message out to classes, civic organizations, the press, environmental organizations, politicians and the general public.
Another project is activist and general member recruitment. We need people who will canvass other members of ZPG to join us in our efforts, as well as encouraging the general public to join ZPG in our crusade.

You've Got Mail—And Maybe A Pack of Condoms As Well

Oct 16, 2000 04:30 Hrs (IST)

India Abroad News Service

Lucknow—A birth control agency in Uttar Pradesh, armed with Rs 10 billion [$214 million] provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has come up with a unique plan to popularize the use of condoms in rural areas.

The State Innovations in Family Planning Services Agency (SIFPSA)—specially created to run the USAID family planning project—wants to use postmen and milkmen to distribute condoms in the villages.

"We have trained postmen to drop a packet of condoms with every mail one receives," SIFPSA executive director Aradhana Johri, an officer of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS), said.

Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state. The state's population is already well above 180 million, accounting for nearly 20 per cent of the country's total population and more than that of France and Germany put together.

What was proposed to be started as a pilot project in Agra and its neighboring Ferozabad district with effect from November 1 is likely to be extended to other parts of Uttar Pradesh as well. "And once we achieve success with this experiment, we would rope in milkmen, who could also prove to be excellent service providers by delivering condoms with their routine supply of milk," Johri said.

According to her, some 300 postmen had been trained by SIFPSA to carry out their additional assignment. "The response had been remarkable even though the incentive offered by us to the postmen was just Rs 100 [$2.14] a month", she told IANS, adding, "what was amazing that the postmen were also willing to undertake the task of some kind of family counselors."

Thus, apart from delivering condoms, postmen would also come in handy in educating the rural folk about the benefits of a small family, the need for spacing between children and above all, the health hazards of early marriage.

"You see postmen have a tremendous rapport with their clients and often they become a part of the local household; so they would be in a better position to convince their audience than the usual family welfare sector worker", explains Johri.

She however hastens to clarify, "this practice will not continue indefinitely; the idea is to inculcate the habit of using condoms and once that was done, the demand for condoms would automatically be created, following which the same postmen could work as condom salesmen."

Various schemes including the infamous target-oriented and cash incentive sterilization program in the 1970s failed miserably and the state sank billions of rupees in successive experiments until the early 1990s.

However SIFPSA's novel target-free approach, directly involving the target beneficiary, yielded magical results—bringing down the average family size from five to four in 1999. "If the state had taken four decades to bring down its average family size of six in 1951 to five in 1991, it achieved a further drop to four in a matter of just eight years", the SIFPSA chief said.

With more innovations in the offing now, there could be even greater results—and those too at a faster pace—in the years to come.

This article is from the India Abroad website. Unfortunately, archives are no longer available online.

On Childlessness

I never really gave the idea of having children much thought. It seemed like a no-brainer to me: why split up the pie with a bunch of whiny rug-rats when I could hog it all to myself? Of course, this selfish viewpoint got me in trouble with several of the women I've known over the years, who also felt it was a no-brainer—in the other direction. They pointed out (rightly, I think) the importance of family, and carrying on traditions, and the bond between parent and child.

As I get older and more conservative, the issue becomes more important to me as well. I think about my parents, who I know would be pleased to become grandparents (although to their credit, they don't make an issue of it). I think about whether I want to leave a legacy, and what it would be like to have a son.
 

At the ice rink last night, I was talking with a fellow named Jay. He was there with his daughter Samantha, who seemed to have quite a flair for the dramatic even at her young age. She was very expressive with her arms, while at the same time attempting various spins and small jumps. Like the other kids, falling didn't seem to phase her at all—just a momentary setback. As I watched Jay, I could tell he was very proud of her.

However, I realized recently another advantage to being childless. If you read books about the environment—especially the ones that tell you how you can make a difference—you begin to approach daily routines differently. Should I throw my apple core in the trash or take it out back to the compost heap? Should I wash my clothes in hot, warm, or cold water? Could I avoid buying yet another glass bottle by making my own tomato sauce? Do I really need to spend 15 minutes in the shower on a cold morning when the hot water feels so good?

If you think about this stuff too much, it can give you a bad case of enviro-guilt. Worse, as you try to factor your impact on the earth into every decision, your efficiency slows to a crawl.

