Overpopulation is Displaces the Natural World

"When the Europeans landed, the forests were so thick it’s often been said that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River without touching the ground. Squirrels can’t make that journey anymore. Dr. Doug Tallamy, who heads the Center for Managed Ecosystems at the University of Delaware in Newark, lists figures in his book Bringing Nature Home that cut to the heart of the problem. Seventy percent of the forests along the Eastern Seaboard are gone. In the lower 48 states, 43,500 square miles are paved with asphalt—an area five times the size of New Jersey—and 62,500 square miles are covered with sterile, nature-free lawns—an area eight times the size of New Jersey. “We’ve turned fifty-four percent of the lower forty-eight into a suburban matrix”—homes, roads, malls—“and forty-one percent more into various forms of agriculture.” And each year sprawl gobbles up two million more acres of wild land—an area the size of Yellowstone National Park."

- Excerpted from the book, The Man Who Planted Trees: A Story of Lost Groves, the Science of Trees, and a Plan to Save the Planet by Jim Robbins.

The Surprising Answer to Overpopulation

Underlying almost every major global problem we have is overpopulation. The oceans are overfished because people need to eat and the human population keeps growing. Same with the destruction of rainforests and other natural environments, including most of the forests on earth. Animals are going extinct. More and more land is covered with asphalt, concrete, and buildings — land that would have had something growing on it.

Pollution, overflowing landfills, groundwater contamination, water shortages, starvation, global warming, mineral resources getting more difficult to obtain, dead zone proliferation, and so on — our population is growing so we need more natural resources and more land, and we produce more and more waste.

But the topic of overpopulation is something people don't want to talk about because the solutions to the problem that come to mind are undesirable or unthinkable — things like forced sterilizations or coercive, rights-denying national or international policies.

But a research finding reveals another possibility.

This finding was discovered because many governments around the world are exceedingly concerned about their own overpopulation because in most cases a bigger population means more poverty. "In developing countries," writes Wardatul Akmam, "overpopulation is considered to be one of the most basic causes of underdevelopment."

Different methods of slowing population growth have been tried in different countries. So a research team compared the different methods to see if they could find some clues about what slows population growth most effectively.

The researchers John Casterline and Steven Sinding found that simply giving women more rights works better at lowering population than any of the coercive methods (China's policy of heavily taxing parents who have more than one child, for example, is considered a "coercive" method).

It turns out that most women don't want to have eight kids. If women have the option and freedom to choose, by and large they do not choose to have large families. When they have the right to decide their own fate, they also don't usually elect to quit school or be forced into marriage by their parents or marry young or have children early (especially in places where a woman has a real chance of dying during childbirth). But all of these things happen in countries where women lack basic human rights, and they all add up to population growth.

This is a monumental finding. Think about the implications of this study. Something that is good and right and should happen anyway — women getting human rights where they now don't have them — also happens to solve humanity's biggest problem. This might be the best news you've ever read.

Steven Sinding is former head of the Population Sciences program at the Rockefeller Foundation. He says they discovered this surprising fact when were looking at the demographic and health surveys in different countries, trying to answer the question: How many women would use contraception if it was available to them? Sinding says, "I looked at the level of unmet need and asked, if we could satisfy all the need that was there, what level of contraception use would you have compared with the targets that the countries had set for their demographic goals?"

In other words, they looked at countries that already had set goals for slowing their population growth and already had government programs in place to achieve those goals. The researchers discovered that if the women in those countries had enough human rights that they could choose to use contraception, and if contraception was available, it would lower the population better than any coercive program any government has ever tried. 

In the book, Champion of Choice, a biography of Nafis Sadik (executive director of the United Nations Population Fund), the author describes the shift in the U.N.'s policies that ensued from this discovery:

The result of these years of analysis meant that heading into Cairo, Nafis presented a fundamentally different paradigm from the one that had been considered at past population conferences...This tectonic shift in theory came from the concept that both agendas referenced in the name International Conference on Population and Development would be conveniently solved by the same action: the empowerment of women.

And the most important fundamental factor that empowers women is education. "In my opinion," says Sinding, "the basic problem of women as far as their role and status is concerned, arises from the fact that they have no control over their fertility and that is used to keep them out of everything else."

