One of the major drivers of global warming is our burning of fossil fuels and the greenhouse gases that result. Another major driver of global warming, including the extent we burn fossil fuels and many other ways we’re making our earth unsustainable for human life. is the population explosion. When I was young the earth’s population was around 3 billion. It has more than doubled. Population can double quickly. The devastation that causes and will cause is incalculable and will make the earth inhospitable in short order – contributing to the overuse of water, the over fishing of the oceans, the deforestation of the jungles, the overuse of carbon based fuels even while we try to flush them out of the atmosphere and every other form of damage to the earth we depend on.
That makes population policy a tremendously important issue worldwide. Years ago we used to talk about ZPG, zero population growth. The idea had been talked about for centuries but a best-selling book, The Population Bomb, written by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, helped make it a movement in 1968. The Ehrlichs’ conclusions were controversial and the movement was hijacked by the national battle over abortion. But population growth did not suddenly become unimportant. It remains at the root of the unsustainability of the world we inhabit.
Naysayers like to point out that Malthus’ and the Ehrlichs’ predictions of worldwide starvation have not yet come true. But evidence is all around us that devastation to the earth’s productive capacities are coming true as climate and earth scientists keep documenting. Lands once fertile are becoming deserts. Trees crucial to a sustainable atmosphere are being chopped down at alarming rates in the southern hemisphere with worldwide consequences. Fish stocks have been shrinking and even more important, the coral reefs that are at the base of the oceanic food chain are dying. May Malthus rest in peace, though he never glimpsed the stresses on the globe that scientists are documenting now. Human beings have never been good at listening to prophets. Those of us living now can’t claim we weren’t warned. We can only claim that too many people scoffed as they scoffed at the prophets of old. The earth will have its revenge.
We have a choice, we can curb the growth of population voluntarily, or an angry earth will do it to us, reducing our children and grandchildren to refugees, beggars, and marauders, leaving them to die of heat, thirst, starvation or gasping for oxygen, if they’re not killed by armed bands looking for the scraps of the earth.
I do not want to treat abortion as part of this problem because it raises so many separate issues and debates. But I do want to treat almost every other method of birth control as very much part of the issue. Whatever your faith, we have an obligation to life, to treat our world with the respect it deserves. Religious proclamations about populating the earth made thousands of years ago have been over-accomplished, and must now be subordinated to religious and secular claims about life, about treating each other as required by the Golden Rule, about protecting the soil and the air and the water that give us all life. There is no escape from that injunction. Or the earth will have its revenge.
Make sure the people you elect start protecting us from world-wide disaster.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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