Table Of Contents

Annual Meeting and Dinner

Speaker: Peter Alden
Topic: Pole to Pole Through the Americas: The Crowded and the Uncrowded Places
Cost: $20.00 (includes tax and gratuity)

Please send your check, payable to ZPG/Boston, to Frances Cameron, 9 Princeton Road, Arlington, MA 02474 by May 17.

Peter Alden, our guest speaker, has led birding and nature tours, safaris and cruises, to over 110 countries. He is also the author of more than 14 books, ranging from field guides to Africa to the National Audubon Field Guide to New England. He is currently with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, organizing the state's third annual Biodiversity Days for Secretary Bob Durand. His banquet lecture will focus on the lands, people, and wildlife of the Canadian Arctic and Latin America south to Tierra del Fuego. In it, he will weave a link between the sustainability of human life, and that of wildlife, both under pressure from the current population crisis.

Russia Looks To Halt Population Drop

MOSCOW (AP) — The Russian Cabinet on Thursday rallied behind a program aimed at countering the country’s sharp population decline by working to improve health, encourage women to bear more children and foster immigration.

Yet some demographers were skeptical that a government program could solve the population problem, blamed largely on the social and economic disorder following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Heavy drinking, poor nutrition and medical care, and environmental pollution plague Russia. Low birth rates have combined with a short average life span to accelerate the problem. In a major speech last year, President Vladimir Putin warned that the nation’s very survival was in jeopardy.

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told the Cabinet on Thursday that 1999 was the worst year, with a population drop of 768,000 or 0.5 percent.
 

A government study prepared for the Cabinet meeting said the population, which was 145.6 million in 2000, could fall by 2.8 million by 2005, the ITAR-Tass and Interfax news agencies reported.

“The decrease of the able-bodied population of the Russian Federation is not just a social problem, it is a problem of whether our state will develop successfully of unfavorably,” Kasyanov said.

“If this is not resolved, the economy will soon begin experiencing a labor shortage,” Interfax quoted Kasyanov as saying.

The Cabinet tentatively approved a program aimed at stemming the decline, which was drawn up by the Ministry of Labor and Social Development. The ministry was given until June 1 to elaborate a more detailed program on improving the nation’s health, increasing the birth rate and boosting immigration.

Average life expectancy for Russian men was 59.8 years in 1999, the last year for which figures are available, said Maria Shabalina, a spokeswoman for the State Statistics Committee. Life expectancy for women was 72.2 years.

Vladimir Sorokin, head of the State Statistics Committee, said population decline for the next 20 to 30 years is inevitable.

Russia today is missing “the unborn people of those millions of our fellow citizens who died as a result of World War I, the civil war, all the revolutionary events, the famine of the 1930s and so on,” he said on Ekho Moskvy radio.

Murray Feshbach, an expert on Russian demography at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, forecast the population will keep dropping, partly because of an “incredible increase” in deaths from AIDS and tuberculosis he said was expected.

Feshbach said it would be difficult for Russia to double its birth rate, which is what demographers estimated would be necessary to maintain the current population.

Some people have suggested increasing government aid to families with children, but Feshbach and Sorokin said that was unlikely to stimulate enough births.

“What they have to do is change attitudes and expectations and health services and conditions,” Feshbach said.

Nor would immigration provide an easy solution, said Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Center for Demography and Human Ecology.

“I don’t think the country is ready for that, either economically or even psychologically,” Vishnevsky told ORT television.

Copyright 2001 by the Associated Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Six Billion of Us: Boo? Hooray?

[Editor’s note: Donella Meadows recently passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness. Prof. Meadows was a true environmental pioneer, and a major influence on many of us both inside and out of the movement. Her loss will be deeply felt. In tribute, we are reprinting a column she wrote about overpopulation.]

Months ago the United Nations decided to make an event out of the fact that the human population meter would soon click over another billion. They picked an arbitrary date—October 12—and declared it the Day of Six Billion.

