THE CROWDED PLANET
ZERO POPULATION GROWTH OF GREATER BOSTON
| Volume 9, Issue 6 | November/December 1999 |
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THE CROWDED PLANET ZERO POPULATION GROWTH OF GREATER BOSTON
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Up Front |
Feature Articles |
Special Y6B Section |
About Us |
On October 12, 1999, we produced six billion people on the planet. Boston's ZPG had a demonstration on a bridge over the expressway. It was expertly organized by Jeff Herman, and he chose a superb time and location. During rush hour traffic, a banner was lowered across an eight-lane freeway, at the notoriously congested “funnel” where four lanes merge into two for the airport tunnel exit. There were so many cars that I could feel my lungs choking with pollution.
This protest was very appropriate, in view of the “iceberg the size of Rhode Island” currently heading in our direction, melting copiously along the way. This will cause the oceans to rise, resulting in yet more massive flooding. It’s only one of many unfortunate consequences of too many people driving too many cars. All these cars contribute significantly to global warming, which also makes our weather change in horrific ways: disastrous hurricanes, winter storms, severe droughts, et cetera.
Members of ZPG made creative signs and a huge banner reading Six Billion People on Earth Today! One that particularly stands out in my mind is a drawing of a family with two children, reading “Family Planning Now!” Other very apropos signs were “Fewer people equals less traffic”, “Enough is Enough” and “We need to solve this problem together.” Many people in their cars responded with a ‘thumbs up’ gesture. Others—only a few—yelled out, “I’m going to have ten children” and “I love sex!” Most people drove by or walked by as if they didn’t want to be bothered. A reporter from the Boston Globe took quite a few pictures, but none made it into the paper. By and large, the reaction was mixed. However, we did manage to enlighten a few folks about the dangers of overpopulation.
We all enjoyed ourselves and wished more of you could have been there to increase our numbers to 50 instead of 25. Many thanks to all who participated, especially Pam and Jeff, the two hardest workers. By the time the sun descended, there were another 200,000 people on Earth (that’s 6,000,200,000, if you’re numerically challenged). The demonstrators folded up their banner and went home.
Peter Ames' address is 90 Ivy Street, Brookline, MA. The nearest T-stop is St. Mary's on the C Train of the MBTA Green Line. Walk north up St. Mary's Street towards the Charles River. After one block, turn left on to Ivy Street. Look for a lavender brick house, the first detached house on the left.
For those of you driving, Peter Ames' home is located near the Charles River, in the northeast corner of Brookline, which is a section of Boston, about a ten minute walk west of Fenway Park. It is just two blocks north of Beacon Street between Carlton Street and St. Mary's Street. Peter's phone number is: (617) 731-0512 should there be any questions. The meeting starts promptly at 7pm.
Please see the meeting schedule for general information and other meeting dates.
Also debuting in with this issue is a book review column, called Bookshelf. The two books reviewed there are examples of the population-related issues mentioned above. These are: Biodiversity: Exploring Values and Priorities in Conservation and The Natural Superiority of Women. Both reviews consider how their subjects impinge on, and are in turn affected by, population growth. Books, even more than episodic articles, afford a way to thoroughly examine a subject. In so doing, they have the best chance at permanently influencing what a reader thinks or feels.
We hope these features prove popular, and we look forward to your comments.
MSNBC's internet division, MSNBC.com, is currently featuring a special report called Terminal Planet. In Part III, The People Bomb, there is an article titled World population nearing 6 billion, subtitled New U.N. report highlights challenges of population growth. The author is Julia Sommerfeld, an MSNBC correspondent. (The article was originally called 'Y6B’ revives the population debate. Perhaps MSNBC has decided that the term Y6B is politically incorrect?)
It is nice to see the popular media paying some attention to the Y6B event. One might think any kind of publicity about population issues would be good. As the politician says, I don't care what you print about me, just spell my name right.
However, unlike in the political arena, stories like this can do more damage than good. The media did what they always do: present a story as a debate between sides, leaving 'credible doubt' in the reader's mind over where the truth lies. To highlight the 'conflict', Sommerfield capitalizes on a statement from Alex Marshall of the United Nations Population Fund. Marshall is quoted as saying, "This is a classic good news, bad news story." Sure, every story has shades of gray. But anyone who has taken the time to really study environmental issues knows we have a serious crisis in the making.
The story, in its attempt to be 'fair', presents opinions of some well-known contrarians. These include Sheldon Richman, editor of the libertarian publication The Freeman, and Ben Wattenberg, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Neither has any scientific qualifications. However, their dogmatism is given equal weight to the majority of the scientific community, which holds a much different view.
