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APOCALYPSE SOON
by
Donald A. Collins
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Former
US Navy officer, banker, venture capitalist and now part-time
freelance writer living in Washington, DC., Donald Collins has
spent years working for women’s reproductive health as
a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations
over the past 40 years including PPFA, Guttmacher Institute,
Family Health International and Ipas.
Is
it possible that our planet is heading for a worldwide apocalypse
that will ravage humankind? Some of the best minds on the subject
of nuclear holocaust have recently met to outline their plans
for curtailing that realistic possibility. Meeting in October
2007 at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, former U.S. Secretaries
of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, along with former
Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn,
advanced their vision for a nuclear-free world and suggested
steps to achieve that goal. Countless others join in concern
over the pending abyss of nuclear wars, something that has been
feared since the dawn of the Nuclear Age in 1945.
In
1931, when Aldous Huxley wrote his classic book, Brave New
World (1932), he felt (as he later wrote in his 1958 essay
“Brave New World Revisited”) that population was
not a key issue—a view he radically changed in that 1958
essay. In 1800, world population was still slightly under one
billion, and in the 1930s it seemed that the planet still offered
some “stretch” room: the total population in 1931
was still only slightly over 2 billion. But by 2008 it had increased
to 6.75 billion, and the U.S. population had risen from 122
million to over 300 million, en route (thanks to massive immigration)
to an estimated 500 million by 2050, and one billion by 2100.
According to the UN Population Division, by 2050 world population
is projected to reach 9.5 billion.
During
the euphoria of post-World War II prosperity and the Cold War
build-up of U.S. defenses against the Soviet Union, America
briefly addressed the population issue in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. During the Nixon years, a commission was empaneled
under the chairmanship of John Rockefeller III to study the
impact of population growth and make recommendations about what
our nation should do. In Nixon’s July 18, 1969 transmittal
letter for “The Report of The Commission on Population
Growth and the American Future,” the President said that
“One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in
the last third of this century will be the growth of the population.
Whether man’s response to that challenge will be a cause
for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much
on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate
manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of
attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able
to surmount this challenge as it has surmounted so many during
the long march of civilization.”
However,
the Rockefeller report recommended liberal access to abortion,
which alienated Catholic and other religious support. From then
onward, particularly after the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision
(in Roe v. Wade), the Federal Government in the United
States became so politically conflicted that the U.S. Senate
passed (also in 1973) an amendment to the U.S. Foreign Assistance
Act that prohibited government funds from being used overseas
for abortions. Then under President Reagan the so-called “Mexico
City Policy”—the predecessor to the current “global
gag rule”—prohibited non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) in other countries from receiving U.S. funds if, even
with their own funds and in accordance with the laws of their
own sovereign countries, they “performed or actively promoted
abortion as a method of family planning.”
While
efforts in the 1970s and early 1980s were made by those in the
U.S. government (such as USAID Population Director Reimart T.
Ravenholt) to augment family planning, the result of those two
1973 events has been that the U.S. never again exercised cohesive
leadership in family planning, which many claim that to succeed
must include access to safe, legal abortion.
Although
President William Clinton removed the “Mexico City Policy,”
President George W. Bush immediately reinstated it when he took
office, and undertook many other anti-family-planning actions.
Humane
solutions to the population growth problem were supported vigorously
until 1973 at the highest levels of corporate, government and
educational America. Since then, the issue has largely been
ignored or dismissed by those who make policy decisions in the
U.S. While the rate of population growth has slowed, more than
75 million humans are currently added to the planet yearly,
a situation that likely will create the climate for much more
discord in this century.
The
evidence is growing daily that humanity may not survive for
even a few centuries at the present rate of global population
growth, resource utilization and environmental destruction.
After reading the record humans are compiling (as reported by
so many credible sources), one immediately recalls Cormac McCarthy’s
2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, which depicts
the sad state of the Earth after an apocalypse. The biblical
definition of apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is “the
final destruction of the world.” Obviously, the absence
of human life would not mean the destruction of the planet,
which would undoubtedly regenerate new life forms over time.
However, the cumulative pressure of resource overuse by expanding
human numbers has been understood by the majority of scientists
for years, exceptions coming mainly from studies funded by commercial
sources.
Michael
Chabon, who reviewed the McCarthy book in The New York Review
of Books (February 15, 2007), touches only lightly on this
excellent work as depicting a human apocalypse as a possible
reality. After reviewing the long list of authors who treat,
as science fiction, the subject of a real Apocalypse, this brilliant
member of the literati did not admit what some, including this
writer, see as a distinct, foreseeable and even likely relatively
near-term chance for such a cataclysm. But he concludes by saying
that, “It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with
which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s
guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself
in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its
great power to move and horrify the reader.”
