As Europe grapples with how to integrate (or expel) millions of unexpected new economic migrants from impoverished countries to its south and the USA's presidential elections hinge on building a wall to keep out economic migrants, we thought it time to revisit the subject that no one wants to talk about, the Human Population Bomb.
Ehrlichs' The Population Bomb has been both praised and vilified, but there has been no controversy over its significance in calling attention to the demographic element in the human predicament. How its message relates to climate change is a subject no politician in USA wants to talk about, especially in an election year. Even the UN has shied away from discussing the obvious: a smaller human population would result in less consumption and a reduced carbon footprint.
More reading on the subject:
EU pays Turkey billions to fence them in while Germany begins the long process of deportation.
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| Photo: Matthieu Paley @paleyphoto
In Delhi, a boy combs the bottom of the Yamuna River, one of India's holiest rivers, with his feet, looking for religious items tossed in from a bridge above. The objects, ranging from coins to small metal statues, can then be given to recycling shops for money. Because of the extreme level of pollution, authorities have instructed people not to wash their animals in the river (much less swim in it). The stretch of the Yamuna that flows through Delhi makes up only 2% of its entire length, but accounts for 80% of the river's pollution. An estimated 4,000 million liters per day of raw, untreated sewage (domestic and industrial) are directly disposed in the Yamuna River every day. The smell is described as "unbearable." According to the Central Water Commission, the level of Bilolgical Oxygen demand in the Yamuna is 55 mg/L, as compared to the 2 mg/L that is necessary to break down organic matter. Currently, 50% of the underground water sources in the Indo-Gangetic plains (home to over 500 Million people) are contaminated. The toxic black water flows first into the Ganges, then into the ocean, eventually reaching all of us.
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Human Population Growth and Climate Change
The largest single threat to the ecology and biodiversity of the planet in the decades to come will be global climate disruption due to the buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. People around the world are beginning to address the problem by reducing their carbon footprint through less consumption and better technology. But unsustainable human population growth can overwhelm those efforts, leading us to conclude that we not only need smaller footprints, but fewer feet.
Discussions about adapting to climate change that ignore population explosion (that would be most of them) are pointless. On the the one hand there are myriad initiatives being put in place but on the other there is ongoing exponential world population growth. To what end does that take us? If we only invest in programs that do not take into account the broader social interventions necessary to control consumption, not only is there a missed opportunity but the interventions will likely fail.
Carbon Legacy
The reproductive choices of an individual are rarely incorporated into calculations of his or her personal impact on the environment. The summed emissions of a person's descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him or her, may far exceed the lifetime emissions produced by the original parent.
Statistically, the relationship between population growth and global warming determine that the “carbon legacy” of just one child can produce 20 times more greenhouse gas than a person will save by driving a high-mileage car, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs, etc. Each child born in the United States will add about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent. The potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle.
More reading on the subject:
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| Photo: Matthieu Paley @paleyphoto
Looking for plastic bits to sell, a boy jumps down from one of Delhi's garbage dumps, in Bhalswa. 2.2 million children in Delhi have irreversible lung damage due to the poor quality of the air (World Health Organization, WHO). In 2014, according to the WHO, Delhi is by far the world's most polluted city. 13 of the 20 world's most polluted cities are in India. The constant burning of 4 garbage dumps located within the city accounts for about 18% of Delhi's air pollution (National Environmental Engineering Research Institute). The World Bank estimates that there will be 243% increase in waste generation in Indian cities between 2012 and 2025. All that toxic air, all that garbage will eventually reach all of us.
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The Green Climate Fund, perhaps the most high-profile fund helping developing countries adapt to climate change, does not say anything about population on its website. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which manages climate-focused "national adaptation programmes of action" for the least-developed countries, devotes a section of its website to the role gender plays in climate change. Women, it explains, are more vulnerable to its ravage and must be included in adaptation efforts. But family planning and contraception aren't on the official list of adaptation projects.