I fervently hope that these critics are proven right by history. Unfortunately, while they cast aspersions, the world continues to conduct business as usual. The time to act has already passed, and we blithely proceed to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Here are some web sites that will fill you in on all the details:
Here we review two books: one about biodiversity, and one about feminism. At first glance, these topics may not seem to have much to do with population. But both have a direct bearing on it: human population growth decreases biodiversity, and the patriarchal worldview contributes to overpopulation. And it's even more complicated than that: all three subjects are intimately intertwined, and changes in any one have repercussions in all three.
Ironically, a seminal work in the feminist movement was written by a man. The Natural Superiority of Women, by noted anthropologist Ashley Montagu, was first published in 1952. It was serialized in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, leading to the formation of the National Organization of Women in 1966. Earlier this year, the author completely revised and updated the book to take recent studies into account. Remarkably, the structure of his argument remains largely intact—only the details have changed.
Montagu is well aware of the cultural dangers inherent in discussing this topic, and he goes about it with tongue in cheek. He acknowledges up front that men are as important and necessary to the human equation as are women. And he concedes that men possess the "bruited advantages of larger size and muscular power," which offers certain athletic benefits. While these benefits may have been useful in earlier times, they have been rendered largely superfluous in our highly mechanized industrial society. And the same hormones that produce this size and power also give rise to aggressive and violent behavior. Men constitute the vast majority of criminals, psychopaths, drug users, and suicide attempts; they also instigate and wage most wars.
But the central question of the book is: which sex is superior, from an anthropological perspective? Well that, of course, depends on what you mean by 'superior.' Montagu offers this definition: "Superiority in any trait, whether biological or social, is measured by the extent to which that trait confers survival benefits upon the person and the group." With this benchmark in place, he then goes about showing how women excel in a wide variety of domains: intelligence, physical and emotional health, sensory perception, sociability, and longevity, to name only a few.
Montagu gives ground on only one topic: creativity. He admits that throughout history, the vast majority of artists, musicians, writers, inventors and scientists have been men. However, he never assumes for a minute that this is due to an inherent genetic superiority. Instead, he shows that it is a consequence of men's traditional subjugation of women. Men have always kept women "in their place": cooking, cleaning, taking care of the household and the children. Although this is finally beginning to change, the glass ceiling is still in place: women are even now paid only 67 cents for each dollar a man gets for the same job. Given such disincentives, he finds the supposed lack of creativity unsurprising.
I propose another possible explanation: women's creativity is expressed differently. I have long suggested that fully 50% of the funds allocated toward any new research or development project be used to investigate possible negative consequences of that project. So many discoveries have turned out to have nasty undersides; we don't find out until years later about nuclear waste, holes in the ozone due to CFCs, genetic damage due to hormone disrupters, and a great variety of other technologically-induced horrors. Could it be that women somehow intuitively sensed that these were genies better left in the bottle? Perhaps they devoted their creative skills instead to more practical matters, such as storytelling and crafts. These fields, while undervalued in today's world, have much greater utility in a socially-oriented culture. The craftspeople and the storytellers are the ones who preserve the fabric of society, producing its artifacts and passing on its legends.
This theory is, of course, highly speculative and fanciful at best. If true, and if the world were less patriarchal, it would imply a vastly different lifestyle than the one we enjoy today. We would not have all the blessings of indoor air conditioning, nuclear power, and plastic milk jugs. We would be more like indigenous people, living close to the land. Or perhaps we could combine the best of both worlds. The point is only that the kind of creativity we value determines, to a large extent, the shape of the world we inhabit.
Reading this book makes me wonder what other consequences would result from true equity between the sexes. How would it change our lives, for better or worse? Certainly it would affect our reproductive rates. Nafis Sadik, the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), recently gave a speech in which she lamented the slow pace of progress for women. She cited the Programme of Action, produced by the UN’s International Conference on Population and Development. Its primary goals are to encourage universal availability of reproductive health, including family planning; to reduce infant, child and maternal mortality; and to provide universal access to education. While there have been small successes, much remains to be done. Dr. Sadik, speaking for the UNFPA, made it clear that our present overpopulation woes are a direct result of gender inequity. The sheer enormity of humans on the planet—a number that is about to hit six billion—is directly or indirectly responsible for virtually all of our environmental problems.
The Natural Superiority of Women is as relevant and as true today as it was half a century ago. It should be required reading for any person who claims allegiance to a gender. As the cover of the original paperback edition says, "A must for every woman—a challenge to every man."
