THE BOMB IS A DUD
Boyce, James K.
POPULATION The Bomb Is a Dud BY JAMES K. BOYCE Look around you: The world is a mess. Poisons are seeping into our air and water. Beaches are defiled by oil spills and medical debris. The...
...The Ehrlichs are right on one point: The stakes are high...
...The danger of population reductionism is not only that it diverts attention from more basic causes of environmental degradation and human suffering...
...The ozone layer is being depleted...
...People are starving in Africa...
...For the dispossessed, and for impoverished women in particular, children may not be the "ultimate resource," but they are one of the few resources at their command...
...environmental movement is considerable...
...The views of Simon and the Ehrlichs are mirror images of each other...
...For Simon, human numbers multiply the good but not the bad...
...More disturbing is that it paves the way for assaults upon individual rights in the name of population control...
...This in turn can have a negative feedback effect, putting greater stress on environmental resources...
...A more balanced view of the "population problem" would start with the recognition that environmental degradation brings benefits to some even as it imposes costs on others...
...Under this rather curious assumption, the Ehrlichs concede, "a condition of overpopulation might be corrected with no change in the number of people...
...In his book The Ultimate Resource, Simon argues that more people mean more producers and more technological progress...
...Some "conservatives" resolutely maintain that there really is no environmental problem...
...This is blaming the victim, writ large...
...Or might it be the price of continued concentration of economic and political power in the hands of wealthy elites who arrogantly pursue their narrow, short-term interests at the expense of most of humankind and the environment...
...One must always keep in mind," the Ehrlichs caution, "that the price of personal freedom in making child-bearing decisions may be the destruction of the world in which your children or grandchildren live...
...He is coauthor, with Betsy Hartmann, of "A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village...
...Homo sapiens is no exception, they assert...
...For the Ehrlichs, human ills are "population-related" but human achievements are not...
...The Ehrlichs recognize that there may be some scope for changing the affluence and technology factors, A and T. We can eat less meat and more vegetables...
...This spring the Natural Resources Defense Council devoted its journal's cover story to an excerpt from The Population Explosion...
...Tens of millions more people— or "more mouths," as the Ehrlichs refer to people born in Bangladesh and the Philippines—are added every year...
...If one birth in every million produces a genius, a doubling of the population means twice as many geniuses...
...Others acknowledge the environmental crisis and espouse population reductionism in an effort at ideological spin control...
...They remain remarkably oblivious to issues of gender...
...These were spelled out two centuries ago by the Ehrlichs' intellectual forefather, the Reverend Thomas Malthus...
...And because of the long time-lag between initiating action and achieving population shrinkage, "first priority must be given to achieving population control...
...Could population growth have some positive effects...
...In practice, however, the Ehrlichs see few "bright spots" on what they, like the white colonialists of bygone days, call "the Dark Continent...
...Both are anchored in selective logic...
...Today we number more than five billion, and the outbreak continues...
...The Ehrlichs provide a handy formula to help us "laypeople" grasp the role of population growth in the environmental crisis...
...But the appeal of population reductionism to many people, including some in the environmental movement, lies more in its political implications...
...As the environmental movement grows in myriad forms around the world, people are searching for new understandings of our problems and their solutions...
...All else equal, twice as many people means twice as much pollution, global warming, home-lessness, tropical deforestation, and so on...
...The Ehrlichs' sweeping review of the human condition is marred by their often casual treatment of evidence and their penchant for hyperbole and lurid predictions...
...Neo-Malthusian influence within the U.S...
...At the same time, many women and men who want safe birth control and abortion cannot get it, just as they cannot get adequate food, health care, education, and other basic needs...
...That the principal and most permanent cause of poverty," Malthus wrote, "has little or no direct relation to forms of government, or the unequal division of property...
...For instance, the impact of today's 665 million Africans on their resources and environment theoretically might be reduced to the point where the continent would no longer be overpopulated...
...and that, as the rich do not in reality possess the power of finding employment and maintenance for the poor, the poor cannot, in the nature of things, possess the right to demand them...
...Unless we act fast, not only to curb population growth but also to shrink our numbers, we face catastrophes including "the total collapse of civilization and the disappearance of the United States as we know it...
...Tropical rain forests are going up in smoke...
...Julian Simon, an economist at the Heritage Foundation, thinks so...
...Reducing a society's well-being to a multiple of population, one positive and the other negative, both obscure the truth that, within wide bounds, what matters is not so much the number of people, but how they interact with each other and with their environment...
