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Oh, My Gosh! How is This Happening?

Sierra Club Still Aghast at Population Growth

BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER

In March, I thought it nearly fortuitous that, when I was writing an article on the Sierra Club controversy over immigration -- and touching on the club's stance on population control in general -- the United States Census Bureau should issue a report noting that fertility rates were dropping worldwide. Could it be, I wondered, that the Sierra Club might consider changing its position on population control, given the Census Bureau's report? At least, mightn't it consider taking a stance of neutrality on population growth (as it has on immigration), seeing that fertility rates are not increasing, but declining? Eagerly, I called the Sierra Club to get its take on the Census Bureau's report.

After being shuffled around a bit, I was directed to Annette Souder, who works in the club's population division. Souder, as I expected, was familiar with the Census Bureau's report. She knew all the salient points -- that, though we hit the six billion mark in 1999, the pace at which world population is growing actually peaked a decade earlier. Indeed, the rate in 2002 (1.2 percent) is down quite from what it was in 1963-64 (2.2 percent). Souder was familiar with the more interesting point, that not only was the rate of world population growth decreasing, but the Census Bureau projects that if trends continue, "the level of fertility for the world as a whole will drop below replacement level before 2050." This, of course, means that in the not too distant future, world population may actually begin to decrease.

I asked Souder about all this. But before she would speak to the report, she wanted to clarify for me the Sierra Club's position on population control. The Sierra Club, she said, is opposed to coercive control but in favor of giving "access to family planning education to women and girls around the world. Everyone who wants family planning," should have it, she said, "in democratically-minded and human rights-based approaches."

Finishing her introduction, Souder got into the main theme. "As far as fertility rates having dropped," she said, "absolutely they've dropped. You can take any number of countries and look at fertility rates in the '60s and fertility rates now to see that fertility rates indeed have dropped." But, despite this decline in fertility rates, Souder said, "the world is still growing; so we're not at replacement level, we're not actually declining in growth each year."

Souder was referring to the report's finding that, while the rate of population growth is decreasing, the number of children being born is projected to increase world population from six billion in 1999 to about nine billion in 2048. This is on account of what the report calls "population momentum" -- that past fertility has resulted in a continued growth in the number of women of childbearing years. Even though these women are having and are projected to have fewer and fewer children, the population of children will increase in absolute numbers. The rolling ball of population growth has not stopped; it is only slowing down.

But, still, I asked Souder, will not the earth's population fall below replacement level after 2050? "I would definitely say that's optimistic at best," she said. "If you look at the fact that we have the largest [ever] cohort of youth reaching their reproductive years simultaneous with a contraceptive shortfall that exists across the planet, I think it's really hard to predict what will happen. To say that, OK, all of these trends are going to continue in the same pattern that we've seen, I think may not be capturing the whole picture. In fact, in a meeting I attended recently, recent data shows that Kenya's fertility rate has actually increased. And they're like, 'oh, my gosh! How is this happening?' For years Kenya's fertility rate has declined, and suddenly now it has increased. And so now a number of folks are starting to look at the hows and whys of that happening."

So, I said, "you are saying the Sierra Club should stay the course it has taken?"

"The course I've laid out the Sierra Club has taken," Souder replied.

I assured her that I believed her when she said the Sierra Club does not support coercive population control. "I don't know of any nonprofit organization working in the United States that supports that," she added. "As a long-term women's rights advocate myself, no way! That would not happen for me."

Souder said that if the Sierra Club scaled back its efforts to promote "family planning education, reproductive health care, education and rights for girls around the world, it's uncertain what the future will look like, what the numbers will look like. Even World Bank sites say that fertility rates declined in part due to increased access to family planning. So the question begs to be asked, what would happen if suddenly we cut back on contraceptive availability globally? I don't know the answer to that, but one would have to guess that without access to contraceptives in general, we can theorize what would happen with fertility rates."

