Who Will Heed the Warnings on the Population Bomb?

Consider, if you can stand it, almost every public policy crisis that blips on the radar, and follow each back to its source.

Every lane of roadway too crowded, forests leveled for housing timber or grazing land, not enough clean water, not enough clean air, not enough open space--not enough of anything, except us. People. Just too damn many of us, 6 billion strong, a billion more than what we were just a dozen years ago.

We are arguably the most successful species in history. We have used our brains to make tools--tools of steel, tools of antibiotics--to defeat almost every natural predator.

If our own numbers are the problem, then policymakers the world over are simply nibbling at the edges, treating the symptoms, not the ailment, the crises that overpopulation creates, not overpopulation itself. Yet the paradox is that reproduction is both the first and the ultimate right; no one in this country--nor in most others--can tell anyone else how many children they can have.

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In his 20s, Robert Gillespie was a soils science expert studying in Egypt, and everywhere were hungry kids and sick kids, yet no matter how he cut the numbers, he realized “the population was doubling every 23 years. [As for] agricultural production, it was very obvious population was quickly going to outstrip food production. And that’s what’s happened. If it weren’t for huge international aid programs, no doubt Egypt would be starving tomorrow.”

So he switched from soils to a different sort of cultivation, working for nearly 40 years with organizations that sent him to Taiwan, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey to set up family planning programs.

In that time, he became a founding member of Zero Population Growth, has become president of Pasadena-based Population Communication--and has seen world population double.

“The Information Age has taught us that labor is not the power, that the brain is the power. [The] places where people are ending up with five or six kids--most of sub-Saharan Africa for example, where it’s gone on for the last 5,000 years--is where governments spend 12% or less of budgets on health and education services combined. As poverty increases, the reinforcement for large families increases: ‘We need more children to substitute for the ones gone through infant mortality.’ Individually that sounds like a great idea for a family, but collectively that is suicide.”

Just as he learned that agriculture alone could not cure hunger, Gillespie knows that birth control devices alone will not solve overpopulation. States in India have raised the legal age for marriage. Educating women lowers birthrates.

The father of population policy--and a controversial one he is, too--was English economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus decreed that population always tends to outgrow subsistence, the upshot of which is that nature will enforce its own limits with disease and famine. “He never conceived,” says Gillespie, “that the technology would have as much influence, that urbanization would have as much influence. People say, ‘Malthus was wrong.’ Malthus was right. It’s just that the bubble has gotten bigger, and it will go and go and go, and ultimately the population will stabilize by increasing the death rate or lowering the birthrate.”

The most divisive issue in population battles is immigration control. Gillespie’s is one of the few population groups that concerns itself with the matter. Gillespie has, like fellow ZPG co-founders Paul and Anne Ehrlich, split with that group over the issue of “not addressing immigration as an important component of population growth,” and the assessment that “we are allowing in more people than we can afford.”

It drives him nuts to be “with people who want immigration reform for the wrong reasons. They are racist. They just think Hispanics are stupid and lazy and will rape and pillage, when the fact is they’re the hardest working population we have.”

It also drives him nuts that people have already made up their minds. “Latino activists or the Heritage Foundation, they won’t look at facts. I just send literature to both sides and say, ‘These are the facts.’ ”

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If you’re congratulating yourself on being a Responsible American with just one or two kids, don’t.

The paradox is that one American consumes as much as 60 Bengalis, as much as three Japanese, twice as much as a German. We are wasteful and heedless children, gobbling down fossil fuel and other goods willy-nilly. Like children, we keep depending on technology to haul us to safety in the last reel .

“We are the most gluttonous country in the world, with no discipline economically or politically. That’s going to go on until there’s a major crisis such as gas and oil running out. If that were to happen today, more people would be starving in New York City than Bangladesh, because in Bangladesh people live closer to their level of subsistence.

“We live in an artificial world, and nobody is addressing the future as it relates to finite resource. And all resources are finite except population.”

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com