BEIJING (Reuters Life!) - We do it about 215 million times a day, so humans need to stop shying away from talking about sex — and the babies it makes — to help avert the global climate crisis, environmentalist and author Robert Engelman says.

With 78 million new homo sapiens arriving every year, the human race urgently needs to address population growth through debate, Engelman says in his new book, “More: Population, Nature and What Women Want”.

Engelman, a program director at Washington’s Worldwatch Institute, spoke to Reuters about how to get the conversation going, and why we need to hurry, but be calm, about it.

Q: Condoms for climate change. Is that what you’re saying?

A: At the risk of oversimplifying, it’s possible to boil it down to say condoms to help prevent further climate change. The book is very much about relations between human numbers and the environment. And it’s very much suggesting that better access to contraception, not just condoms but the whole range, is important in thinking about the environment.

Q: Why is it so hard to talk about this topic?

A: In some ways it is an ultimate taboo. People feel that there is no safe ground — even to bring it up, as an issue, it sounds as though you are telling other people how many children to have, and that is unforgivable as reproduction and having children is so sensitive and so personal.

Q: What are the taboos in this discussion, exactly?

A: Several topics come up that are unpleasant or difficult to deal with, one is abortion, one is immigration, one is racial or ethnic differences in fertility. Mostly northern Caucasian peoples are on average having fewer children than other ethnic groups, or other nationalities. That’s not universally true but there’s a tendency to perceive it that way. So that makes it even more sensitive. You combine sexuality, abortion, immigration and racial and ethnic differences. What sensitive issue haven’t we not thrown into this mix?

Q: You suggest there simply too many humans running around emitting global-warming related carbon to be sustainable?

A: We have succeeded too well at expanding the species into every nook and cranny of the planet. In some ways we are now suffering some of the negative impacts of that very success. We discovered that we could burn coal when we ran out of forest wood. Coal launched an industrial revolution that allowed us to have the larger population we have. On one hand it’s a triumph. On the other hand we wouldn’t be facing a potentially catastrophically changing climate if we hadn’t had to feed and care for an unprecedentedly large human population.

Q: And now we need to slow down?

A: I can’t prove it, I’m not going to predict it, but we could be facing an era when we find that population doesn’t grow forever, and we find that it is a finite planet. Eventually food, disease do have an effect on population by affecting death rates.

At this point, I think we would be well-advised not to keep growing. To have some population decline, not too much, not too long, would be just what the doctor ordered.

Q: You suggest that’s what most women would choose?

A: There’s a term that I think I invented called the demostat, like a thermostat. The idea is that women’s childbearing decisions respond to their environment — when conditions are really bad they tend to have fewer children and then when conditions improve they tend to have more.

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as women just put their finger into the wind and say it’s a good time or a bad time but I think that it’s the best way to think about population; that we’re most likely to arrive at a sustainable population simply by allowing women to make the decision.

Q: Meanwhile, governments worried about having too many, or too few people, should be calm, you say?

A: I call it “Zen and art of population management”. Many governments have become fairly successful with this Zen approach — not telling women how many children to have, not taxing children or somehow disincentivizing family, but simply making sure women had good health services by which they could make their own decisions about reproduction.

When that happened, women spontaneously grasped it, and fertility rates went down. Not because governments were telling women to have fewer children, but because they were setting up the conditions under which women could achieve the goal they had always had, which was to be able to time their pregnancy.

The word, in fact, defines an entire approach to governance that characterizes the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush: Deny that global warming justifies any significant U.S. action. Deny government scientists access to the public when their views conflict with those of the administration.

And, as illustrated on Thursday of last week, deny the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) any financial help to improve the health and lives of women around the world and ultimately slow population growth.

It’s a toxic brew of denial that pushes people and the planet closer to catastrophe.

Each year during Bush’s two presidential terms, Congress has authorized a bit less than $40 million to support UNFPA’s work in some 154 developing and former Soviet bloc countries to improve basic reproductive health care and family planning for women and men who want it. The agency works to prevent violence against women and to support emergency obstetric care, a deadly threat to women in rural areas where hospitals are few and far between. And UNFPA supplies a variety of contraceptive methods appropriate to individual needs in many countries where family planning services are, to be generous, “works in progress.”

One of these countries, of course, is China, which is attempting to shift the focus of its infamous one-child policy away from ham-fisted and sometimes coercive pressure on parents. What makes much more sense is simply to improve the reach of reproductive health services that women and men want, regardless of the one-child policy. UNFPA is helping the “good guys” within China’s family planning bureaucracy—offering technical assistance with higher-quality condoms and other contraceptives, for example.