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| Photo: Lynsey Addario @lynseyaddario
Aboard the Godetia, a Belgian ship patrolling the Mediterranean, meals for rescued migrants are simple—bread and water, rice and porridge, here and there a piece of candy. It's not exciting, but it is food, and none of the migrants has come aboard carrying his own, which means they lost it, ate it, or never had any when they pushed out from the Libyan coast. For the Belgians, its bewildering. Who would cross this sea without food, without water? It suggests stupidity, or worse a kind of cleverness. We learn it is probably the latter. Human trafficking has evolved to this point: migrants are taught to expect rescue, and encouraged to look pathetic, so that European ships will be obliged to save them. Maritime law demands that sailors aid vessels in distress, and migrants, knowing this, will sometimes dump overboard water, food, and even the little engines that propel their rafts at the first sight of a larger boat. Here is the state of play as warm weather returns to the Mediterranean and more travelers begin crossing. It's infuriating for some of the Belgians, who joke that their ship shold be named "Euro Taxi." They wonder how long it can go on. Still, most of the crew is sympathetic. One evening I climb to the bridge and watch with a sailor while migrants receive dinner. He and I live in the West, neither of us has ever known hunger. How can we ever describe that first awareness of it, the signal sent up from the belly which warns of emptiness, the emptiness which becomes a question, the question that begins to gnaw? The sailor stubs out his cigarette. If it were me, it it were my family's future, I'd be on a boat, too, he says. Words by @neilshea13 Who will feed these millions of migrants riding the "Euro Taxi?" You and I.
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Controlling Passions
and the Global Gag Rule
Columbia University history professor Matthew Connelly argues (in Controlling Passions) that the 20th century was filled with wrong-minded approaches to family planning that have created a taboo subject for 21st century politicians and policy makers. Those efforts have ranged from using risky contraceptives on unwitting clients—in 1967 a Ford Foundation report praised a proposal for a new technology involving “an annual application of a contraceptive aerial mist” (from a single airplane over India)—to offering cash incentives to poor people who agreed to be sterilized. Policies like these “made family
planning seem like an imposition, rather than something that served clients’ own interests,” writes Connelly, and the backlash was ferocious. Revolutionary leaders worldwide (including Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan) attacked family planning as a symbol of American imperialism, and the Vatican jumped on board, helping organize a global campaign against family-planning efforts, which just happened to line up with the Catholic Church’s official stance on procreation, particularly in developing countries.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan instituted what has become known as the “global gag rule” (officially the Mexico City Policy), which stopped U.S. dollars from flowing to any international family-planning groups that provided abortions. The rule also stipulated that any organization receiving U.S. funding could not educate patients on abortion or take a stand against unsafe abortion. President Bill Clinton repealed the policy in 1993, George W. Bush reinstated it in 2001, and Barack Obama repealed it again in 2009. If a Republican takes the presidency in 2016, the gag rule will likely come back.
When the gag rule was in effect, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funding to family-planning organizations plummeted. Clinics providing everything from condom distribution to HIV/AIDS treatment to neonatal care cut back their staff and services, and in some cases shuttered their doors entirely. In some cases, the rule backfired: Kelly Jones, a senior researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute, found that in Ghana during gag rule periods, rural pregnancies increased by 12 percent and the rural abortion rate increased right along with it, going up by 2.3 percent.
Meanwhile, U.S. funding for family planning abroad has flatlined for several years, at about $530 million, although it would take relatively little money to make an enormous difference. For every dollar spent on family planning, USAID’s website boasts, up to $6 is saved on health care, immunization, education and other services. Put another way, every dollar not spent on family planning will cost the U.S. up to $6 more in the long run. “It’s not difficult to understand that contraceptive devices are relatively cheap compared to the cost of building roads and schools and hospitals,” Wilmoth, the head of the U.N. Population Division, says. “So it’s not for lack of money that it isn’t accomplished.”
planning seem like an imposition, rather than something that served clients’ own interests,” writes Connelly, and the backlash was ferocious. Revolutionary leaders worldwide (including Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan) attacked family planning as a symbol of American imperialism, and the Vatican jumped on board, helping organize a global campaign against family-planning efforts, which just happened to line up with the Catholic Church’s official stance on procreation, particularly in developing countries.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan instituted what has become known as the “global gag rule” (officially the Mexico City Policy), which stopped U.S. dollars from flowing to any international family-planning groups that provided abortions. The rule also stipulated that any organization receiving U.S. funding could not educate patients on abortion or take a stand against unsafe abortion. President Bill Clinton repealed the policy in 1993, George W. Bush reinstated it in 2001, and Barack Obama repealed it again in 2009. If a Republican takes the presidency in 2016, the gag rule will likely come back.
When the gag rule was in effect, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funding to family-planning organizations plummeted. Clinics providing everything from condom distribution to HIV/AIDS treatment to neonatal care cut back their staff and services, and in some cases shuttered their doors entirely. In some cases, the rule backfired: Kelly Jones, a senior researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute, found that in Ghana during gag rule periods, rural pregnancies increased by 12 percent and the rural abortion rate increased right along with it, going up by 2.3 percent.