What kind of event should this be? A day of repentance? A celebration? In a world of soundbites, what’s the right tone here? Six Billion, oh woe? Six Billion, yippee?

My guess is that “oh woe” will rule the day. That’s how we’re used to talking about ourselves. Overpopulation, population bomb, population explosion, the population problem. Nobody is doing this population thing to us; we are doing it to ourselves; but most of us seem to lament it.

I can surely understand why. Our numbers are scary and getting scarier. We are growing at 78 million per year, the equivalent of a new Mexico City every six months. Virtually all that growth is happening in places we call “developing.”

From the point of view of the planet, we must indeed look like an explosion. In 1800 there were just one billion of us. We hit three billion in 1960 and have doubled again in the blink of a planetary eye. Our fifth billionth person is now just 12 years old; our fourth billionth is just 25.

Not only are there so many more of us, but each of us is bigger, as measured by the energy and material we use and the pollutants and wastes we spew out. We cover the globe with our lights and buildings and farms and roads and planes and ships and dumps. We have eaten into the ozone layer and are changing the climate. We’re moving into the space of other species, causing an extinction spasm greater than anything the earth has seen since the fall of the dinosaurs.

But we are, as far as we know, the first creatures on this planet evolved enough to realize that there is such a thing as a carrying capacity and that there are penalties for exceeding it. Our scientists have begun to calculate how many of us at what standard of living the earth can support. They don’t agree on an exact number, but there’s clear evidence that we’re already beyond it.
 

Our fisheries are crashing.

A coalition of thousands of scientists says we must cut back our fossil fuel burning by 60 to 80 percent to have any hope of stabilizing our climate.

Our farmers are not keeping up with our population; grain output per capita has been falling since 1984.

Huge rivers—the Colorado, Yellow, Nile, Ganges, Indus, Chao Phraya, Syr Darya and Amu Darya—are so drained by irrigation and cities that their channels run dry for some or all of the year. In India, North China, California’s Central Valley and many other places, we are pumping down groundwater at rates that cannot continue.

The World Commission on Forests says, “There has been a clear global trend toward a massive loss of forested areas. ... Much of the forest that remains is being progressively impoverished and all is threatened.”

Two researchers at the University of British Columbia have calculated our “ecological footprint”—the amount of land needed to produce our resources and absorb our wastes. They say our footprint is now 20 percent greater than the productive land base of the planet. The only reason we can get away with that overbig impact is there are still stocks of forest, fish, soils and waters to draw down.

We can’t go on drawing down forever, or even much longer. We don’t get a choice about that. If we don’t reduce our load on the planet voluntarily, the planet will do it for us. That will solve our population problem.
 

Of course we don’t have to submit to that outcome. There are signs that we are in fact an intelligent species. Birth rates are coming down. In the 1950s the average woman bore six children; in the 1990s that number fell to 2.9. In every rich nation the fertility rate is below the replacement rate of two children per woman. Some, such as the United States, are still growing because of immigration and/or baby-boom cohorts moving through their reproductive years. But if fertility holds at present levels, the population of Europe will decline from 728 million in 1998 to 715 million in 2025.

We could, inspired by the awesome spectacle of our six billion, choose to bring our numbers down gracefully, gradually, everywhere, over a century or two, to around two billion, which would allow good lives for all humans and leave plenty of room for nature as well.

The Day of Two Billion! THAT would be worth celebrating!

To get there, we need NOT regard ourselves, especially not the poor among us, especially not the poor mothers of many children, as a cancer upon the earth. Quite the contrary. What is bringing down birth rates in Thailand, in Costa Rica, in Malaysia, is the empowerment and enrichment of poor women. Education, health care, decent jobs, family planning programs, wherever these are generously available, family sizes come down.

The other thing that has to come down is consumption. The number of people is not what degrades the earth; it’s the number of people times the flow of energy and material each person commands. The ecological footprint of the average American is 13 times that of the average Indian. The 4 million babies born in the U.S. this year will have twice the earthly impact of the 26 million babies born in India.

