NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Lou and I received a letter recently from Shirley Roth, a faithful reader in Fountain Valley. In a previous column, Lou had briefly mentioned the incessant growth of the human population. Shirley wrote to us to ask why world leaders, especially environmentalists, don’t talk more about the problem of overpopulation. I thank Shirley for raising this important issue.

People do, in fact, talk about overpopulation. I teach a course about how humans relate to the environment. The textbook I use includes a large fold-out wall chart that gives the population statistics for each country, each continent and the world as whole. Other textbooks in the field use different approaches, but all stress growing population as a central issue.

All of the national environmental organizations with which I am associated — Sierra Club, Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, and Natural Resources Defense Council — have strongly worded positions on the problems of population growth. Zero Population Growth, the first environmental group I ever joined back in 1967, is no longer in business, but other groups have formed to take its place.

Actually, I believe that talking about population control is no longer necessary. Population growth is already tapering off. Growth is occurring, to be sure, but the rate of growth is slowing, and slowing dramatically in many countries. In the prosperous countries of the world (U.S., Europe, Japan) growth has already slowed to zero or even below zero. Only immigration from poorer parts of the world keeps some European countries from actually declining in population. This much is widely recognized.

What is less widely recognized is that growth is slowing in poorer countries as well. Mexico is a country of great concern to many of us here in the U.S. because it is the country of origin of the biggest fraction of illegal immigrants to our country. Back in 1974, Mexico had a growth rate of 5.4% per year. By 1993, that rate had dropped to 2.9% per year, and it has continued to decline to an estimated 1.14% at present.

As the world’s largest (by population) country, China cannot be ignored. Its population grew at a rate of 2.61% in 1970. Today the population has grown to 1.3 billion people, but the growth rate is down to a mere 0.63% per year, up slightly from a low of 0.57 in 2004.

The African nation of Niger is sometimes cited as the country with the world’s highest population growth rate, which is now 2.88%. Niger was growing at 2.92% in 2006.

Back in 1960, the world’s growth rate was 2.6%. Now it is down to 1.1%, a dramatic reduction.

Now, I’m not trying to convince you that there is no longer a problem. World population is already too high and is continuing to get higher. But the declining growth rate is a favorable trend. Some optimists are calculating that the world population might stabilize completely (that is, stop growing) as early as 2050. Some people alive today (but who are younger than Lou or me!) may live to see that great day.

So what should environmental leaders do at this interesting point in world history? My answer is, it depends on where they are from. Many Americans would like to see people in Mexico, China and Nigeria make fewer babies. What’s the delicate way of saying that to the people of those countries? I don’t think there is any.

I believe as strongly as anyone that reducing birth rate is the single most important thing that poor countries can do to achieve their own goal of alleviating their own poverty. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, world leaders made that very point. Regions like Latin America had very high growth rates that worked like economic treadmills, continuously keeping prosperity away from those societies. It was expected that entrenched institutions like the government and the Catholic Church would oppose efforts to spread birth control. To the dismay of environmentalists, leftist leaders and intellectuals joined with conservatives in the chorus of opposition to birth control. Marxists and others saw birth control as an imperialistic capitalist scheme by which the western powers were seeking to maintain their hegemony over the poor of the world. I guess no one wants to be told what to do by the U.S.

The good news is that the U.S. can take active steps to help. Now that just about every country really does seek to control its own growth rate, technical and financial help from the U.S. is tacitly welcomed. But for the past few decades, family planning assistance from the U.S. has been hampered because some of the international organizations that promote birth control also promote abortion. During years of conservative control of the federal government, the U.S. withheld funds for these groups at the insistence of the Christian right here in this country. With the election of Barack Obama, we can anticipate change in this federal policy. But I predict the new president will not speak loudly about the need to control population growth. I don’t think it would be useful for him to do so. Birth control is still a politically touchy issue. It’s also a sad fact of life that as the population continues to expand, cities will continue to grow, either sprawling more widely or increasing in density, or both.

Locally, we’re seeing a real downside to continued population growth. A number of new high-density housing projects have been approved recently, such as Ripcurl at Gothard and Center streets. In part, our problem is the result of world population growth. But in part, it is simply that Huntington Beach is a more desirable place to live than practically anywhere else in the world. Unfortunately, more people means more traffic, and that’s going to impact our quality of life.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].