But what I realized was that I really don't care that much! I've never married, I have no children and don't plan to do either. I decided that I'm just me—and how much impact can one person have? No kids means no grandkids, which means no great-grandkids, and the geometrically expanding spiral that implies. My self-indulgent five extra minutes in the shower will never be multiplied by future generations of progeny.

Of course, that doesn't exempt me from an obligation to care about the environment. Consumption and population are both driving forces in environmental destruction (as expressed in Paul Ehrlich's equation I=PAT, or Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology).

And so I try to do what I can. I haven't owned a car since grad school; I get around mostly by bike or on foot these days. I don't use the trash pickup service in my neighborhood. Instead, I compost anything that rots, minimize my purchasing of excess packaging, and get off as many mailing lists as possible. Every few weeks I take a small bag of trash (mostly junk mail) to my parents' house and put it in their garbage can.

Even so, this small stuff affects the future far less than the number of children one has. That's why I don't feel quite as guilty about my minor extravagances. Not that I intend to rush out and buy a car tomorrow, or start sending my clothes to the dry-cleaners, or buy stock in nuclear power plants. But when it's 10 degrees outside on an icy winter morning, I don't spend much time deciding what to do with my apple core. The compost heap can wait until spring. Into the trash it goes!

Will Science Save the World?

The role of research in conservation

Truth or Consequences?

The world's biological integrity is under threat as never before, and no one knows more about the consequences and cures than field scientists. So we naturally look to them to take a stand, to tell us what we should do. But consider: If they speak out, don't they risk undermining the objectivity that makes their data valuable in the first place? On the other hand, if they don't tell us what it all means, aren't they rendering that data moot? Should scientists be directly involved in conservation? We put these questions to five of our international science advisors and field scientists. Here are their responses.

Dr. Norman Myers

What should be the response of pofessional biologists when the world and Earth are heading toward exceptional crisis? The guts of the situation is that humankind is conducting a planet-wide experiment, disrupting the biosphere on every side. The experiment is entirely unplanned, and we have scant understanding of its repercussions except that they will be exceptionally harmful to the human enterprise. We are eliminating tropical forests, creating extensive deserts, dislocating climate itself, and eliminating species in tropical forests alone at a rate somewhere between 50 and 150 per day, thus precipitating the greatest extinction episode since the first flickerings of life almost 4,000,000,000 years ago. We are not only extinguishing species. Thanks to the elimination of tropical forests, coral reefs, wetlands and other "powerhouses of evolution," we are depleting the capacity of evolution to generate replacement species. This means that the recovery period is likely to extend for at least five million years, possibly several times longer.

Alas, most biologists remain silent. Even those journals specifically designed to promote the new discipline of conservation biology carry few articles that proclaim the extreme urgency of the crisis in its full scope. Much of the biologist community prefers to pursue its traditional interests, geared in major measure to pure research. This is curious in that there is little chance of our resolving the basic issues of ecology-predator-prey relations, density dependencies, parasitism, and the like without a full spectrum of species to explore.

Still, many biologists protest that the ultimate case is not yet proven 100 percent, that professionals must protect their scientific credibility. Yet what will remain of their credibility if, in a decade's time, the public asks why professionals did not make more vociferous efforts to take action while there was still time to avert a biotic catastrophe of unprecedented scope?

In the early 1970s, when I was starting out on my scientific career, I undertook a two-year survey throughout sub-Saharan Africa to determine whether the cheetah and leopard were in trouble. I wrote up the results, with plentiful policy prescriptions, in two thirty-thousand-word monographs. The survey sponsors thought they were doing enough to publicize the problem and foster action responses by putting several hundred copies of each monograph into the mail addressed to wildlife agencies in all relevant countries of the region. During my subsequent travels around Africa, I enquired about what the said agencies had done to tackle the problem. I did not encounter a single agency that had done anything at all. The individuals concerned (or rather, unconcerned) were reacting in the manner of civil servants everywhere: to take action would be to challenge the status quo, making for disruptive measures by definition. Better to sit on their hands and hope the problem will go away. Moral: action requires intensive and sustained lobbying by scientists before the lever pullers can be persuaded to spring into life. This process can seem tedious to the scientist, but that is usually the way things get done.