In many countries, girls are not educated or their education is cut short. The common assumption is that the girl will get her economic security from her husband, so she doesn't need an education. "So no matter how brilliant the girl might be," says Sinding, "she's not given a chance. And from that so many things happen to her: she is not educated, she is not able to be independent, she does not know her own rights, she doesn't know much about her health, and all that. She is married off at a young age, and then no matter how mistreated she might be by her husband and her husband's family, she can't really get out because she doesn't know what to do with herself. She can't go out and earn a living because she is not prepared..."

These women shouldn't have to live that way. And by solving that problem, we simultaneously solve our biggest environmental problems. Overpopulation is the wellspring of most of the world's problems, and the most effective solution to overpopulation is women's rights. Specifically, education for women.

The good news is that there are already many organizations around the world working to accomplish these goals (see links below) and they need all the help they can get. These organizations need three things: Money, volunteers, and publicity.

And you can provide all three.

Money: Most nonprofit organizations rely on small donations. It may seem that sending ten dollars is nothing, but those small donations are what keeps most nonprofit organizations afloat and doing their work.

Volunteer: Many of the local events of these organizations need local volunteers.

Publicity: You are a center of influence, whether you know it or not. I'm sure you've heard of the concept of six degrees of separation. It applies to you. What you share with your friends and family and what you share on your social media makes a difference. You influence people. You can make more people aware of these organizations and why their work is so important. You never know where or who or how far your influence will reach.

Here are some of the organizations empowering women, working to give women rights where they now don't have them, and/or helping to provide education for girls. Please help them:

The Girl Effect
Girl Rising
Chime For Change
Global Campaign For Education
Global Partnership For Education
Girl Up

Historically, Overpopulation Means Fewer Trees on Earth

Homer speaks frequently of “wooded Samothrace” or the “tall pines and oaks of Sicily,” but these woodlands had largely disappeared from the ancient world. The forests had been cleared by man, and his sheep and goats and cattle had altered forever the nature of the landscape bordering parts of the Mediterranean and Aegean. Even at the time of Greece’s glory, Plato was writing that “What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having been wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left.”

Of an estimated 400,000 square miles of virgin forest that once covered the eastern half of the United States, less than 2,000 square miles might be said to remain in anything like their primeval state. Only the more inaccessible reaches of the Appalachians and a few small scattered areas elsewhere are left to suggest what the whole region was like. For almost the first 200 years of American settlement, pioneers claimed a farmstead by hacking one out of the forest, cutting down trees so large a person might chop for several days before felling one. At best, the pioneer farmer could clear a few acres each year, and one reason so many of the huge trees were girdled was to save the backbreaking toil of swinging an ax day after day.

The above is excerpted from the book, The Secret Life of the Forest, by Richard M. Ketchum.

How Much is the Population Growing?

According to the United Nations' World Population Prospects report:

The world population is currently growing by approximately 74 million people per year. Current United Nations predictions estimate that the world population will reach 9.0 billion around 2050, assuming a decrease in average fertility rate from 2.5 down to 2.0.

Almost all growth will take place in the less developed regions, where today's 5.3 billion population of underdeveloped countries is expected to increase to 7.8 billion in 2050. By contrast, the population of the more developed regions will remain mostly unchanged, at 1.2 billion. An exception is the United States population, which is expected to increase by 44% from 2008 to 2050.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#Projections_of_population_growth

Habitats Are Shrinking

I just finished watching Planet Earth, a beautiful BBC series on the wild places of the world. But of course those wild places are shrinking as the world population expands, and that means more and more species are going extinct.

It's a very clear ratio: As more land is used by people to grow crops or graze cattle or build houses or roads, less land is available to support the wild creatures who share the planet with us.

Would you like to save the species? The best long-term solution is to reverse population growth.

The fastest, most ethical and most efficient way to shrink the human population is to give women rights where they now don't have them. Read more about that here, and begin today to help make it happen.

Dead Zones Proliferating

Out of sight, and largely out of mind, something deeply disturbing is taking place in the world’s oceans and estuaries: hundreds of dead zones, areas devoid of oxygen and the sea life it supports, are forming.

In recent decades the number of these aquatic black spots has risen steadily. At the latest count there were 479 such sites, distributed along the most populous coastlines of Europe, Asia, the Americas and even Australia. Together they cover an area somewhat larger than Victoria, Australia.