It’s pretty hard to coerce people to use condoms. By denying funding to UNFPA, the Bush administration is simply punishing the agency in what amounts to a no-risk “photo op” to buff up its anti-abortion rights credentials.

The irony, of course, is that by taking money away from contraceptive services, the policy boosts the number of abortions all over the world. By undermining the many other reproductive health services that UNFPA helps expand, the policy pushes women further into potential harm and second-class citizenship. And the world’s estimated 80 million annual unintended pregnancies continue to power population growth at a time of soaring environmental and social risk.

It’s an old story, one I document in my new book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. Sadly, some leaders want to make sure the old story never catches up with the times in which we live.

Postscript: These blogs will become a bit less frequent over the next couple of months as I return to book writing—in this case a chapter for the upcoming Worldwatch Institute publication State of the World 2009. The theme of that book will be how the world can best cope with climate change while preventing climate catastrophe over the coming century.

Occasional future blogs may take on the population-climate connection as a result of my new research and writing. And I still owe readers a promised post on whether “Pop” Malthus’s 200-year-old views on population have any wisdom to offer us today. Please stay tuned for further updates.

]]> http://morethebook.org/2008/07/01/more-denial-on-what-women-want/feed/ http://morethebook.org/2008/06/26/washington-post/ http://morethebook.org/2008/06/26/washington-post/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:04:13 +0000 admin http://morethebook.org/?p=52 Come out and listen to Bob SING and talk about More at Busboys & Poets on Monday, June 30 at 6 p.m.
More info is here.

The Washington Post Book World reviewed More this past Sunday calling it “Useful and Illuminating…”
Read the review here.

Many points that some readers feel I’ve missed are actually in the book, though perhaps not highlighted or explored in depth as much as people would like. That’s the case with the topic of individual consumption of natural resources, which I discussed in an earlier blog (“All Consuming Question,” June 6). And I do make the point clearly (as have some reviewers and questioners) that many women aren’t able to use contraception at all because of social pressure from their partners and others in their lives.

By contrast, some topics could use more attention in a future treatment of this linkage. Among those I’m making notes on are:

• The desire of many women to have large families, and the need some have felt throughout history to enhance their fertility, not suppress it. I acknowledge in More the diversity of childbearing intentions among women, and point out that what matters to overall population outcomes is average fertility, not that of any particular woman or group. But the persistence of reported high desired fertility among many women is worth exploring in more detail. I’d like to try to tease out what is personal and what is social (and possibly socially pressured) in women’s frequently expressed hopes for having many children in some societies.

• The related issue of infecundity—the inability to bear or father a child (commonly called infertility, though technically this term means simply having no children). Should couples or individual women who would like to conceive and bear a child, but who have had difficulty doing so, get help from societies and governments (a measure that I support for women who want to postpone and prevent pregnancy)?

• The ways that men often support rather than undermine women’s reproductive intentions and strategies. An earlier draft of More had a longer section on contemporary male involvement in reproduction and its importance, and I’d like to dig further into that topic.

• The importance of sexuality education. This is a critical component of healthy and intentional reproduction that deserves much more attention. The recent news story about a spate of teen pregnancies in Gloucester, Massachusetts, serves as a sad reminder of the high cost of blindness to young people’s need for sound information about sex and reproduction as well as access to safe and effective contraceptive options.

I may deal with some of these points in future blog posts. It’s hard to say, after all, whether or when More More will ever see the light of day.

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak recently endorsed a new $80 million campaign that reportedly focuses on the slogan “Two children per family—a chance for a better life.” Mubarak took office in 1981 in a country with about 45 million people. Egypt today grapples with food scarcity and riotous bread lines in one with 78 million.

Almost all the country’s arable land lies along thin strips on either bank of the Nile River, whose waters traverse nine other countries, all with growing populations, before reaching Egypt. So it’s not hard to understand Mubarak’s concerns about the future of human numbers in the ancient nation. And, as he pointed out, Egypt built the pyramids and evolved one of the world’s first civilizations with a slowly growing population that never exceeded a few million people.

But there’s no evidence that slogans about two-child families slow population growth. You get the impression that a small group of men sat around a table and came up with the slogan idea because it was easier than asking women what might make for smaller families. Many would respond that it takes decent family planning and reproductive services offering a range of healthy contraceptive choices.

Actually, I couldn’t tell in reading the Washington Post story what Mubarak’s campaign involved, because the reporter didn’t relay anything beyond the slogan. Instead, she went on to interview men—and only men, so far I can tell—about why they don’t have smaller families. The journalistic enterprise left a lot to be desired.

One source was a 71-year-old merchant of baby products. He said he had five children and wished for a dozen. “God will feed us,” he added. Other men blamed the government for “not providing,” and suggested children were economically valuable because they often work and earn money—when they can find a job, at least.

