Scientists say too many people on one small planet is the real cause of our environmental problems
Published: The Globe and Mail, May 30, 1992, FOCUS
BY DEBORAH JONES/HALIFAX
AS world leaders gather in Brazil for the Earth Summit, critics are saying the event - the largest environmental confab ever - ignores the biggest environmental problem of all: the sheer numbers of people on Spaceship Earth.
Over-population has emerged as a central environmental issue - for obvious reasons: The globe's resources simply cannot support the 5.4 billion men, women and children who live on it. And it certainly cannot support the doubling of that population expected within the next few decades.
"In the past, population was limited by war, pestilence, famine and the like," says U.S. physician Michael McCally. "Ten thousand years ago there were a few million of us. The world population will reach 10.8 billion in 40 years."
Dr. McCally is one of the founders of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a group with 200,000 members in 75 countries that won the 1985 Nobel Prize for its efforts. Today, on behalf of the U.S. wing of the organization - called Physicians for Social Responsibility - he is lobbying doctors worldwide to join a campaign to curb population growth.
"Population," he says, "is the root of our environmental crisis," At a meeting in Boston this autumn on human health and the environment, members of the U.S.-based group will urge physician-members from other countries to broaden their mandate to include population and environmental issues.
To spread his message, Dr. McCally recently attended a conference on medicine and the environment at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He explained that with the end of the Cold War, anti-war organizations can - and should - turn their resources to population and environment issues.
The U.S. initiative has met resistance in Canada. Canadian Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War had decided not to change its anti-war focus: "There are millions of people whose lives are still afflicted by war," says Joanna Santa Barbara, a Hamilton, Ont., psychiatrist and past president of CPPNW, who attended the Dalhousie conference. "There are 20 or 30 armed conflicts at the level of war going on all over the world, some of which have the potential to become nuclear. . . . We don't say to ourselves or others that these are the only major global problems, but we will work hard at these and trust that others will work hard on other problems like population."
Few would dispute the link between overpopulation and human suffering. A recent report from Population Crisis Committee, a Washington-based non- governmental group, states that 73 per cent of people in the world today are suffering - a judgment based on criteria ranging from life expectancy, calorie intake and access to drinking water to civil rights and communications technology. It also says that 95 per cent of population growth is in the poorest countries, with the people of Mozambique suffering most and Danes suffering least. Canada is fifth on the list of least-suffering countries.
With society's increased sensitivity to environment issues, the ranks of population activists have grown. "I find the general public paying more and more attention to population, particularly since it's been tied into the environmental issues," says Bonnie Johnson, executive director of the Ottawa-based Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada. The federation has sent a representative to Brazil to join a women's caucus that will discuss issues that have been excluded from the official U.N. agenda.
One of those issues, amazingly, is population. That it has been excluded is a measure of how freighted it is with political, religious and human-rights concerns.
John Meyer, president of Zero Population Growth, says that poor countries see the issue of over-population as a consequence of the developed world's consumption of more than its share of the Earth's resources. "The Third World countries . . . say population is not a problem: People are an asset, a resource that will help development. They've gone completely away from any discussion of the effects of population. They're refusing to discuss it if the North will not discuss consumption levels," he says.
"The South feels very beaten up on the whole issue because they are losing the resources. They can't compete for the resources in their own countries and they are also being asked to undertake very costly environmental upgrades (such as) pollution-abatement systems."
Zero Population Growth was founded in Connecticut in 1969, about the same time that The Population Bomb, by Stanford University entomologist Paul Ehrlich, was published; the Canadian organization started its work in the early '70s. Membership flagged somewhat in the 1980s. Then last year, Mr. Meyer initiated a controversial membership drive from his home in Don Mills, Ont., that focused on limiting population in Canada by limiting immigration. Membership has grown from a handful of people to about 450.
He points to Canada's three largest cities - Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver - and says immigration has harmed those cities through overcrowding, noise and air-quality problems. "We are trying to say there should be an integrated strategy of population, economic and environmental policy. If you don't make the population work, nothing else works," says Mr. Meyer.
Discussion of population often brings charges of racism, criticism that the West wants to foist its values on other cultures, and outrage at controversial birth-control methods, such as the one-child restriction in China and government-supported sterilization in India.
"The World Bank has made the statement that the cause of environmental degradation in developing countries is poverty, and therefore population has to be addressed," says Ms. Johnson from Planned Parenthood's national office in Ottawa. "That puts a lot of organizations and groups into the position of saying we must enforce population policies and that gets us into the population-control agenda pretty quickly, which Planned Parenthood opposes."
Planned Parenthood's approach to population issues is through education and support of women.
Dr. McCally agrees that educating women is the key. His physicians' group proposes six initiatives to curb population growth. They include increasing health-related aid to poor countries, improving access to family planning, putting a priority on education and empowerment of women, increasing research into birth control, and integrating family-planning and health-services organizations, which in most jurisdictions are separate bureaucracies.
He believes doctors in particular should set a good example. "We should limit our families to one or two children. We've not heard that in several decades. I think that should resurface."
Meanwhile, North Americans have population problems at home, especially related to adolescent pregnancy and reluctance to address such issues as abortion, family planning and sexual behaviour. That must change, says Dr. McCally: "It's unconscionable that we don't have this dialogue." Deborah Jones is a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail.
Copyright Deborah Jones 1992
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