Publicity
about the threat posed by global warming has created some interest
in the need to protect the global environment on which we as
humans depend, although the argument that the warming is primarily
due to excessive human production of carbon has been challenged
by some respected scientists who believe that current temperature
changes have solar roots. Regardless of the outcome of this
debate, actions necessary to control industrial emissions are
unlikely to be adopted by the new polluters, China and India.
Articles by respected researchers make the point that world
oil production has peaked while energy supplies from alternative
sources—such as wind, sun, nuclear, ethanol, and shale
oil—are seen either as inadequate short-term fixes or
as being far from technologically feasible.
That
the number of people on the planet will grow to what many scientists
regard as unsustainable levels in just 50 years has yet to be
taken seriously by many governments in large countries, China
being the possible exception: in January 2008, The Washington
Post reported that the Chinese had expelled 500 members
from the Communist Party for ignoring the one-child limit.
“So
what?” say the optimists, “Everyone can plainly
see that there are vast uninhabited areas, which while largely
wasteland could perhaps be watered and opened for human use.”
However, it is evident that the arable, most livable spaces
for human habitation have now been occupied. Even the continental
U.S., beginning with European colonization four centuries ago,
has expanded its population until it is now facing problems
of water shortages, due to the imbalance between increased population
and natural resources; and water shortage threatens many areas,
notably the Middle East. Global deforestation and the loss of
soil have in recent decades become a widespread threat to the
environment and its ability to support advanced life forms.
Most
of the established agencies interested in the environment have
shown only slight interest in the population issue. Their names
are familiar since their direct mail campaigns never cease.
Their coffers seem amply filled by their direct mail and individual
donor gifts; but perhaps they find that supporting family planning
and choice might alienate donors of some religious persuasions.
However, to not address the issue when the impact on resources
is so great is arguably immoral and completely unconnected to
the reality of our global crisis. The same reasoning unfortunately
seems to prevail on the part of many of the agencies whose mandate
is to offer services, research, and education on the urgency
of the population crisis: Don’t jeopardize the cash flow
that keeps us afloat. Environmental groups, as well, have also
chosen to ignore the immigration issue.
The
urgent impact of the population issue has been brought forward
by the Global Footprint Network, which speaks about the sustainability
of the planet. In its comprehensive working series of charts
and diagrams prepared for its October 2, 2007 meeting at the
Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington, D.C., GFN asked
a key question: “How is population related to the footprint?”
(“footprint” being the product of population times
per capita consumption times the availability of resources).
At present levels of population, GFN claims the Earth’s
resources are already well oversubscribed. Adding up the resource
allocations, GFN reports that “Humanity’s Ecological
Footprint exceeds Earth’s biological ability to sustain
us. While some of us are living rich, healthy, pleasant and
safe lives, massive numbers of people are not.
The
humanitarian efforts of developed countries’ governments
and large private charities such as the Gates Foundation to
feed the hungry and provide better health care will not solve
this fundamental shortfall of resources. Indeed, they work to
aggravate it. When population growth outstrips resources the
result is poverty. The sights and smells of human poverty and
degradation cannot be fully understood by visitors to such places
as Calcutta, but only by those living daily in those dreary
places; even then, familiarity with such adverse conditions
can perhaps inure those poor souls to the abnormality of their
plights.
While
argument is rife on how humanity will find alternative energy
when fossil fuels are depleted, the issue is clearly on the
table. Could it be that whatever system created by humans that
over time exceeds their capacity to sustain the vital supplies
of life—however unfairly or fairly divided—will
ultimately lead to worldwide disaster? Clearly, many experts
from diverse fields have raised concerns, but few have suggested
an ultimate cataclysm.
The
seminal question can now be reasonably asked: When will the
war to save the planet truly begin? Certainly the war to destroy
the planet has already begun. The question of how to save it
has been posed by many before, but never with the knowledge
we now have to see the limits of our world so clearly.
Humane
solutions have been proposed for decades, ever since the population
began to explode from about two billion in 1931. Developed nations
have sought to offer help to those that are less developed.
The rise of population in many poor and undeveloped nations
has been supported by the West, financially and technologically,
and now threatens the developed nations of the West. Medical
assistance has held back disease, nature’s pruning fork.
Development and family planning programs have been promoted
to counterbalance the increased pressure of population that
has resulted, but have met with only partial success because
of lack of adequate funding, inept or corrupt management by
donors and recipients alike, and attacks from ideological and
religious enemies of family planning. The question of whether
enough restraint will be shown to bring population levels into
balance with resources has already been answered in too many
countries where poverty, disease and hopelessness breed indifference
to the future of the world. Optimists are rare among those who
have intensively looked at the realities in which billions try
to survive; they are rare among the experts on nuclear proliferation
at NTI (who are right in warning us about nuclear proliferation)
or the folks at the Global Footprint Network, previously cited.
