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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 22, 1999)
Salsas ♦ Bean Dips ♦ Hummus For People Who Choose Their Food As If Their Life Depended On It; Organic Ingredients ♦ 1% Sales to Humanitarian & Ecology Projects ADVERTISE* GET RESULTS* Oregon Daily Emerald 346-3712 Earth Day World population continues to grow Projections look BLEAK FOR FUTURE SUSTAINABILITY By Jack Clifford hicken Little squawked that the sky was falling on us. Patrick Bronson pre dicts a much slower demise for hu mankind, but one just as definite. “I really believe the human pop ulation is growing itself to death,” he says. “We’re a cancer on the planet, and our consumption is eating away at the foundations of our existence.” One might have a hard time cat egorizing Bronson, who has writ ten innumerable letters to newspa pers, talked at length to Eugene city council members and Lane County commissioners, bent the ears of mayors and spoken at hear ings, all to discuss the impacts of population growth. Is he a vision ary with keen foresight or just an other zealot on a hopeless crusade? “I talk to all of my friends, and they know I’m obsessed with this is sue,” he admits. “I’m willing to put myself out there and say, ‘This is what I believe, what do you think?”’ Predictions of our doom due to overpopulation have circulated for years. In 1968 Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” a critical essay on the topic. He wrote, “If left uncontrolled, the population ex plosion will destroy man’s her itage of nature and produce a soci ety of war, famine, and disease. ” When Ehrlich’s book came out, close to four billion people inhabit ed Earth. Sometime this July, ac cording to statistics recently re leased by the U.S. Census Bureau, we will surpass six billion in num ber; by 2050 the population will hit 9.3 billion. Most of the growth oc curs in developing countries such as India, China and African nations. John Baldwin, director of the Uni Oregon Daily Emerald versity’s Institute for a Sustainable Environment, has seen first-hand the problems in these Third World areas. “Go to Airica, go to India, go to Pakistan, even go to Russia, and look at the conditions,” he says. “It’s not rocket science. You come very quickly to appreciate that five out of six people on this planet do not have a living wage, do not have clean wa ter and do not have adequate food. ” Bronson says his focus has a “think globally, act locally” men tality. He says surveys show Ore gonians are most concerned about growth. However, the consensus is that we need to manage growth, which he says “is not the same as stopping it. It’s not addressing the problems that growth is creating.” Water shortages, pollution and declines in resources are his biggest worries. He has tried to engage or ganizations such as Friends of Eu gene in rallying behind his cause, but he concedes his attempts were frustrating due to lack of support. “Reaching people who aren’t interested isn’t effective at all,” he says. “What’s more effective is to reach the policy makers who are willing to address this issue and make changes.” At least one University professor sees a potential easing of the situa tion. Researchers once predicted that the population would stabilize at 12 to 15 billion people. Growth in areas such as Kenya, where the average woman had seven chil dren, seemed unmanageable. How ever, with fertility rates reducing in Third World countries, those num bers have been adjusted. “Ten years ago, when you talked about population, the mag nitude of it was unfathomable, and it was hard to imagine how we would get by,” admits William Jaeger, a visiting professor of eco nomics. “Now we’re at six billion, talking about going to nine, so that’s only a 50 percent increase. It’s still a big problem, but we’re not tripling [in size].” Jaeger points out that the cur rent focus is on women in devel oping countries, offering them more opportunities for education and employment. He adds that it is only in the past ten years that many African countries began dis cussing family planning. Still, Jaeger admits that even with revised population numbers, scarci ty of resources globally is a concern. He says an increase is likely over the next 100 years in regional conflicts, with water supplies replacing oil as a fought-over resource. Here in Eugene, pressure is on the local government to manage our predicted growth, Baldwin says. Projections show that the city’s population will grow two fold within the next 25 to 35 years. “We are asking our city council, in the next 35 years, to double the amount of urban structures that have been provided by all [Eugene] city councils in the last 140 years,” Baldwin stresses. “Do the math; that’s quite a task. And they have to do it at a time when the government is being viewed as the enemy. ” So, if there is a light at the end of the tunnel, is it our salvation or a runaway train aiming to flatten us? “The commercialism, the mate rialism, the keeping up with the Joneses, is beginning to wane a bit in popularity,” Baldwin says with a more optimistic tone. “I really do think that conspicuous consump tion of material and energy re sources is going to give way to a different way of thinking. ” Bronson isn’t quite ready to wear the rose-colored glasses, however. “The sad thing is if I see the stop page of growth in my lifetime, it won’t be because we chose it and made it happen,” he says. “It will be because we have created so many obstacles in our way to our growth that it can’t happen anymore. 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