If you know where to look, you can see how good lives can be lived with much less load on the planet. Organic farmers produce high yields of healthy foods without chemicals. “Green” architects design buildings that use less than half the energy per square foot and are more comfortable. Drip irrigation grows crops with higher yields using less water. Windmills and solar collectors and fuel cells produce power without crazing the climate. Best of all, many people are freeing themselves from the steady brainwashing of the advertisers and deciding that they actually have enough.

Whatever the media do with the Day of Six Billion, I’d suggest that we real folks, each of us an infinitesimal drop in that huge sea, refuse to simplify or trivialize it, refuse to caricature each other as either the scourges or the conquerors of the earth, refuse either to despair or to rejoice. We know of the problems we cause each other and the millions of other creatures that co-inhabit our finite planet. We know of the accomplishments we’ve pulled off just to be able to support six billion of us, however inadequately or inequitably. What I hope we will have the greatness to do is to respect each other, encourage each other, reach out to each other, commit to the vision of everyone being able to thrive and to contribute to a diverse, sufficient, equitable, joyful, sustainable, nature-rich world.

Everyone, however many billion that turns out to be.

This column, as well as the recent Global Citizen archive, is available online. For a comprehensive posting of past columns, see http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows/default.htm. Copyright 2001 by the Sustainability Institute; reprinted by permission.

A Tribute To Donella Meadows

Donella (Dana) Meadows: 1941-2001

For 16 years Dana wrote a weekly column called “The Global Citizen,” commenting on world events from a systems point of view. It appeared in more than twenty newspapers, won second place in the 1985 Champion-Tuck national competition for outstanding journalism in the fields of business and economics, received the Walter C. Paine Science Education Award in 1990, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Selected columns were published in 1991 as a book, also called The Global Citizen.

Dana was the author or co-author of nine books, including:

• The Limits to Growth (1972)
• The Electronic Oracle: Computer Models and Social Decisions (1983)
• The Global Citizen (1991)
• Beyond the Limits (1992)

Donella Meadows was a true environmental pioneer, and a major influence on many of us both inside and out of the movement. Her loss will be deeply felt.

Population & People of Faith: It’s About Time

In 1830 there were one billion people inhabiting the earth.
In 1930 – 2 billion.
In 1960 – 3 billion.
In 1975 – 4 billion.
In 1990 – 5 billion.

In the year 2000, there were six billion people on the planet. By the end of the twenty-first century, the number of people could reach 14 billion.

Ninety percent of growth is taking place in developing countries.

People of faith, it’s about time.

Now is the time for people of faith to take action to help slow the rapid rate of population growth. Such action is the only way to alleviate the suffering caused by too many people demanding too much from the increasingly fragile earth.

Slowing population growth will help solve the worldwide problems of hunger, poverty, violence, inadequate health care, urban decay, underdevelopment, depletion of natural resources, including clean water, and environmental pollution.

Richard McHale of the National Council for International Health has this to say about Population & People of Faith: It’s About Time:

“An excellent tool for educating the average American citizen on the urgency of controlling population growth.”

Completely revised and updated in 2000.

You can view a RealVideo clip of this video on the Internet at the following web address: <www.idtonline.org/videos_IAT.htm>.

Amazon Customer Review

The Facts About Overpopulation from a Biblical Perspective, May 10, 2000
Reviewer: Spence Hackney from Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Population and People of Faith, It’s About Time does and exceptional job at the arduous task of presenting unbiased information about overpopulation to the Christian audience. The Institute for Development Training has created a video that breaks out of the stereotypes of Christian thought on overpopulation and delves down to what the Bible says about this issue. Before this video, I considered overpopulation to be an issue that was of no special concern to Christians. From this video I understand just how vital population issues are to Christian beliefs. I would highly recommend this video and study guide for individuals, churches, study groups, and organizations who deal with, or are interested in, overpopulation and Christian issues.
 

