street roots
8
Jan. 3, 2014
9
street roots
Jan. 3, 2014
us. I wondered: Could we realistically do
this? Which is why I went to so many
countries. It was a much bigger project that
I bargained for. I’m still alive, but there were
times where I wondered if the book would
finish me before I finished the book.
The U N predicts that by
2050, there could be 9.6
billion people on the
planet. Journalist A lan
Weisman says unless we
lower birth rates, life on
Earth will suffer.
R.R.: I hope this isn’t too personal o f a
question. How big is your family?
A.W.: My wife and I had a daughter, and,
unfortunately, she died in infancy.
It’s one of life’s tragedies. They hit us all.
We had some pregnancies after that, but
none of them lasted. In retrospect, I wish
we would’ve pursued adoption. Adoption
agencies don’t like the idea that I travel so
much, and we thought about foreign
adoption, but I’ve worked in a lot of
countries where my colleagues are incensed
that their countries have become baby
farms to the U.S. It was hard for us to deal
with that. Looking back now, I wish we’d
done it anyway.
But that brings up something else. People
who think that large families are beautiful
can still have them. The one natural
resource we’re not running out of is kids
who need a home. So adoption is a
wonderful thing.
BY ROSETTE ROY ALE
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
n O ct 29 at 4 p.m. PST, the global
population was 7.12 billion people,
and our population keeps growing.
Every four-and-a-half days, one million more
children are born. UN officials predict that
by 2100, there may be 10.9 billion of us.
That would be world record.
Alan Weisman thinks it would be
imprudent to hit that milepost. Indeed,
Weisman, author of the international
bestseller “The World Without Us,” believes
that we should implement steps to reduce
childbirth to preserve the planet — before
it’s too late.
Not that he’s a doomsayer. Indeed, in
Weisman’s new book, “Countdown: Our
Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?”
(Little, Brown and Company, $28), you can
sense his love of humanity. Yet he still
believes we need a prescription to curb our
propensity to procreate. To find answers, he
traveled the globe, making stops in
countries such as Niger, where women
average between seven and eight children,
the highest rate on Earth, and Japan, where
the population has been dropping since
2006.
O
R.R.: You said earlier this might sound a little
depressing. So do you consider yourself a
pessimist?
A.W.: No, I consider myself a realist and a
R osette Royaler At the beginning of your
book you mention that in 1815, the world’s
population was one billion. Now we’ve
surpassed seven billion.
Alan W eisman: Yeah, that was fast.
R.R.: Then you ask: “How the hell did that
happen?" So how the hell did it happen?
A.W.: Well, up until about 300 years ago, we
were pretty much subject to the same laws
of any other species: We existed, we
procreated, we made copies of ourselves.
We made extra copies of ourselves because
we knew that, unfortunately, some of those
kids died. In fact, most children did not
make it to their fifth birthday, which, if we
think about the pain of our ancestors, that’s
pretty sobering. On the other hand, that
was normal. So women would have six or
seven children in the hopes that some
would survive.
Our species, when we’d actually gotten to
a billion, it meant that we had made it a
little easier on ourselves. The Industrial
Revolution was helpful. People lived in
closer quarters, there was more access to
doctors, even if the doctors weren’t very
good. But doctors started getting real good
in 1798, when Edward Jenner invented a
vaccine for smallpox, our first vaccine,
which was quickly followed by more
vaccines and methods of eradicating insects
that carried other diseases. We learned how
to pasteurize milk; we learned how to wash
our hands in hospitals. That alone was
huge. Just the idea of using disinfectant in
hospitals dropped the infant mortality rate:
Ten times the number of kids started to
survive. So as a result of medical
technology, more children were surviving
infancy and more people were living longer,
so they were still hanging around when
PHOTO BY A N D R E W BIRAJ, COURTESY OF REUTERS
other people were bom.
And then, in the 20th century, two other
things happened. The first was that figured
out how to pull nitrogen out of the air and
chemically apply it to soils. Before, the
amount of plant life on the planet was
limited to relatively few plants that had
roots that could fix nitrogen: beans,
legumes. Artificial nitrogen fertilizer just
blew the lid off what nature does. All this
extra plant life suddenly could grow, and we
used it to feed ourselves. And three
relatively rare weeds in prehistory — wheat,
corn, rice — were proliferating.
The next step was in the 1960s, with
what we call the Green Revolution that was
the result of crossbreeding plants: We
weren’t inserting genes, but we were
selecting plants for their genetic qualities.
Among the qualities was shorter plants, so
they’d be putting more energy into grain
rather than long stalk. Dwarf wheat
varieties suddenly changed the world, and it
was rather opportune because by then, our
population on the planet had risen to a little
under half of what it is today. And even
then, people were starting to get very, very
nervous.
I go to the places where famine was
averted: India and Pakistan. That means
that people who would’ve otherwise died of
famine lived to have more children, and
those children then lived to have more
children. Today India is about to surpass
China as the most populous nation on the
planet And Pakistan has one of the fastest
growing birth rates in the world, and it’s
one of the places that scares me the m ost
They’ve got between 185 and 190 million
people today, and they’re the size of Texas.