To which the scientist may respond that he has no training in such matters. Each to his craft; better for the scientist to stick to his own field of expertise. Conversely, the policy maker feels he is no expert on wildlife. Many politicians are so ecologically illiterate that they would suppose a food chain is a line of supermarkets. It is up to the scientist to learn the politician's language and to see the world from the politician's viewpoint—which is usually a world with all manner of clamors for action on this and that. The scientist would do well to recognize that if he stays silent about an issue, this is likely to send a resounding message that there is little to worry about. Absence of evidence about a problem implies evidence of absence of a problem. By consequence, the politician may decide to do nothing—and to do nothing in a world of rapid change can be to do a great deal. In these circumstances, undue caution from scientists can become undue recklessness in terms of the consequences.

Dr. Norman Myers has spent 40 years as a scientist and a conservationist. He has published 300 papers in refereed scientific journals and 400 articles in popular books and magazines, plus 15 books with sales of over one million.

The Near Future

There are more than six billion people living on this planet, with just over half of them living below the poverty level. Half of those, 25% of the world's population, are malnourished, living just above the level of starvation.

In a report submitted at the United Nations' International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1995, it was estimated that if, as expected, the world's population doubles again by the year 2050, the number of people living in such a wretched condition would rise to 80%.

What did our most recent presidential candidates here in the U.S. have to say about this issue during their campaigns? Nothing. This problem doesn't even seem to show up on their radar screens. Perhaps worse, not even the general public seems to care. Instead, everybody was worried about the Florida recount. Now that Bush has won, it will clearly result in an escalation in the amount of environmental destruction being wrought upon this planet. If Gore had won, he would have been more aware of that destruction, and might have helped mitigate it.

The price of a barrel of oil has tripled in the last two years, even though OPEC has stepped up production. The world is now consuming in excess of 72 million barrels of oil a day, and that figure is going to outpace production in about two years. The price of oil will surpass $40 then $50 a barrel, and that price is never going to return to its previous, lower levels. It won't go down because oil is a nonrenewable resource. It took more than fifty million years to produce the oil we are using up now. As we run out of it, the price will skyrocket.

The tension between the United States and the OPEC nations can only increase. Terrorism, the bombing of the USS Cole, the Palestinian rebellion (Intifada), are all going to be used as a pretext for the United States intervening in the affairs of oil-producing nations, and for sending US servicemen into battle to fight for oil price stability.

The easy, sensible, true solution to this issue is to reduce the number of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. This can be accomplished with intelligence and contraceptives. Everything, including the price of oil and land, would become more affordable if there were fewer people. We could thereby regain control of our lives, which we have somehow managed to lose in cyberspace.

Help! Stop the world. I want to get off!

What a different and better world we would have if every child were planned for and loved. If we used resources more wisely, with future generations needs in mind. Birth rates are dropping, contraceptive use is growing. We have made great progress in family planning, improving the lives of women and families around the planet, but we have much more to do! I encourage you to get involved!

The Sky "Might" Be Falling!

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

William Robert Catton

From Amazon.com's website

Although now 20 years old, Overshoot remains as pertinent and important today as ever. At heart, it is about the implications of our profligate use of the world's oil reserves. We are using, in the blink of an eye, a resource that took billions of years to form—with no thought of what will happen when it runs out. This book examines the consequences of our shortsightedness. It is an excellent resource about an issue that is fundamental to our society today. It is on my "top 10" list—books I consider essential reading for any literate person who cares about the world, the future, or their place in either. —Editor

Being the first reviewer of this title verifies the specificity of the subject matter. Trying to be a skeptic among both extremes of environmental thought can be a tough act, especially after reading such explosive "documentation" of what Catton blatantly subtitles "The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change". His research is thick and juicy; his claims believable. Written in 1980, the concerns maintain an ever-increasing credibility of the much earlier "Tragedy of the commons" analogy, in that, limited resources and unlimited consumption will eventually come to a head.

This book shines a giant flashlight on what many don't what to look at. I'm still on the fence, but looking into the other yard now. Highly recommend this for those in the light though it is written for those in the dark. Could be one of the most important books in this lifetime, if not the next.

Patrick Renau manages a ski resort in Washington. He has a Masters degree in Earth Science and an undergraduate in business. He has written 11 reviews for Amazon.com.