About IDT

Another major focus of IDT’s work is providing aids education for health care providers. AIDS is a significant, inescapable women’s health issue in many countries. IDT believes that the prevention of AIDS is largely dependent upon education and that appropriate training materials are critical to combating the spread of the disease.

The key to IDT’s mission is to work closely with mainstream religious organizations in the United States and in developing countries. In the latter, Christian health networks usually comprise the second largest health care system. Yet, their potential for impact as providers of family planning and reproductive health care tend to be neglected by many government and international development agencies. IDT is the only international health organization in the United States that focuses especially on working ecumenically with the Christian health networks. Thus, IDT has become unique in energizing the Christian church and its enormous health apparatus for family planning, women’s health and AIDS education.

This description of IDT was excerpted from the IDT website at <www.idtonline.org>.

Rocket Scientists Don’t Get It

Last week I attended a symposium at MIT which packed a room with several hundred participants, some sitting in the aisles. It was to be a presentation of this country’s top scientists who had and do work on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which the new Bush Administration wants bolstered. They testified that that was a bad idea. One scientist said that the rate of efficiency (number of enemy rockets hit) could not go high enough to prevent a tremendous disaster, even under the best of conditions. Then there’s the problem of a ship firing a missile from offshore, which the SDI missiles could not hit because the system could not be activated fast enough. And there are other problems, such as breaking a treaty we’d signed and don’t have the right to unilaterally break. Taking such an action would undermine the sanctity of treaties in general. The United States would be saying to the world that it could not be trusted.

Some scientists discussed possible options, such as setting up the missile sites outside of the United States, at strategic locations around the world. However, the number of sites that would have to be constructed to prevent disaster was more than could possibly be produced in sometimes-unstable areas.
 

Lastly, there was some speculation about the underlying motive for the SDI program. The general consensus was that it is a government handout to the scientific and military community.

There were forty minutes left for questions from the audience. Everybody more or less agreed that the SDI program was a bad idea, that it would have a destabilizing effect on the world because it would create another arms race, a race to construct missiles that can pass through enemy defenses with decoys or other means.

This game goes on while it takes financial resources away from areas that do need support, like family planning. The Bush Administration’s first act after taking power was to cut off funding to any international organization that uses other monies for abortions or even counseling to any mother under their care. We have an uphill fight.

As I listened, it became increasingly apparent that both the scientists and the audience were extremely well informed, articulate, and opinionated—often passionately so. The quality of discourse was often quite impressive. I had never been in a room with so many smart people.
 

Toward the end of the evening, I was able to get in one question. I asked if overpopulation was not more of a threat to the human race than nuclear bombs. I quoted Warren Christopher from a speech he made before students at Stanford University just after stepping down as Clinton’s Secretary of State, in which he asserted that it was.

In fact, Christopher has made this point several times. On April 16, 1996, the Washington Post quoted him as saying, “I have seen the future, and I find it alarming. I see parched fields, poisoned air, toxic waters, rampant disease and societies driven by armed conflict by competition for dwindling resources, all potentially threatening to Americans. In that vision, those calamities result not from nuclear war but from worldwide abuse of the environment and overpopulation.”

The scientist who fielded my question said that the Earth’s population was going to stabilize at about nine billion. He said that overpopulation is not going to be that big of a problem. He thought that nine billion was a sustainable number—not realizing, of course, that we’re doing a poor job of sustaining even six billion. After that, the topic reverted back to nuclear bombs.

I was both flabbergasted and amazed. Here I was at MIT, among some of the best minds in the country. And yet they had no idea that the world is already overpopulated.

Perhaps just my mention of the idea of overpopulation at this conference may have done some good. But it’s hard to say. And either way, the fact remains that, so far as the “population bomb” is concerned, there’s no doubt that we’re running out of time. Our planet is already hard pressed to support even the number of human inhabitants already on it. One doesn’t have to be a genius to see that.

