HEALTH HORIZONS : ENVIRONMENT : A Crowded Planet : MANY SAY THAT DRASTIC ACTION IS NEEDED TO SLOW POPULATION GROWTH AS THE NUMBER OF EARTH INHABITANTS ROCKETS TOWARD 14 BILLION BY THE MIDDLE OF THE NEXT CENTURY.
By the time you finish reading this sentence, 12 more people will be living on the planet. A year from now, 95 million or so human beings will have joined the 5.4 billion earthlings competing for food, clean air and water, shelter, and fuel, and the U. S. population of 251 million will have grown by 3 million. By 2025, the 100 million people now living in Mexico and Central America will have more than doubled to 225 million. And unless something drastic happens, the Earth’s population should hit 14 billion by the middle of the next century.
Something drastic needs to happen.
Adding 8.6 billion people to the current crowd, say most population experts and environmentalists, is something the human race must avoid at all costs. If we cannot check our rate of reproduction on our own, the environment could come close to collapse, and Nature would enact its own, more drastic methods of population control.
“There are a number of environmental disasters looming--increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, destruction of the ozone layer, rising global temperature and sea level, deforestation and desertification, soil erosion, faltering food production, large-scale extinction, and accelerating pollution of the world’s rivers and oceans--and all are tied directly to the rapid growth of the world’s population,’ says Werner H. Fornos, president of The Population Institute in Washington. “Already, there are too many people for the Earth to support in a sustainable manner, and the situation is only going to get worse. Far worse.”
One should not feel smug and dismiss this as a problem that is happening elsewhere. After achieving zero-population growth briefly in the 1970s, the U. S. population is on the upswing again. Certainly, the rate of population growth in the United States is much less than India’s or Kenya’s or that of the 90 or so Third World nations that could double their population within the next 30 years. But even the seemingly small 1% population growth in the United States presents a huge danger to the environment.
“Any growth in the U. S. population is ominous because though we (make up) only 5% of the world’s population, we use 25% to 30% of the world’s resources and produce a third of its pollution,” says Rose Hanes, executive director of Population-Environment Balance, an organization that focuses on controlling population growth in the United States.
To illustrate her point, Hanes cites statistics for per-capita energy use: one American, in energy consumed, equals three Japanese, six Mexicans, 14 Chinese, 38 Indians, 168 Bangladeshi or 531 Ethiopians. On average, an American uses more than four times as much water as a British subject and more than six times that of a Tunisian.
The United States is the world’s fastest-growing industrialized country, and the environment is suffering as a result. Each day, a person here needs 150 gallons of water and 3.3 pounds of food and produces 120 gallons of sewage and 3.4 pounds of garbage. And as the population grows, so grows the demand on our already stretched natural resources. Eight states, for example, will fill their garbage dumps to the brim within the next five years, and 17 more will exhaust the capacity of their landfills by the end of the century.
Soaring populations in the Sun Belt have raised the demands for drinking and irrigation water. The water table in Tucson has dropped 150 feet in the last 20 years and the Florida Everglades are drying up. Population pressures also create a demand for more living space and for more timber to build houses and furniture. As a result, 80% of the nation’s old growth have fallen to the lumberman’s ax, and creatures such as the spotted owl are nearing extinction as their habitat vanishes.
This is the not the first time that experts have raised the population alarm and pointed out its connection to environmental problems. As early as 1960, the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, the leading professional organization of American scientists, passed a resolution calling for increased support of scientific research on the problems associated with population pressures. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, professor of Population Studies and Biology at Stanford University, wrote “The Population Bomb.” In this landmark book, Ehrlich detailed the problems of overpopulation, particularly in the world’s poorer nations, and called for a worldwide effort to bring population growth under control.
Ehrlich stressed that population growth itself is not the only factor leading to environmental disaster. Environmental impact, he said in a mathematics analogy, was equal to a country’s population times its relative affluence times its level of technology. This explains why the United States, with its high level of affluence and technological development, has such a high impact on the environment.
For nearly two decades after Ehrlich’s alarm, it seemed as if the United States had licked the problem of the population bomb. Families began having fewer children and the country’s birth rate dropped to the point where the number of children born each year was about equal to the number of people who died each year. In the United States, zero-population growth occurs when the fertility rate, the average number of children that a woman bears during her lifetime, is between 1.8 and 1.9.
In 1976, the United States a record low fertility rate of 1.7, which at that time was zero-population growth. Today, it has edged above 2.0 and is nearing 2.1. At that rate, the U. S. population will grow at a little more than 1% a year. While that may seem insignificant, it is not when a population the size of the United States’ is considered.
“Each year the U. S. adds the equivalent of another Los Angeles to its population,” said Susan Weber, executive director of Zero Population Growth, the first organization to direct public attention to the problems of overpopulation. “If this growth continues, the added number of people will overwhelm whatever gains we’ve made in protecting the environment through legislation.”
As an example of this, Weber cites the connection between the automobile, population growth, and the failure of many cities to meet the standards of the Clean Air Act. Between 1970 and 1989, the U. S. population grew 22%, but the number of cars soared 74%, almost 3 1/2 times faster than the population. If the U. S. population continues growing at its current rate, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the number of cars on American roads will increase to 271 million--a 76% rise--over the next 20 years. Currently, 101 regions in the country already exceed public heath standards for ozone and carbon monoxide pollution under the Clean Air Act. Automobiles are the major producers of these pollutants despite the fact that today’s cars are relatively clean.