The cause of Dead Zones is well understood: they are driven by the avalanche of nutrients which humanity dumps in the oceans – from agriculture, sewage, leaky landfills, urban stormwater, soil erosion, industrial and vehicle emissions. This rich nutrient soup provides the food source for vast blooms of algae – and as these die off they sink to the sea floor and decompose causing blooms of bacteria which strip the essential oxygen from the water column, often resulting in fish kills – their most visible impact.

The biggest contributors of all are the 110 million tonnes of nitrogen, 9 million tonnes of phosphorus and other nutrients which we unleash into the planetary ecosystem every year as we try to feed ourselves. That is off-the-scale compared with what the pre-human Earth circulated naturally.

- Excerpted from the article, March of the Dead Zones.

What we need is more robust recycling, but also a dwindling population, which could be facilitated by the global institutionalization of human rights for women.

Where Lions Used to Live Versus Where They Live Now

This map (follow the link) shows where lions used to live in Africa (in red). And where lions live now (in blue). This doesn't even mention the complete elimination of lions from other places they used to live, like Europe. The bigger the human population, the smaller the lion population.

 Read more about this dwindling lion population here >>

Running Out of Fish to Eat

In an article in The Conversation, they ask, "Will there be enough fish to go around?" Their answer: Not if we follow healthy eating guidelines. They write:

Globally, we still catch enough fish to eat – just about. But numbers of fish caught from the sea haven’t kept up with human population growth and unsustainable fish farms have filled the gap. So why are we still being encouraged to eat more fish?

The health benefits are clear: fish protein is typically low in saturated fats and high in nutrients and essential fatty acids. UK and US food standards agencies recommend eating two portions of fish per week, while Australia, New Zealand and Estonia advocate two or three servings per week and Greece five or six.

Yet as our recent research has shown these health recommendations must be set against a backdrop of declining global fish stocks and food security concerns. While in the UK fish constitutes just one choice of animal protein among many, one billion people throughout the world rely upon it as their primary source of animal protein and our global fisheries are in crisis.

Read the whole article here >>

Unlimited Growth

In an article in Post Carbon, Richard Heinberg writes:

"The Earth is a bounded sphere, and the human economy is an engine that extracts raw materials and produces waste. If we keep that engine’s operation within the bounds of what our planet can absorb or replenish through its normal ecosystem functions, all is well. But if the economy continues to grow year after year, at some point the planet’s systems will be overwhelmed — even if we’re using renewable energy to extract and transform raw materials. Our uses of energy and materials can be made somewhat more efficient, but only up to a point. If the Earth itself were expanding at an ever-increasing rate, perpetual economic growth would pose no problem. Yet last time I checked, the planet hadn’t gotten any bigger — while our demands upon it continue to increase."

Contraception Husbands Don't Know About

In an interview with Bill and Melinda Gates, Melinda says something insightful about women in some countries: Although condoms are available for contraception, it doesn't do them any good. Their husbands don't want to use them. So what the women want is an injection that can prevent pregnancies. That way, they can do it without their husband knowing about it. So one of the things the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working on is making that injection available to more women that want it. Here's the interview:

Manhattan

Manhattan was once a beautiful island of rolling hills, ponds, forests, streams, etc. Now it is almost entirely asphalt and concrete.

To minimize human beings' impact on the natural world, some suggest we can simply build higher. We can pack more people into smaller spaces in cities, as has been done in Manhattan.

That is not a solution.

Not only do the cities themselves pave over the natural world, but all those people need to eat, and that food must be mostly grown somewhere else.

The simplest, most direct solution is to lower our population, which can be done by simply giving women basic human rights where they now don't have them. It should be done anyway, and the side effect will be a far better world in the long run.

Future Food Shortage Predictions Presuppose Population Growth

In an article in the New York Times, Justin Gillis writes about the recovery of the Costa Rican Forest and similar governmental efforts to stop deforestation and in some cases the reforestation of large areas. It's good news. When forests are cut down, all the carbon that was sequestered in the trees is released into the atmosphere. When a forest recovers, it removes a significant amount of the carbon back out of the atmosphere.

But in the article, Gillis writes, "Around the world, trees are often cut down to make room for farming, and so the single biggest threat to forests remains the need to feed growing populations, particularly an expanding global middle class with the means to eat better. Saving forests, if it can be done, will require producing food much more intensively, on less land."