But, what if the Census Bureau's projections are right on the mark -- isn't the Sierra Club concerned about the world's population falling below replacement level? "As an environmental organization," Souder replied, "our mission in working on population is not on numerical targets, the same as we don't support numerical targets in China. The Sierra Club supports increasing access to family planning, reproductive health care to everyone who wants it in a voluntary, democratic, human-rights way." But couldn't such a scenario -- with the number of elderly and old increasing and the number of young decreasing -- put a strain on social infrastructure? "Currently, as far as I know," said Souder, "the Sierra Club has no position on what you have just described."

Of course, I thought; the Sierra Club is an environmental organization; the common good is not its concern. Yet, I reflected, one set of problems has a way of adversely affecting other concerns. No man, and no cause, is an island. If families and societies become financially overburdened in the quest of keeping the very structure of society together, mightn't they become less concerned with how their efforts affect the natural environment? Less leisure often leads to more waste. But when I asked Souder about this, she said, "we don't take a position on it."

I then began to hint that, perhaps, the Sierra Club has the wrong enemy. After all, the Club's own literature states "no one is certain how many people the world can support." The same literature states that the industrial countries, comprising about one-fifth of the world's population, use two-thirds of the world's resources and that the United States alone, with five percent of the world's population, accounts for about 25 percent of global consumption. Mightn't the chief cause of environmental degradation be rates of consumption, not the number of people?

"It's a mixture," Souder said. "We all as global citizens play different roles in the problem and different roles in the solution. I view them as inextricably linked." But, I pursued, is the problem large families in developing countries or over-consumption in developed countries? "I would not choose sides," Souder replied. "I absolutely believe that population affects the environment; but to go into the specifics of your comment is a much broader answer than yes or no. So, as the club works on this, we talk about, 'here's the impact of population on the environment.' Then you can pick any issue and link it back to population pressures. But how you define what those pressures are varies from global region, varies from type of ecosystem, varies from type of natural resource bases and natural resource products that are available within that area. So there is no one set answer that fits every area."

Then are population issues more local than universal? Is it a matter of population distribution? The Los Angeles area is overpopulated; the Bay Area is overpopulated, perhaps. But is the world overpopulated? "It all depends on what your interests are," Souder said. "I've hiked through Borneo before, and as I flew in to Borneo, I could see where literally acres of forest had been cut down. Is that because of local demand for wood products? And who is impacted by that? Is it a local impact, because of deforestation and perhaps unsustainable deforestation? Or is it a global effect of losing bio-diversity that is unattainable anywhere else?"

Or is it an economic and/or political effect? "That goes back to my question," Souder concluded. "There's no one set solution and no one set philosophical approach that fits to every ecosystem, region, or problem that we face."

I must confess to a certain uneasiness after talking to Souder. Certainly, Census Bureau projections are merely that -- projections. What if the Sierra Club and other like groups should slacken their efforts at family planning? Wouldn't we be faced with the overpopulation horrors these groups so solemnly hold up for our gaze? Should the Census Bureau report (and other reports with similar conclusions) give anyone cause to pause?

Allan Carlson, a sociologist who runs the Howard Center for Family Research in Rockford, Illinois, says, yes. In fact, says Carlson, we should be pushing for population growth, not decline. "Experience shows," Carlson told me in mid-April, "there's no such thing as stability. There's no such thing as zero growth. You're going to have either growth or decline. All the pressures are still pointing towards decline, and it's not going to stop when it reaches replacement level. It's going to go down and go down further, just as it has in Europe.

"It's certainly time," Carlson continued, "to reverse the incentives around the globe -- certainly in the developed countries -- and find ways to encourage child bearing. The population control people and organizations and advocates have put incentives in place (sometimes it is a kind of covert coercion) in public policies that make child bearing and child rearing more difficult, all with the goal of stabilizing the population."

Carlson cited a work by the economist Julian Simon -- Economics of Population Growth. Simon, said Carlson, "shows the best long term strategy for any society is to have a society focused on moderate population growth. That's what generates long-term economic growth per capita. He would say it' s possible that you could grow too fast, but that's not really an issue in the world anymore."