‘New Corporate Order’ Already Established

In his latest syndicated column, Leonard Pitts wonders what motivated all the ruckus at the political conventions, as well as in Seattle and D.C. (“Either I or the protesters don’t get it”, 8/24/2000). He lists over a dozen causes on the protesters’ agenda, and complains that they are too unfocused to achieve anything.

 

Corporations rule the world. Why should they care about a few noisy picketers?

Some people fear the takeover of the world by the United Nations, complete with black helicopters and a New World Order. It will never happen; corporations beat them to it. With NAFTA, GATT, the IMF and the WTO, they have established a New Corporate Order.

Corporations rule the world. Why should they care about a few noisy picketers?

Gregory Wilcox
Candler, North Carolina

[Editor’s note: the Asheville Citizen-Times has a 200-word limit for letters to the editor. There was not room to point out that corporate domination contributes in many ways to overpopulation. To companies, the more of us the merrier. It means more cheap labor to produce their products, and more consumers to buy it. Huge corporations also expand the gap between rich and poor, resulting in a much higher birthrate than would be the case if income were distributed more equitably.]

The Ascendant Corporation

• The combined revenues of just General Motors and Ford—the two largest automobile corporations in the world—exceed the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for all of sub-Saharan Africa.
• The combined sales of Mitsubishi, Mitsui, ITOCHU, Sumitomo, Marubeni, and Nissho Iwai, Japan’s top six Sogo Sosha or trading companies, are nearly equivalent to the combined GDP of all of South America.
• Overall, fifty-one of the largest one hundred economies in the world are corporations.

A Distant Early Warning

Mr. Thorne:

Extinction is a function of evolution. It has been the phenomenon of life. It will occur. We are headed this way rather quickly… it is a myth that technology will save us…

In Time Magazine, October 10th, I read about a landscape architect who believes that “the U.S. can replan its cities, curb pollution and halt suburban chaos—the answer to our environmental problems is diffusion.”

What is one to believe? To a rude awakening, the words of Boulder were beginning to penetrate beyond my ears. This summer, for the first time in my life, I had experienced fear—fear for the future.

I have seen in print, just once, that we are running out of oxygen because we are destroying so much of our oxygen-producing greenery. What is more horrifying, I heard that most of our oxygen is produced by the plankton in the ocean, which is dying from pollution. Most people (myself included) are not able to grasp the enormity of this fact. And even more startling, I read in The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon R. Taylor: “In the early 1950s the Nobelist Harold Urey had a brilliant insight which opened the door to the new conception of the origin of life. He realized that the original atmosphere of the Earth must have been devoid of oxygen.” The implication of this remark is chilling indeed!
 

Isn’t it true that archaeologists have been excavating past civilizations? Why not ours? It is difficult for the mind to accept that this is a dying civilization and planet—at this very moment. But who could grasp the Nazi atrocities either?

Overpopulation is the underlying cause of our environmental problems. Again, from by Gordon R. Taylor: “We are faced, as a result of medical progress, with a population explosion the violence of which is still not generally understood.” Is there anything that can be done to prevent 100 million lives from being conceived in this country over the next 30 years? Why can’t a couple find parental fulfillment with just one child? It is not a valid statement that an only child must grow up lonely, selfish and neurotic.

I urge you to devote an entire issue of Life Magazine to the environmental crisis. This issue should explore all aspects of the crisis, separating myths from facts. It should also address the question, What can an individual do to help avert the impending catastrophe?

It is easier for people to understand the war in Vietnam because the killing is occurring now. But upsetting the balance of nature is equally momentous. I would like to compare our present exigency to that of a whirlpool: we’re at the edge, but irresistible forces are in motion. The closer we move toward the center, the less control (if any) we have.

Barbara S. Clapp
100 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142

Dear Miss Clapp:

Thank you for your letter to Mr. Thorne.

LIFE has been and will continue to be concerned with all aspects of danger to our environment. I hope you saw our August 1 article, “Threatened America,” and will watch for forthcoming reports on environmental problems.

