Groups Unite to Point Out Hazards of Overpopulation : Environment: Hunger, poverty and pollution are cited by a revived coalition. Bush is urged to renew his support for family planning.

A diverse group of environmentalists, scientists, Nobel laureates and others launched a concerted effort Wednesday to heighten public awareness of the disastrous social and environmental effects of overpopulation.

The group, warning that the current world population of 5.4 billion could nearly triple by the middle of the next century if current growth trends continue, urged President Bush to renew his past support of family planning and population control efforts.

“Together, the increase in population and in resource consumption are basic causes of human suffering and environmental degradation and must become major priorities for national and international action,” said a statement endorsed by more than 100 individuals and environmental, population and family planning organizations.

Wednesday’s public appeal marks the revival of a 1960s-era coalition of environmental and population control activists, many of whom later went their separate ways to pursue more specific goals.

Despite the united front, the coalition could run afoul of abortion and birth control opponents. Bush, for example, supported family planning and population control programs as a U.S. representative from Texas, but he adopted a staunch anti-abortion stance as Ronald Reagan’s vice president and has not changed it as President.

By assembling a broad group of participants, ranging from two-time Nobel Prize-winner Linus Pauling to National Organization for Women President Molly Yard, the coalition hopes to overcome the political obstacles that have blocked previous population control efforts.

“Never before has such a large and diverse group of our country’s leaders endorsed one common statement expressing the vital link between population growth and the environment,” said Dale Didion, vice president of the Humane Society of the United States.

The United States, whose citizens represent 5% of the world population yet consume 25% of the world’s resources, and other industrial nations are just as responsible for the harmful effects of overpopulation as are rapidly growing developing nations, Didion said.

Besides contributing to poverty and hunger, overpopulation has resulted in global pollution, deforestation, resource depletion and plant and animal extinction, the coalition said.

The group called for developing better family planning services and improving education throughout the world. It noted that women with seven or more years of schooling have an average of 2.2 fewer children than uneducated women.

Rep. Chester G. Atkins (D-Mass.), chairman of the Congressional Coalition on Population and Development, faulted U.S. leaders for taking a passive approach to overpopulation.

He cited the 1989 International Forum on Population, at which the United States “came shackled by its own misguided public policy, unwilling to support the most simple and effective solution to population growth: voluntary family planning services.”

Atkins said that, in the next generation, more than 3 billion women will come of child-bearing age. Unless efforts are made to control population growth, “it will create the most monstrous, uncontrollable, devastating environmental crisis this planet has ever known.”