...Some biologists may find it easy to make the logical leap from animal to human populations, glossing over the capacity for social and technological change which distinguishes us from butterflies and rabbits...
...The most critical reviews of The Population Explosion to have appeared so far have run in Forbes (Population Poppycock) and National Review (Chicken Little Is Wrong...
...The Ehrlichs define "overpopulation" as any situation in which "the long-term carrying capacity of an area is clearly being degraded by its current human occupants...
...So I=PAT...
...Global warming threatens to disrupt the world's climate and economy...
...their sole mention of patriarchy appears in reference to traditional Islamic societies...
...But the environmental and social ills the Ehrlichs recount are all too real...
...At times they mention the distributional politics of environmental destruction...
...In The Population Explosion, however, the Ehrlichs zero in on what they see as the crucial factor, the P in the PAT equation...
...They have studied animal populations and seen them explode and then crash from starvation and disease...
...Like a dog which cannot give up an old bone, the Ehrlichs cling to population reductionism...
...What is wacky is their diagnosis...
...If we focus only on A and T, they explain, "the P factor will always get us in the end...
...But their retreat from "coercion in a good cause" seems tactical...
...The need for children and the lack of birth control both contribute to rapid population growth...
...The impact (I) of any human group on the environment is the product of three factors: the number of people (P), their average level of consumption or affluence (A), and the environmental disruptiveness of the technologies (T) used to produce James K. Boyce teaches environmental development and environmental economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...They back away from coercion...
...These will allow the champions of complacency, who claim it is all a false alarm, to score unearned debating points...
...Population control "need not be coercive," they assure us...
...The world's total human population at that time was about five million...
...Ehrlichian overpopulation is not just, or even primarily, a matter of human numbers...
...We can donate some of our leisure time to planting trees instead of watching television...
...In their latest book, the Ehrlichs are more circumspect...
...The executive director of the Sierra Club wrote the foreword to The Population Bomb...
...Whenever humans degrade the environment, the problem is overpopulation by definition...
...In The Population Bomb, published in 1968, Paul Ehrlich endorsed compulsory sterilization in India, a step he termed "coercion in a good cause...
...Then humans invented agriculture, and some two thousand years ago, our population had reached 200 million to 300 million, "an unprecedented outbreak of a single animal species...
...But to identify population as the root of the problem is to mistake a symptom for the cause...
...All of these ills, we are informed by Paul and Anne.Ehrlich in their book The Population Explosion (published this year by Simon and Schuster), have a common source: overpopulation...
...are important truths flowing from the principle of population...
...As Paul Ehrlich did in The Population Bomb, they provide sample letters to be sent to politicians, the Pope, and other influential persons...
...In the end they circle back, again and again, to gnaw on population control, "the most pressing of human problems...
...This, of course, is why the beneficiaries make it happen...
...Its history is long indeed, stretching back at least 10,000 years to the time when our hunter ancestors caused, "or at least abetted," the extinction of woolly rhinoceroses and mammoths, "the first instance we know about in which human populations exploited a resource with such ferocity that it was extinguished...
...They urge us to follow their personal example of not giving baby presents for any child past number two, and recommend that stories and films in schools should never depict happy families with more than two children...
...In How to Be a Survivor, published in 1971, he called upon governments to put "criminal sanctions on overbreeding" if gentler means of persuasion fail...
...Friends of the Earth sponsored How to Be a Survivor...
...POPULATION The Bomb Is a Dud BY JAMES K. BOYCE Look around you: The world is a mess...
...But what will ultimately flower and bear fruit remains to be seen...
...Overpopulation, they lecture, "is defined by the animals that occupy the turf, behaving as they naturally behave, not by a hypothetical group that might be substituted for them...
...Ruling elites are divided over their versions of events...
...The homeless roam our cities...
...what they consume...
...We can wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats...
...Is this really the price of reproductive self-determination...
...The Ehrlichs' population reductionism provides nourishing organic manure for the latter...
...Rapid population growth is a symptom of this unequal distribution of wealth and power...
...They are now writing another book full of such helpful tips...
...The AIDS epidemic is reaching worldwide proportions...
...The winners tend to be rich and disproportionately male, the losers poor and disproportionately female...
...The environmental movement contains within it seeds of democratic revolution and of technocratic totalitarianism...
...This may come as a surprise to you, but the Ehrlichs are biologists so they understand...
Vol. 54 • September 1991 • No. 9