Sincerely Yours,
Marilyn G. Rosenberg
for the Editors

Who Needs Animals?

From This Corner: Excess vs. Surplus

I was reading around in my deep ecology anthology* recently when I came across a short article by Gary Snyder, the poet, written over 30 years ago. I’ve never read much of Gary Snyder, tending to think of him as a bit too mystical for me. But in this article he pinpoints overpopulation, overconsumption, and pollution as the chief obstacles to our survival.

I find myself largely in agreement with his conclusions, if not entirely with every one of his assumptions along the way. Here is an example of his language and thinking:

In the realm of thought, inner experience, consciousness, as in the outward realm of interconnection, there is a difference between balanced cycle, and the excess which cannot be handled.

Excess has to do with having or using more than we need, whereas surplus is about having enough for ourselves so that we can feel generous toward our neighbors on a regular basis. Depending upon how you look at it, our tendencies toward excess have a characterological or emotional basis, while our need for surplus is a more or less practical one.

The big change that’s occurred in the world over the past few hundred years, culminating though far from ending in its potentialities and refinements, at the end of World War II is the development of the technological capability to provide a surplus for everyone. Taking this development by itself on a purely practical level, one should think it could mean, to an amazingly beneficial extent, the end of scarcity, war, famine, inequity of opportunity, etc., etc.

At least two things, however, stand in the way of our making this wonderful new world. Both have to do with excess. One is that, at the same time that we have been developing the potential for universal surplus, we have also produced an excess of human beings. Many of the reasons for this are quite well-known, and have to do with advances in agricultural and medical science.

Six billion people living on our planet, however, would have been too many without modern technology. But clearly, with the streamlining of the workforce our new technologies has made possible, even less people than those technologies could sustain would do just fine by themselves, with a far better quality of life for all.

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that this state of affairs is both ironic and scary: that so many fewer people than ever before is necessary even as we are adding to our population at a shocking rate.

The other form of excess blocking our better future is somewhat harder to pin down, precisely because it involves that usually amorphous realm of “inner experience” to which Snyder refers. The result of its actions, however, are clear: we habitually crave and use more stuff than we need.
 

So what we have here is a compound ecological problem: too many people using too much stuff. One may point out that some hope lies in the apparent fact, that looking at the crisis “ecodemographically,” rates of population growth tend to be tapering off in areas where overconsumption is the worst, whereas overconsumption is relatively negligible in areas where population growth is the highest. Because common sense, however, would still suppose higher rates of consumption to be one logical result of raised social status, improving the life of people in developing nations would not by itself particularly seem to offer a long-term solution to the general ecological crisis.

So, to whatever extent overpopulation and overconsumption may or may not be connected, a chief obstacle to our attaining the sort of inner and outer balance to which Snyder alludes would seem to center on our inability to effectively distinguish between excess and surplus. Many still at some level buy into the age-old notion that human beings are somehow characterologically flawed, that such disasters will therefore always be with us, and that the best we can do is surround ourselves with sufficient protections and ameliorations to keep the inevitable damage to the minimum.

A more idealistic view, however, is that human beings are indeed capable of doing much better than they have done in the past, that many of their self-destructive habits are learned rather innate, and that they can thus be unlearned or modified as external conditions change.

No sensible person, however, can deny our continued tendencies toward excess, or our still chronic lack of clarity when it comes to distinguishing them from the very real, practical need for surplus.

It seems to me that for those for whom human behavior in this area is essentially innate, genetically predisposed in some unalterable way, or otherwise writ in stone, the only recourse is to find some happy way to wait out the apocalypse. For the rest of us, however, developing more effective methods of clearly distinguishing, both within ourselves and in the world at large, the difference between the need for surplus and the habit of excess would seem prerequisite to solving our ecological problems.

Perhaps Synder said it best 32 years ago: “Our own heads: Is where it starts.”

*Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, Edited by George Sessions, 1995.