But the situation is dire, not hopeless. The U.S. population is increasing by about 2.3 million people each year, but bringing the fertility rate back to replacement level could cut growth by 60%; the rest of U. S. growth comes from immigration. The same experts who predict that global population could nearly triple in the next 60 years also say that it is possible to achieve a stable world population of just over 9 billion people. The key to achieving this lower figure, though, is immediate action.
Experts say keeping the Earth’s population below 10 billion will require more money to help provide family planning information to more women. “We know perfectly well how to bring birthrates down,’ says Sharon L. Camp, vice president of the Population Crisis Committee in Washington. “We have the technological ability to give every couple in the world control over childbearing (at a cost of) $5 billion now, and $10 to $11 billion by 2000. We know that, given real choice in the matter, that most women--rich or poor, educated or illiterate--will have fewer children.
“The problem is not technical, it’s political,” she said.
Many population experts and Congressional supporters say that the policies of the Reagan Administration have contributed greatly to the current situation. “What happened was that Ronald Reagan was totally unsympathetic to the idea of population control,” says Fornos of the Population Institute. “It didn’t fit his conservative notions of government staying out of the private lives of individuals.”
In addition, the right-to-life movement convinced Reagan Administration officials that population control and family planning were synonymous with abortion.
“We do not take a position against family planning, per se, and we have no position on family planning assistance,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right-to-Life Committee in Washington. “But we feel that most of these programs do promote abortion as an option, and have provided funding to governments that promote abortion, and we are totally against that.”
Many, if not all, anti-abortion groups do not take a position on the connection between overpopulation and environmental degradation. The Roman Catholic Church, however, dismisses the problem as irrelevant, saying that there is no overpopulation problem. “The world’s food resources theoretically could feed 40 billion people,” according to official church doctrine, and thus there is no need to limit fertility in the near future. But Ehrlich says that although it may be possible theoretically to feed 40 billion people, doing so would require converting every acre of fertile soil into farmland.
Partially as a result of Reagan’s sympathies with this position, the United States withdrew funding from the International Planned Parenthood in 1985 and from the United Nations Fund for Population Activities in 1986. Those two organizations have been most responsible for funding family planning efforts. This decision to withdraw financial support stemmed from charges that the two organizations funded abortions in China.
Actually, neither organization funds abortions, which Peter McPherson, head of the U. S. Agency for International Development in the Reagan years, conceded in congressional testimony as early as 1985. The Chinese government operates abortion clinics but they are not funded by International Planned Parenthood or the U.N. Fund for Population Activities. “Neither (funds) abortions nor supports coercive family planning practices through their programs,’ McPherson said. But the Reagan Administration withheld funds because the organizations provided “demographic assistance.” The Bush Administration has reviewed that decision.
This is not to say that the United States does not spend money on international family assistance programs. Last year, the State Department, through its Agency for International Development, spent about $330 million supporting foreign programs. But the U. N. and population experts would like to see that funding increased to $570 million.
In the United States, funding for both family planning assistance and research on reproductive control has not kept pace with inflation.
Italy’s 1.3 fertility rate is the world’s lowest. In the 1970s, contraception was legalized there, as was abortion, and both the birthrate and the number of abortions have dropped. This suggest, proponents say, that family planning and abortion do not go hand in hand.
But the issue is still heavily debated in the United States.
In May, a bipartisan coalition of 89 members of Congress sent a letter to Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, asking for $570 million for international family planning assistance for fiscal 1992. “We’ve started a major effort in Congress to provide the funds needed to help stabilize the world’s population,” said Rep. Chester G. Atkins (D-Mass). “We need to have the grass-roots support for this.” Last May, more that 110 conservation and environmental organizations signed a statement endorsing population control.
“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 effort,” said Weber of Zero Population Growth.
Then there is the more difficult matter of making the personal choice to limit the size of one’s family. “We must set an example for the rest of the world, and we can do that by having no more than two children per couple,” Weber said.
Hanes of Population-Environment Balance, Americans need to respect the decision of couples to have one, or even no children, or to adopt children instead of conceiving them. Too often, she said, pressure from friends and relatives drives people to have larger families.
“The 1990s are really the decade of decision,” said Camp of the Population Crisis Committee. “But are we going to act now, right now, and prevent another doubling of the human population? Or are we going to do nothing and see the world’s population nearly triple?”
Contraception by Country
Percent of couples using contraception in countries with an average family size of two children or less:
COUNTRY USING CONTRACEPTION IN 1990: % OF COUPLES*
Czechoslovakia: 95%
United: Kingdom: 83%
Belgium: 81%
Finland: 80%
France: 79%
West: Germany: 78%
Italy: 78%
Sweden: 78%
Taiwan: 78%
Bulgaria: 77%
South: Korea: 77%
United: States: 76%
Singapore: 74%
Canada: 73%
Hungary: 73%
Hong: Kong: 72%
Netherlands: 72%
Austria: 71%
Norway: 71%
Switzerland: 71%
* The contraceptive prevalence rates used in this study are the latest available estimates of the proportion of reproductive-age women (15 to 49) who are married or living in union and who are using any method of family planning, excluding abortion, but including less effective methods.
Source: Population Crisis Committee, Washington, D.C.