Circular Versus Linear Ecosystems

(see review on page 4)

Whatever the origins of human redundancy, and whatever the sequel to it, we needed to see (but were not seeing) that what had happened to us between the wars, and especially what happened to us since World War II, had not resulted merely from politics or economics in the conventional sense. The events of this period had simply accelerated a fate that began to overtake us centuries ago. The population explosion after 1945 and the explosive increase of technology during and after the war were only the most recent means of that acceleration.

Human communities once relied almost entirely on organic sources of energy—plant fuels and animal musclepower—supplemented very modestly by the equally renewable energy of moving air and flowing water. All of these energy sources were derived from ongoing solar income. As long as man's activities were based on them, this was, as church men said, "world without end." That phrase should never have been construed to mean "world without limit," for supplies can be perpetual without being infinite.

Locally, green pastures might become overgrazed, and still waters might be overused. Local environmental changes through the centuries might compel human communities to migrate. As long as resources available somewhere were sufficient to sustain the human population then in existence, the implication of Liebig's law was that carrying capacity (globally) had not yet been overshot. If man was then living within the earth's current income, it was not from wisdom, but from ignorance of the buried treasure yet to be discovered.

Then the earth's savings, and new ways to use them, began to be discovered. Mankind became committed to the fatal error of supposing that life could thenceforth be lived on a scale and at a pace commensurate with the rate at which treasure was discovered and unearthed…

Homo sapiens mistook the rate of withdrawal of savings deposits for a rise in income. No regard for the total size of the legacy, or for the rate at which nature might still be storing carbon away, seemed necessary. Homo sapiens set about becoming Homo colossus without wondering if the transformation would have to be quite temporary. (Later, our pre-ecological misunderstanding of what was being done to our future was epitomized by that venerable loophole in the corporate tax laws of the United States, the oil depletion allowance. This measure permitted oil "producers" to offset their taxable revenues by a generous percentage, on the pretext that their earnings reflected depletion of "their" crude oil reserves. Even though nature, not the oil companies, had put the oil into the earth, this tax write-off was rationalized as an incentive to "production." Since "production" really meant extraction, this was like running a bank with rules that called for paying interest on each withdrawal of savings, rather than on the principal left in the bank. It was, in short, a government subsidy for stealing from the future.)

For a much longer excerpt from Overshoot, see the Brain Food website at http://www.dieoff.org/page15.htm

Letters To The Editor

Before I focused exclusively on population, I worked quite a bit with socialists, especially the Socialist Workers Party/Young Socialist Alliance and the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade.

Alan Ditmore
Leicester, NC

David McReynolds responds:

I may not have been asked the question directly—certainly we support "free" healthcare etc. Except, Alan, it isn't free. It is paid for by taxes—i.e. all of us. I am a little resistant to throwing around the word "free" as if the government could print money.

But do I favor government paying the bills on these items, yes, and if I failed to make this clear, I'm sorry.

David McReynolds

From This Corner

Lee Strauss

Well, it's December already, and the presidential election is still almost over. By the time you read this, it will probably be entirely over. But I'm not sure if even then either you or I will know much more about what our future holds than we do right now. The only thing we can be sure of is that the election was pretty darn close.

Well, wait a minute. There is one other thing I can be sure of: Despite anything the political and media pundits may tell me, I still don't have any definite idea why it was so close. I know I'm supposed to think it's because they are so much alike. But in what way are they alike? It seems to me that they really couldn't be much more different, if only in looks and personality, and that no sixth grader would have much trouble picking them out of a crowd on the playground.

So not only don't I think I have any definitive answer in the matter of this close election, I doubt if I ever will. Others might; more power to them. In the meantime, however, I am going to hazard a wild and admittedly untoward guess about all this. It seems to me that it could have been this close because Americans can't really agree about much of anything anymore. And maybe that's because we aren't even sure what we're arguing about, beyond the one or two things that touch us personally. So for the moment at least, feeling rudderless and leaderless, we have mostly given up trying to deal with the whole mess. In other words, at the very same time both candidates have been preaching unity, as a nation and people we have never been more fragmented.

Now, no one—including me—wants to admit to this sort of thing. I confess to spending a lot of time and energy in an effort to conceal my chronic confusion in these matters from both my friends and myself. But lately it seems to me that many of our happiest moments together occur when we can all let down our defenses long enough to admit we haven't much of an idea how we are really going to solve our biggest ecological, social and cultural problems. In that at least we can still find some common ground.