In
fact, so many experts have produced learned papers that we can
quickly summarize their main points. A report from the Population
Institute, on whose board this author served for many years,
entitled “The Population Challenge: Key to Global Survival,”
by Terry M. Redding, succinctly documents the best scholarship
about what steps are needed to avert disaster. Some are covered
here:
• Modern
birth control reaches low percentages of women in the countries
where population growth is greatest. The relatively low-level
resources required to meet fertility demands have not been
provided, and the U.S. has conspicuously failed in taking
a leadership role, especially since the end of the Nixon administration.
This was due to the ideological attacks on family planning
and abortion by the religious right. For a relatively modest
$4 billion from the U.S., coupled with assistance from other
developed and developing nations, modern family planning could
be provided worldwide. The U.S. contribution now, however,
is about $400 million.
• The rapid
increase in world population in many developing nations has
meant a failure of education systems, including those that
would ensure literacy. High birthrates obviously impinge heavily
on the health of entire families, not just on the mothers
who bear too many children they do not want and know they
cannot properly care for. That the average age in many developing
countries is under 20 leaves many young people without work
or prospects. They are thus highly subject to terrorist recruitment.
On January 20, 2008, The New York Times reported
that many Arab youngsters are joining terrorist groups and
offering to be martyrs.
•
Governance of many countries has failed at least partially because
of runaway population growth. There is now a sizeable list of
perhaps as many as fifty states that provide safe harbors for
terrorist cabals and fertile places for recruiting young acolytes,
represented by the present spate of suicide bombers.
• Damage
to the world environment by emerging giants such as China
and India joins that done by already-developed nations in
such areas as the global impact on air, water, basic sanitation,
food security, etc. Those who travel to China, where the air
quality in Beijing is almost unbearable, become aware of the
effect of its industrialization not only there but as its
sputum spreads far beyond its borders into the world’s
lungs.
• As human
density grows, with the resulting large uneducated and irate
masses, failed states, and failure to bring decent living
conditions to more and more of the eight billion who will
be here by 2050, the threat to global security increases.
A feature of this growing phenomenon is massive immigration.
According to recent reports, the number of international migrants
is at an all-time high, with the number of international migrants
in industrialized countries more than doubling between 1985
and 2005 from about 55 million to 120 million.
Into this volatile
mix comes the clash of cultures and religions, part of the
breakdown of stable societies. As Edgar Allen Poe so eloquently
depicted in his short story, “The Masque of the Red
Death,” there will shortly be no safe hiding places,
even for the elites who so often believe that their gated
communities and the massive force of a defense establishment
will protect them if a widespread breakdown of world order
occurs.
•
That Iran and other currently non-nuclear nations will keep
trying to join the Nuclear Club seems unstoppable. In November
2006, Pakistan tested a missile capable of delivering a nuclear
weapon. The fragile state of that government suggests that less
responsible leaders could readily emerge there. Many fear that
the spread of nuclear technology will not be contained, especially
following the dispersal of information by Pakistan’s now-disgraced
chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The
bottom line is that population pressure, besides promoting extremist
activities, is taking our planet to its limits. A recent comprehensive
report from the U.N., relayed widely but reported relatively
sparsely by the U.S., comes as a bombshell about Planet Earth.
This is the October, 2007 report from The United Nations’
Global Environment Outlook-4 report. From it, we get an authoritative
scientific summary of the planet’s health. This report
found “water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks
are all in ‘inexorable decline’ as 2007 became the
first year in human history when most of the world’s population
lived in cities.
UN
estimates of world population growth indicate something like
9.5 billion people on our planet by 2050, but the present 6.83
billion world population “has reached a stage where the
amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available.”
Further, climate change, the collapse of fish stocks, and the
extinction of species “may threaten humanity’s very
survival.” In addition, environmental exposures are now
causing almost one-quarter of all diseases, including respiratory
disease, cancers and emerging animal-to-human disease transfer.
Pressure on the global water supply has also become a serious
threat to human development as the demand for irrigated crops
soars. The report also estimates that many of the world’s
most important rivers will shortly fail to reach the sea all
year round because of upstream irrigation demands.
Each
person’s “environmental footprint” has on
average grown to 22 hectares of the planet, although the report
estimates the “biological carrying capacity” is
somewhere between 15 and 16 hectares per person. Critically,
fish stocks, a key protein source for several billion people,
are in crisis. About 30 percent of global fish stocks are classed
as “collapsed” and 40 per cent are described as
“over-exploited.”
The
exploitation of land for agriculture has hugely increased as
populations grow and living standards rise. A hectare of land
that once produced 1.8 tons of crops in 1987 now produces 2.5
tons. But that rise in productivity has been made possible by
a greater use of fertilizers and water, leading to land degradation
and pollution. “The food security of two-thirds of the
world’s people depends on fertilizers, especially nitrogen,”
the report says. In turn, the nutrients running off farmland
are increasingly causing algae blooms. In the Gulf of Mexico
and the Baltic Sea these have created huge “dead zones”
without oxygen.