Carlson thinks that moderate population growth is good not only for economics but for the environment. "The environmental problems are not caused by numbers," he said. "They are caused by bad policies, bad laws, and bad individual behavior. A relatively small number of human beings can devastate a continent -- they can tear down all the trees, pollute the water, etc. It's not a question of numbers; it's a question of the moral code by which they operate -- whether they're operating as stewards or as reckless people. Some of the worst environmental disasters in America took place in the late 19th century, in the Plains states and in the West. There were not hundreds of millions of people doing that; it was a relatively few thousand."

An example of this devastation, said Carlson, was what happened in the Great Plains under the U.S. government's Homestead Act in the mid 19th century. "Many of the American plains states were turned into 160-acre farms under the Homestead Act," he said. "The land was unsustainable, even given the technology of that time -- 160 acres could not sustain a farm. Land was abused, people who tried to make those places into good small farms, failed; they abused the land -- land that shouldn't have been put into intensive cultivation."

Carlson does agree with the Sierra Club on one issue -- that no one is certain how large a population the world can sustain. "In fact," he said, "the [Nobel Prize winning economist] Gunnar Myrdal did a devastating critique of efforts back in the 19th and 20th centuries to come up with the optimum population, which was the goal of economists [in the early 20th century]. He showed how it was impossible to come up with such a number; there are too many variables, and the variables constantly change, being driven in part by human values."

Carlson seemed to agree that overpopulation, if a problem at all, is a local one. Taking Los Angeles as an example, Carlson said such growth as that area has experienced has arisen in part from incentives people have received to move there. "For instance," he said, "you should be paying a lot more for water out there; you should be paying its market cost. I think that would have put the brakes on some types of development a long time ago." Saying that he is "not normally a big free market advocate (I kind of have this Chestertonian/Bellocian streak in me -- markets make a lot of sense, but they have to be constrained and guided by a moral code)," Carlson said, "market prices for commodities are a good way of restraining, or at least guiding, more intelligent growth. The best way of getting rid of SUVs is not to scream and cry about them but to let gasoline prices go up. When people have to pay more, they realize they have to buy more fuel-efficient cars. I was in Scotland over Easter; there, the price of gasoline is about $4 a gallon. You think more about travel, and the train makes more sense, and certain other things make more sense, once the realities of that price hit home."

Indeed, I told Carlson, that other pro-population growth folks insist that the "free market system," in fostering development, leads to population decline. Once I was told, "development is the best contraceptive." I found it a troubling statement, for doesn't it simply mean that greater prosperity leads to the greater selfishness that is unwilling to give of itself in having children? Carlson agreed that an economic order, like our own, which has led to population dislocations, to the severing of ties with the past, with tradition, has led to a selfish secularization. But religious groups have often bucked this trend. Indeed, religious faith, for Carlson, is the central factor. It can be undermined by an economic order, but it can also transcend it.

"It's not development and growth, per se, that leads to fertility decline," said Carlson; "it is mass, state education. There's a demographer in Australia named John Caldwell -- he's no conservative, he's not Catholic (to my knowledge), but he's looked at data from Australian aborigines, from Africa, and from the developed world, and finds that the strongest force pushing fertility decline is when you take children out of family-centered or faith-centered schools and put them in a mass state school system. That's the big shift. Also, one of the iron laws of sociology is that the more education women have, the fewer children they have. That's normally true, though there have been some instances where faith groups have defied that. It was true among American Catholics from about 1940 to 1966; the more education they had, the more children they had. It's true among Mormons today, or at least it has been since the late '70s. Another case was in the Netherlands -- the Catholic population were a minority population, but from about 1850 till about 1950, even through the period of industrialization, they maintained an extremely high fertility. It was almost a religious, nationalistic reason they were doing it. Part of being a Dutch Catholic at that time was to have a big family."

But, returning to the claims of the Sierra Club and others who worry over population growth, Carlson said, "it's time to say the overpopulation crisis is over. That's the good news." Of course, Carlson said, there never was such a crisis. "It was a fantasy. The environmental problems that have derived from it are derived from other forces and other pressures, by and large. They were not driven, first and foremost, by numbers."

But, for Carlson, despite the "good news" of an end to the population crisis, there is bad news -- that is, he said, "we face a new problem. It's called depopulation, which, in some ways, is much worse."

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