The most obvious solution to save forests is to no longer have a need for more land. In other words, the answer is to stop populations from growing in the first place rather than figure out a way to farm more intensively on less land. I've seen this again and again whenever future food shortages are mentioned. The one most glaring need (reducing the world's population) isn't even mentioned. It's a taboo subject. But it's taboo only because the answer isn't well known. The solution to overpopulation is something that should be done anyway: To give women human rights where they now don't have them. If more people knew about this solution, reducing the human population and stopping the seemingly inevitable population growth would stop being a taboo topic.

You can help. Whenever you get into conversations and future food shortages are mentioned (or pollution, or climate change, etc.) bring up women's rights. Whenever you read an article online, add your comment. Let more people know about the solution to overpopulation. Let's shatter the silence on this most vital topic.

Gates' Education in Africa

Melinda Gates' charity work has made her rethink some of her Catholic beliefs, said Alice Thomson in The Times (U.K.). The philanthropist has traveled the world with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, trying to eradicate polio, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases. But in doing so, she discovered that for many women in Africa and the developing world, the greatest fear is yet another pregnancy. "I would go to these dusty villages or slums. When I stayed long enough, and the men had faded away, the women would finally ask me questions, and they would always bring up contraceptives."

Distributing condoms, she found, wasn't a solution, because men objected to them. "Women would tell me, 'I can't negotiate a condom in my marriage. It would look like either I had AIDS or my partner had it.' They needed more covert methods and were prepared to walk 100 miles for them."

The foundation is now developing injectable contraceptives — and Melinda, who attended a convent school, refuses to feel guilty. "Without contraceptives, I wouldn't have been able to do what I do. I went to graduate school, I had a nine-year career at Microsoft; I could plan my life.... In the U.S., 96 percent of married Catholic women use contraceptives. It shouldn't just be a rich Catholic privilege."

- From The Week Magazine

Forests Are Disappearing

California redwood trees, the tallest trees on earth (over 300 feet tall) are also some of the oldest. Some are estimated to be 2,000 years old. Before the mid-19th century, according to Melissa Fay Greene, the redwoods "towered above two million acres of America's Pacific coastline. They created their own ecosystem, laundering the skies, purifying the water, enriching the soil, sustaining unique flora and fauna, and anchoring the land. The forest was a natural carbon sink, breathing in CO2 and exhaling oxygen."

By 1968, ninety-five percent of the redwoods had been cut down.

People need wood for many things, of course. So they cut down trees. The larger the human population, the more trees are cut down. "In Kentucky," writes Greene, "the Daniel Boone National Forest is being converted by the U.S. Forestry Service into a regulated tree farm, and the Appalachians are under siege. More than half of the world's boreal forests have been reduced to junk mail and catalogs. The rain forests of South and Central America, Africa, and Indonesia, including the magical cloud forests; the enchanted Danube basin; the Black Forest; the monumental Russian Tiaga — all are falling, falling."

Massive trees are made of a massive amount of carbon. In the absence of the trees, the carbon is in the atmosphere, warming the planet.

Doesn't the Population Go Down When Countries Get Wealthier?

Princess Bolkiah, the fifth child of the Sultan of Brunei,
one of the world's wealthiest men, on her wedding day.

Some people have asserted that as countries or individuals become wealthier, they naturally and inevitably will have fewer children. But this is not true. Many oil-rich countries have some of the highest birthrates in the world, and in those societies women have few rights. Even if a man is very wealthy in a woman-oppressing country, his wife will have little or no choice over her own reproduction.

Nafis Sadik, the woman who ran the U.N.'s Population Fund for many years, said when she was first starting out in Pakistan as a medical doctor, many of her patients were women who were having a child every year, and often starting young. As a concerned doctor, Sadik counseled these women to slow down, to space out their births, to give her body a chance to recuperate. Having babies too close together drains a mother's body of nutrients and can cause debilitating anemia and other problems.

Dr. Sadik was shocked to hear the common response: "That's not my decision to make." In other words, she didn't have the power to decide whether to get pregnant or not. That was her husband's decision; not hers.

The population will not necessarily drop just because a country or a family becomes wealthier.

No, the key to slowing or reversing population growth is rights for women — the right to choose who she marries, when she marries, and how many children she wants to have. And the right to an education so she has economic choices and enough knowledge to use contraception. Population growth is consistently higher wherever women lack these basic human rights.

The Girl Effect