Thomas Wilberding's List: Population control

• The effective strategies go beyond the contraceptive devices themselves to  include better counseling, more dignity for women in clinics, a greater choice  of methods that are completely free — and a broad effort to raise the status of  women.

   

  The best way to elevate women, by far, is to educate girls and to give them  opportunities to earn income through micro-loans, factory jobs or vocational  training. It is sometimes said that the best contraceptive isn’t the pill or the  IUD, but education for girls.

   

  (A side note: Whenever I write about efforts to save children from malaria or  diarrhea, I get cynical letters from neo-Malthusians who argue that saving  children’s lives is pointless until birthrates drop. That’s incorrect. There’s  abundant evidence that when parents are confident that their children will live,  they will have fewer and invest more in each of them.)

• Malthusian limits to growth are back
• (The United Nations projects there will be more than four billion people living  in nations defined as water-scarce or water-stressed by 2050, up from half a  billion in 1995.)
• more than 900 million people are hungry
• There are 6.8 billion of us today
• Population growth constantly pushes the consequences of any level of individual  consumption to a higher plateau, and reductions in individual consumption can  always be overwhelmed by increases in population. The simple reality is that  acting on both, consistently and simultaneously, is the key to long-term  environmental sustainability.
• whacked a hornet’s nest by calling parents of more than two children  “irresponsible” and blasting mainstream environmental groups for “betraying”  their members by fearing to call for small families. “It is the ghost at the  table,”
• if population is the number of us, then consumption is the way each of us  behaves. In this unequal world, the behavior of a dozen people in one place  sometimes has more environmental impact than does that of a few hundred  somewhere else.
• Our species’ demographic growth since its birth in Africa 200,000 years ago  clearly contributed to this crisis. If world population had stayed stable at  roughly 300 million people—a number that demographers believe characterized  humanity from the birth of Christ to A.D. 1000 and that equals the population of  just the U.S. today—there would not be enough of us to have the effect of  relocating the coastlines even if we all drove Hummers. But instead we kept  growing our numbers, which are projected to reach 9.1 billion by midcentury.
• Humanity’s consumption behaviors consequently did and do matter, and in this  arena, all people have not been created equal. Greenhouse gas release has been  linked overwhelmingly, at least up until recently, to the high-consumption  habits of the industrial nations. As a result, in an ethical outrage as big as  all outdoors, the coming shifts in climate and sea level will most harm the  world’s poor, who are least responsible for the atmosphere’s composition, and  will least harm the wealthy, who bear the biggest responsibility.
• With such large disparities, the climate would be better served if the Americans  emulated Indian consumption than if India emulated U.S. population.
• If two billion automobiles getting 30 miles per gallon traveled only 5,000 miles  a year instead of 10,000, that change would save another billion tons of carbon  emissions.
• Without technological breakthroughs in energy or land use, only higher prices  for fossil fuels show much potential for edging down per capita emissions—a  “solution” that policy makers have yet to grapple with effectively.
• the discomfort most of us feel in grappling with the topics of sex,  contraception, abortion, immigration and family sizes that differ by ethnicity  and income. What in the population mix is not a hot button? Especially  when the word “control” is added, and when the world’s biggest religions have  fruitful multiplication embedded in their philosophical DNA. And so critics from  left, right and the intellectual center gang up on the handful of  environmentalists and other activists who try to get population into national  and global discussions.
• For the first time since the 1970s, the average number of children born to U.S.  women has topped 2.1—the number at which parents replace themselves in the  populations of developed and many developing countries. Even if net immigration  ended tomorrow, continuation of that fertility rate would guarantee further  growth in U.S. population for decades to come.
• some 80 million pregnancies around the world are unintended
• educating girls reduces birthrates
• And when women enter the workforce, start businesses, inherit assets and  otherwise interact with men on an equal footing, their desire for more than a  couple of children fades even more dramatically.
• Many developing countries—from Thailand and Colombia to Iran—have experienced  comparable declines in family size by getting better family-planning services  and educational opportunities to more women and girls in more places.

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