The
will to participate with responsible governments around the
world to help rein in the expanding populations is simply not
reflected in the U.S. policy agenda. U.S. and Western policy
has promoted the current world explosion of population rather
than the reverse, and in my view, has been a key in leading
the planet into multiple non-nuclear wars and even pandemics
like HIV/AIDS. These events in aggregate are currently doing
little to stem population growth to the levels predicted by
many reputable sources. If all those presently infected with
HIV/AIDS died tomorrow, deaths numbering perhaps 40 million
would only be slightly more than half of the net yearly population
growth of 75 million worldwide (2009). Long-term treatments
for HIV/AIDs make such a cataclysmic death toll unlikely.
The
prospect of a major effort on the part of the rich nations,
led by the U.S., for a war on unwanted fertility is not bright.
While China has set a laudable example, India barrels forward
toward a population that seems likely to exceed China’s
in the not too distant future. China’s family planning
officials, worried about a baby boom that could further strain
the country’s resources, have been trying to crack down
on parents who have more children than they are permitted under
the law. The law is not a strictly a “one child”
law, but has some flexibility for special circumstances; however,
the point is clear. Governments that can exercise such power
will do so. However, Africa and India are not on board and may
not be in the foreseeable future.
Will
the world melting pot be able to digest these transitions without
a human apocalypse? Frankly, this author’s view is that
nothing sufficiently substantive is likely to be achieved before
massive disasters occur, environmental, economic, or military,
such as the unleashing of several nuclear bombs. At the time
the Rockefeller Commission report was issued in 1972, the promotion
of global family planning offered a worldwide insurance policy
for the Planet Earth that would have carried a cheap premium.
This is something that the U.S. and the developed world could
then easily have afforded. Sadly, accepting that policy still
is not seen as the proper way to go.
There
is indeed much expert opinion that sees disaster in the world’s
future. Two years ago, paleontologist Michael Novacek observed
that “news of environmental traumas assails us from every
side—unseasonal storms, floods, fires, drought, melting
ice caps, lost species of river dolphins and giant turtles,
rising sea levels potentially displacing inhabitants of Arctic
and Pacific islands, and hundreds of thousands of people dying
every year from air pollution.” He commented: “That’s
just doomsday saying, say those who insist that economic growth
and human technological ingenuity will eventually solve our
problems. But in fact, the scientific take on our current environmental
mess is hardly so upbeat.”
One
now unmeasured dimension that is seeming to emerge is the arrival
of diseases caused by environmental pollutants from a variety
of sources. As WHO’s Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan,
noted, “one of the changes affecting human health was
increasingly intensive poultry farming, which may account for
the global spread of bird flu.”
Many
different ways to reduce population growth have been offered.
Playing God will be done brutally: it will not be done by God,
but by harsh actions that will be without moral distinction
or fairness. Delivery of family planning services remains the
primary answer, but only if it is approached like a business,
with enough money to saturate the market. Sadly, political and
religious forces will make that virtually impossible in too
many developing nations. Many U.S. and Western aid agencies
really don’t want to be involved in providing the vital
delivery of clinical services and modern contraceptives which
are so much in demand. Getting such services to the world’s
neediest women remains hard and is certainly unheralded by government
and private funders who too often prefer more visible public
relations-oriented capers such as HIV/AIDS programs and the
curing of diseases that are nature’s harsh way of maintaining
a balance between population and environment.
Among
those who regard the possibility of human extinction is biologist
Edward O. Wilson, who sees the loss of our biodiversity as leading
us to a post-human planet. It is comforting to hear the optimistic
solutions offered by many, including Lester Brown, but these
solutions require political actions that were not even discussed
by the candidates from either party in the 2008 U.S. presidential
election. Real action will require totally out-of-the-box thinking
and action by our elected officials, as well as a concerted
effort on the part of world leadership to focus on this rapidly
approaching tipping point, where human actions will not stop
the changes in climate or the devastation of planetary reactions
to the overbearing human footprint. As the Leonardo Dicaprio
documentary, The
11th Hour, so vividly emphasizes, we are
at a time when action is mandatory, but when sufficient action
is apparently not forthcoming.
What
might be the fuse that could ignite the ultimate human worldwide
disaster? Will it be the conflicts among well-organized, secularized,
monotheistic religions? An overwhelming percentage of the world’s
population is affiliated with one or another of these monotheistic
major faiths, each of which contains large branches that are
highly prone to divisive actions, regardless of consequences
for the world. Examples abound, and the present clashes provide
evidence that with the added pressure of population on increasingly
short resources, matters can get much worse very rapidly.
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