This is not to say that we are not getting along with reasonable and even sometimes stellar success in jobs, kids, families, and financial planning for the future. No, the confusion stems rather from what happens when we attempt to extrapolate from the narrow focus of our own lives to anything larger. It's great to be able to save the environment a little by changing our light bulbs and washing our clothes in cold water; but so far none of this has seemed to make much of a dent in holiday traffic.

What kind of mood does that leave us in? Well, to quote the now seemingly endless chorus of the modern movie gangsters: "Forget abot it."

Problem is, our cluelessness about how to pull ourselves and our world together in any practical sense couldn't come at a worse time. It's not just that we sort of know, when prodded into it, that everything is connected (just ask any PETNet teacher). It is that we live in an era when we desperately need to make these connections work for us on a social and political level—if we are to maintain the ecological viability of our planet.

Unfortunately, our traditional way of doing politics doesn't help us much with this goal. Usually candidates are supposed to win a following by showing how they are different from their opponents. Ironically though, this last time around I think it's possible that there is only one way either of these guys could have gained a significant lead on the other. That would have been to admit the opposite: that all of us are sitting in the same sinking lifeboat.

Judging from his 1992 book Earth In The Balance, Al Gore possesses the intellectual wherewithal to have done this. I doubt whether George W. does, but does anybody really know? In any case, neither of them have done it yet. And after spending so much time and energy trying to show that their answers were somehow different from the other guy's, most people wound up not being able to tell them apart. What would have happened if either of them had been able to come up with the courage and intelligence to admit that he was pretty much like the other guy? That he had not much more than the most rudimentary ideas about how to solve our most pressing and critical problems? Maybe we'd have been so impressed by that candidate's honesty and candor, he would have won in a landslide. We may have wound up giving him the biggest mandate since FDR.

The electorate might have been greatly relieved to finally have a candidate who understood an emergent cultural truth. It is that as a people, we are now mainly bound together by our ignorance about how to go about making some desperately needed, radical behavioral and cultural changes.

Gore has occasionally attempted to take a baby step or two down this road, but in each case quickly chickened out. Who's to say whether George W. even understands that such a road exists, unless it's to walk backwards down it?

To be fair, it is true that Gore has been one of the few people talking about population and the environment—and actually doing something about it. He was one of the main backers in repealing Reagan and Bush's Global Gag Rule just two weeks into the Clinton/Gore administration. He has spoken up repeatedly for increased funding for family planning and a woman's right to choose.

But to the extent that "practical political considerations" come to outweigh the truth, we're always in some kind of trouble. And when that truth involves nothing less than the literal survival of the planet's ecology and the all the people who depend on it, I'd say we're in an unprecedented kind of trouble. Unprecedented. Hmm. Now where have I heard that word before? Well, at least they got that part of the right.

The Mother of Invention and Development

It should come as no surprise that in the Third World, many people, especially policy makers, look at United States economic successes and wish to emulate those successes in their own countries. To do this, most people look at our history. Something happened, early in the 20th century, in the United States, which resulted in an unprecedented increase in our standard of living.

But here is where I believe our history books are misleading. Most of them credit inventiveness and industrial development under capitalism, with people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford for the events which brought Americans wealth. But someone else lived around the same time, who I believe deserves far more of the credit and the emulation than she receives. Her name is Margaret Sanger and she was instrumental in bringing birth control into widespread use.

It is birth control and not industry that deserves the headline of history. It was birth control that made the United States a powerful and prosperous nation, and it is Margaret Sanger and her birth control that deserves to be emulated by the world.

It may be obvious how birth control made such a huge economic contribution. However, the explanation is complex, and involves many theories. Here is one:

If industry had developed in the absence of birth control, the U.S. population would have grown as fast as the economy. The rapidly growing population would have absorbed the early wealth produced by industry. Once this wealth was absorbed, it could not have been reinvested to produce more industry. The momentum would have died and our standard of living would still be at 1910 levels or below. In fact, the 19th century had some inventions and industrial development. Yet in spite of massive U.S. territorial growth, the increase in our forefathers' standard of living was marginal compared to that of the 20th century. Before Sanger, we achieved little while consuming far more land, even with industrial growth. After Sanger, we achieved much more with continued industrial growth but diminished territorial growth. The achievement correlates to Sanger, not to industry or territory.