By the end of the century, they’re going to
have many more people than the United
States has now, and they’re still going to be
the size of Texas. [Pakistan’s] economy is
nowhere capable of employing all these
people. So everywhere you see all these
frustrated, sullen, pissed off young men. In
the cities, usually the best job they can get
is being hired thugs for warlords, or in the
north, it’s kind of a breeding territory for
what we here refer to as terrorists. And this
is a country that is a nuclear power. Kind of
scary.
R.R.: Before I get to some of your points, I
want to ask: Now that we’re at seven-plus
billion people, is there an optimal number of
people?
A.W.: There probably is, but there are a few
ways to consider what that optimum would
be.
First, I dismiss the opinions that we do
not have a problem with the number of
people. There are pro-growth economists
who always talk about the more people, the
better, partly because it’s more consumers,
but what they’re really talking about is that
supply of cheap labor. Then those poor
people compete with each other for salaries
that are oftentimes really depressed, if not
just plain inhuman.
We’ve got another contingent that thinks
we’re not anywhere near the optimal
population, people who say that there’s
plenty of food on this planet, and we could
feed everybody if we just shared better.
Well, first of all, we’re not going to do th a t
Most food today is grown, not for feeding
people, but because it’s a commodity. It’s
something that people sell for profit
They’re not going to give away their
commodity for free. I wish it was the case,
but they don’t So the idea of being
equitable and sharing has always been more
ideal than reality. [Pause.] I’m sorry if you
find that depressing.
see POPULATION, page 9
Passengers sit on the top of an overcrowded train as it approaches a railway station in Dhaka, Bangladesh Aug. 8, 2013.
POPULATION, from page 8
R.R.: How does spirituality tie into human
population?
A.W.: Every religion, just like every nation,
starts out with this mandate to be fruitful
and multiply. It’s a strategy. Have a bunch of
kids, so you can be the biggest nation or
tribe or religion around. So all religions
start out as polygamous. Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob were polygamous; Muhammad was
polygamous. Then they get very numerous,
very fast, and the extremists in those
religions don’t grow with the times.
This is the situation with the Catholics.
They make kind of a funny mistake in the
19th century, and it’s now coming back to
haunt them. They invented this concept
called papal infallibility that didn’t exist
before. So suddenly it’s not just the pope
[speaking], it’s the word of God solicited
through the pope. In the 20th century as
birth control starts to arrive on the scene,
the Church was against this. They want a lot
of Catholics on this planet
By the 60s, when birth control pills come
out, most Catholics wanted to be able to use
them. There was a commission to study the
problem, and by a vote of 89-10, [Catholic
bishops] voted to accept contraception
under canon law. But then this Polish bishop
named Karol Wojtyla, who later became
Pope John Paul II, wrote an essay, which
essentially said that if they allow this to
happen, we’ll essentially be saying that for
part of the century, we were wrong. So
that’s a case where religion becomes
problematic.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, they
realized after encouraging huge population
growth, they were basically going to be
Pakistan: too many men and unable to
employ them all. So they reversed course,
including issuing a fatwa saying that if
wisdom dictates you’ve hit the number of
kids you can take care of, there’s nothing in
the Quran that says you can’t use anything
from condoms to a vasectomy or tubal
ligation. And Iran, using the blessing of its
high mullah of Islam, was able to turn
around their population growth rather
quickly. So as always, religion is a double-
edged sword.
R.R.: You talk about one great form of birth
control: educated women.
journalist. Again, being a Homo sapiens
myself, it’s hard not to react emotionally.
But I’ve realized that my species is too
much of a good thing, and we are
overwhelming the system that supports us.
That can’t go on forever. I think that we’re
in a make or break century right now. Here
in the 21st century, there’s no way we can
continue on with what’s going on with the
atmosphere and temperatures. There are
only so many tricks to grow more food. Rice
is probably the most important food on the
planet, given the number of people who
depend on it. A lot of people would be
ruined if the seas rise. Do we have the
money to put dikes all along Asia and the
Philippine Islands?
It’s hard to grasp this, because you and I
were born in the midst of the population
explosion. This is what we think of as
normal. But it’s very abnormal. And it’s
creeping up ever so slightly.
Fortunately, contraception is the
technology we have. It’s cheap, and there
are wonderful side benefits. Educate a lot of
women, and they become contributors to
societies and economies.
We’re always talking about social inequity.
It’s one of the fastest ways I can think of of
spreading the wealth around.
A.W.: It’s the best contraception of all.
The educated woman, she tends to stay in
school till her studies are done, before child
bearing. Most educated women tend to have
one or two kids.
R.R.: Why did you decide to find out about
population growth and potential control?
A.W.: So there were these astronomical
numbers, and they’re just too hard to grasp.
So I did some long division. And it turned
out that every four-and-a-half days, we’re
adding a million people to the planet. That
got my attention, and that got a lot of
readers’ attention. So I left that hanging at
the end of “The World Without Us.” And I
realized it’s pretty interesting. It’s such a
loaded topic, people are very emotional
about i t We talk about bears and wolves and
balance in a national park: But this is about
Alan Weisman is the author o f several
books, including “The World Without Us."
He writes for Harper’s, the New York Times
Magazine, The Atlantic, Discover, Vanity
Fair, Wilson Quarterly, Mother Jones and
Orion.
Reprinted from Real Change, Portland’s
sister paper, in Seattle, Wash.