From NPR.
How do population, natural resources and women's rights all intersect? Robert Engelman explains in a new book how allowing women to control their reproduction can lead to a more sustainable planet. He argues that personal issues such as the availability of contraception are inextricably tied to much larger issues ... such as climate change.
Engelman says that he doesn't like to use the word overpopulation — "with its implication that some of us already here should not be" — but, he writes, "the reality remains that what most people call overpopulation is more evident, in more places, than ever."
Engelman talks with guest host Richard Harris about population and reproduction through the ages and its connection to environmental issues past and present. Engelman's book is titled More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want.
Book excerpt:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently urged his fellow New Yorkers to "face up to the fact" that overcrowding undermines environmental stability. Members of Rwanda's nearly half-female parliament considered a national drive to achieve three-child families in the land-short African country, in the hopes that slower growth might prevent a repeat of its genocidal 1994 civil war. China, its 1.3 billion people clambering up the lower rungs of the consumption ladder, reached to Brazil for livestock feed, to the west coast of Africa for fish, and to Ethiopia for oil, where nine Chinese oil workers were killed by Somali insurgents. And as for the gorillas of Bwindi, they are far from the only apes that may miss the train to the twenty-second century. The 373,000 human babies born on the day you read these words will outnumber all the world's existing gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, our closest animal relatives.
The most-covered story in the "population news" category, however, is one in which population received few mentions: final public acceptance that by using the atmosphere as a dump for waste gases, human beings are heating up the planet. Even as we have awakened to the scientific reality that human-induced climate change is real and happening now, we still pull up the covers and roll over in bed at the thought that this has any important connection to how many of us there are. In April 2007, Time magazine offered "51 things we can do to save the environment"; not one had anything to do with population. A report from the environmental group U.S. PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) called The Carbon Boom detailed state by state the rising emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from 1990 to 2004 in the United States. The word population did not appear in the report, even though the country's carbon dioxide emissions grew a hair less than did its population over the period, 18 versus 18.1 percent. As I neared completion of this book, serious talk began about the need to slash global and U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide by up to 80 percent within decades—with no discussions of how different population scenarios will affect our chances for achieving such a staggeringly challenging objective.
Why so much silence on something so firmly entrenched in the foundations of the environmental economic, and social challenges the world faces? Some resistance stems from the "impersonal reduction of humans to quantity," in the words of English historical demographer Peter Biller. Who wants to be reduced to a number, or go out for a beer with one? Partly, population is just a sensitive topic. Any discussion of population growth quickly taps into an edgy confusion of feelings most of us harbor about contraception and abortion, about childbearing and family size, gender relations, immigration, race and ethnicity, and—not least—the intense longing, the pleasure, and the risks we can't avoid as sexual beings. Sexual taboos are getting harder to confront as a wave of religious fundamentalism grows in apparent response to the same chaotic global complexity to which population growth itself contributes...
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