Last
summer I traveled to Costa Rica to study tropical biodiversity with a group
of other students under the aegis of the Organization for Tropical Studies.
At two sites there, we wrestled with questions of what should be conserved,
and how.
At Palo Verde, a new community of rice farmers bisected two national parks; a thin corridor of as-yet-undeveloped highly arable land ran between them. The community currently had good relations with the park and its rangers, which were essential for the prevention of hunting and illegal agriculture of park land. The community needed more land to feed and provide for the growing Costa Rican population. Conservation workers had to juggle the need for continued good relations with the community against the park fragmentation resulting from its development.
At La Selva, we witnessed the sharp border between the rainforest and Chiquita Corporation's banana plantations. Banana farming is the second largest source of income for Costa Rica after tourism. Unfortunately, farming of banana monocultures can rapidly degrade land. Efforts were being made by Chiquita to make their work sustainable, but of necessity they took a second seat to the increasing worldwide demand for bananas. Were these efforts enough? How do we assess the recovery of biodiversity?
At Palo Verde, local pressures threaten biodiversity, and at La Selva, global pressures threaten it. Dan L. Perlman and Glenn Adelson have written a book, Biodiversity: Exploring Values and Priorities in Conservation, in order to help conservation decision makers establish priorities for conservation of areas such as these.
In chapters one through three, they draw distinctions which they view as important in conservation decision making. They argue that one should distinguish between the context and the particulars of each conservation decision. Perhaps most usefully, they suggest that decision makers should differentiate between their internal values with regard to decision making, and the worth of a particular parcel of biodiversity whose protection is under debate. In this framework, the book does a good job of talking about biodiversity without requiring any knowledge whatsoever of the biodiversity it discusses. What it accomplishes in chapter two is a categorization of ways that our values inform our assessments of biodiversity or conservation worth.
In chapters four and five, they argue that biodiversity is a concept that is meaningless without a statement of the values which are being applied. In chapter six, they rescue biodiversity for us—the heading title of the last section is "Conclusion: Ambiguity is not always bad."
The rest of the book does not answer questions, but asks them: chapter eight, on articulating goals and setting priorities, concludes that "each person who cares about the biodiversity legacy our generation leaves behind should attempt to develop his or her own answers." Chapter nine finishes the book (except for the afterword) with: "those are the questions we must answer for the generations to come."
If you are puzzled by the claims of conservation workers that conservation decisions are not easy, this book is for you. If you already understand this, then look elsewhere for a more technically informative resource. This book is an easy read for those not familiar with the topic and its complications. Perlman and Adelman give abundant examples as they construct their argument that biodiversity is difficult to assess and that conservation choices are hard to resolve. Since the book is ostensibly written for conservation decision makers, it would be nice if the book were peppered with more examples from actual conservation work, rather than examples from teaching about biodiversity. Teachers of biology may appreciate some of these examples as feasible ideas to implement in their own classroom.
Throughout the book, Perlman and Adelman discuss the many ways that the values of investigators define the sort of biodiversity that is assessed. The ambiguity of the word lends itself to this rather protean usage. Accepting the ambiguity in their vein, however, appears to equate biodiversity with conservation worth—an equation many have made, but with which it seems few are entirely comfortable, because it means both terms are not rigorously definable. Perlman and Adelman discuss a rigorous definition of biodiversity as species richness extensively, and only very briefly discuss other rigorous definitions such as formulations of a community's cumulative phylogenetic divergence or summed number of novel organismic features. Such measures have definite problems, but at least they could then be debated for their conservation worth within each context.
The book ends with an exhortation to take a census of our population to ascertain the values of the population with regard to biodiversity, to "hear every voice" and act on the values of all parties with some undefined strategy of consensus. But biodiversity is so great—nature is so copious in its furtive inventiveness and veiled beauty—how can we possibly expect every person to have a working knowledge of all the entities that make up nature, and thereby have values that are well-informed?
Can we possibly educate people quickly enough to use a consensus criterion in the preservation of biological diversity? This October the human population will witness the birth of the six-millionth human on earth. No one can doubt that humankind's amazing ability to displace the world's resources toward its own growth over that of other biological entities is the prime factor impeding all of our conservation efforts. The seamy underside of the conservation issues discussed in this book is that the greatest evil is ourselves. Ultimately, which is more important to you: more humans, or more nature?
John Andersland has prepared a website with pictures from the sites mentioned in this article: http://bioweb.wku.edu/faculty/andersland/ots10/pv.html. More information about the projected six billionth human may be obtained at http://www.y6b.org/.