Meanwhile, U.S. funding for family planning abroad has flatlined for several years, at about $530 million, although it would take relatively little money to make an enormous difference. For every dollar spent on family planning, USAID’s website boasts, up to $6 is saved on health care, immunization, education and other services. Put another way, every dollar not spent on family planning will cost the U.S. up to $6 more in the long run. “It’s not difficult to understand that contraceptive devices are relatively cheap compared to the cost of building roads and schools and hospitals,” Wilmoth, the head of the U.N. Population Division, says. “So it’s not for lack of money that it isn’t accomplished.”
More reading on the subject:
Earth cannot handle an infinitely increasing population.
Education and birth control are crucial.
Defusing the Population Bomb in Developing Countries
Leaving Half the Population Behind
In 2012, the estimated number of unintended pregnancies was 80 million (63 million in the developing world). World population growth? Also 80 million. In other words, if women all over the world had the ability to prevent the pregnancies they don’t want, the world’s population would stabilize. That would immediately improve both maternal and infant health. However, in most parts of the global south, access to abortion is either extremely limited or prohibited.
Worldwide, it’s estimated that 20 million women have unsafe abortions every year because they lack better options. Over 5 million of them end up needing urgent medical attention, and 47,000 die in the process. In addition, in the developing world pregnancies are often dangerous. Every year, an estimated 358,000 women die during childbirth, and many more suffer debilitating pregnancy-related health problems. In sub-Saharan Africa, the lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy-related problems is 1 in 22. Lower pregnancy rates and you lower those risks—fewer pregnancies means resources don’t have to be spread dangerously thin.
More reading on the subject:
Avoiding a Malthusian Catastrophe
A Malthusian catastrophe (also known as a Malthusian check) is a prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth has outpaced agricultural production. In 1779, Thomas Malthus wrote:
Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
Time is Short
Globally, recent research indicates that assumptions regarding declining fertility rates used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to develop future emissions scenarios may be overly optimistic. While fertility rates have generally declined over the past few decades, progress has slowed in recent years, especially in developing nations, largely due to cutbacks in family planning assistance and political interference from the United States. And even if fertility rates are reduced to below replacement levels, population levels will continue to climb steeply for some time as people live longer and billions of young people mature and proceed through their reproductive years. Per-capita greenhouse gas emissions may drop, but the population bulge will continue to contribute to a dangerous increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Time is short, but it not too late to stop runaway global warming. Economy-wide reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to a level that brings atmospheric CO2 back from 386 parts per million to 350 or less, scaling back first-world consumption patterns, and long-term population reduction to ecologically sustainable levels might solve the global warming crisis and move us to toward a healthier, more stable, post-fossil fuel, post-growth addicted society.
More reading on the subject:
UN Report Links Climate Change to Population: encourages spread of contraception, abortion access to developing world
We've Read:
Road to Rio
Rowing
World's Top 10 Rowers
Top 10 Men
1. Eric Murray, New Zealand
2. Hamish Bond, New Zealand
3. Valent Sinkovic, Croatia
4. Martin Sinkovic, Croatia
5. Peter Reed, Great Britain
5. Alex Gregory, Great Britain
7. George Nash, Great Britain
7. Mohamed Sbihi, Great Britain
9. William Satch, Great Britain
10. Ondrej Synek, Czech Republic
Top 10 Women
1. Helen Glover, Great Britain
2. Lauren Schmetterling, USA
3. Amanda Polk, USA
4. Meghan Musnicki, USA
5. Victoria Opitz, USA
6. Heather Stanning, Great Britain
7. Zoe Stevenson, New Zeland
8. Heidi Robbins, USA
9. Annekatrin Thiele, Germany
10. Carina Baer, Germany
We've Read:
Rowing
World's Top 10 Rowers
Top 10 Men
1. Eric Murray, New Zealand
2. Hamish Bond, New Zealand
3. Valent Sinkovic, Croatia
4. Martin Sinkovic, Croatia
5. Peter Reed, Great Britain
5. Alex Gregory, Great Britain
7. George Nash, Great Britain
7. Mohamed Sbihi, Great Britain
9. William Satch, Great Britain
10. Ondrej Synek, Czech Republic
1. Helen Glover, Great Britain
2. Lauren Schmetterling, USA
3. Amanda Polk, USA
4. Meghan Musnicki, USA
5. Victoria Opitz, USA
6. Heather Stanning, Great Britain
7. Zoe Stevenson, New Zeland
8. Heidi Robbins, USA
9. Annekatrin Thiele, Germany
10. Carina Baer, Germany
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| Crazy Warwick Rowers Always running around Naked in the English Countryside |