Absent from the story were the voices of women (aside from the reporter herself), who bear all Egyptian children. Why not seek out women and ask them: Are you satisfied with the choices you have about childbearing? Do you have good access to contraceptive advice and services that allow you to safely prevent a pregnancy when you want to do so? Are you hoping to become pregnant soon or, if not, are you taking steps you’re comfortable with to avoid doing so?

It’s not every day that heads of state speak up about their population worries, but the topic is on more and more presidential minds these days as food and energy prices soar with no end in sight. When population does emerge as a public issue, journalists can ask the people bearing children what it is they want. The answers might lead to populations that grow more slowly for the best of reasons, because more women became pregnant when they wanted to do so, and only then.

Talking to reporters and others about my new book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women, I’m sometimes asked where consumption fits into the population picture. A review in the intriguingly named magazine Bitch, for example, criticized the book for “failing to adequately distinguish between the individuals who are overpopulating the world and the individuals who are responsible for the type of overconsumption that causes environmental deterioration.”

Well, the book actually doesn’t identify any individuals who are “overpopulating the world.” I explain on the book’s second page why I don’t like the word overpopulation. And for many years I chaired the board of the Center for a New American Dream, which works to make North American consumption a sustainable model for the world. I see More as being in one sense all about consumption, because it is through what we use, consume, and discard that human beings affect the environment.

Unfortunately for open discussions, consumption is often placed in opposition to population, as the Bitch review does—as if one part of the world has no population and only consumes, while another has no consumption and only populates. That’s not how the world works. Population and consumption multiply each other everywhere, in rich countries and poor, even though the dynamics and magnitude of each force vary widely across and within countries.

One obvious connection between the two is that if populations had never grown large, the consumption levels of individuals wouldn’t have much impact on the environment. We worry about consumption precisely because there are so many of us affecting nature and natural resources.

A second point, which I explore in More (p. 230), is that population growth itself has historically driven people to innovate in ways that often boost individual consumption. The exhaustion of forests as European populations kept growing drove people in the 16th century to use coal, long considered a dirty fuel inferior to wood. Improvements in coal mining made possible the Industrial Revolution, which in turn facilitated the hazardous alteration of the Earth’s atmosphere today. In modern industrialized nations, sprawl and the great distances many people drive have a lot to do with high population densities.

As More makes clear, we’re not going to solve human-induced climate change or most other serious environmental problems through any one policy change, technological breakthrough, or change in individual behavior. It’s going to take action on every level, and even then we’ll be adapting to a rapidly changing environment for generations to come. A world of 6.7 billion people can’t easily change its behavior to leave no imprint on the Earth.

What’s attractive about addressing population is that it will stop growing, for the best of reasons, if we can satisfy the wants of women everywhere for reproductive choice. A stable or gradually declining world population offers the best demographic platform for a sustainable future, one in which consumption is environmentally safe and meets the needs and reasonable wants of people everywhere.

Even in today’s age of safe and effective modern contraception, women in every society get pregnant when that wasn’t the plan. It’s a simple point I explore in More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. In the wealthy and health-obsessed United States, for example, 49 percent of conceptions result in “oops” pregnancies. The figure for the world as a whole is estimated at around 38 percent. I suspect that women in many countries under-report unintended pregnancies and that the real proportion is even higher.

Interestingly, the estimated number of annual unintended pregnancies worldwide is almost the same as the annual added population—around 80 million in the first case, 78 million in the second. The two numbers actually aren’t fully comparable, since many unintended pregnancies result in abortions and others simply occurred earlier than a woman intended. Nonetheless, it’s clear that much of the world’s population growth is the outcome of unintentional or at least ill-timed reproduction.

Unintentional pregnancy is common even among rich, well-educated, and influential women. You could hardly find a better example of this than the curious case of Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In her new tell-all autobiography, Speaking for Myself, Ms. Blair reveals that her fourth pregnancy came about because she was too embarrassed to bring her “contraceptive equipment” with her on a royal visit to Balmoral Castle, Queen Elizabeth’s Scottish residence.

Apparently the Royal Unpackers at the residence carefully remove and put away all the contents of their guests’ luggage. When the prime minister and his wife first visited the castle, Ms. Blair writes, she had been annoyed that all her possessions had been unpacked, down to “my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables.” (Interesting noun.) So, on the next visit, she “had been a little more circumspect” and left the said unmentionables at home.

I’ll spare you her description of what happened later in the “bitterly cold” castle, but the result was the Blair’s fourth child, who is considerably younger than the other three. Incredibly, though Cherie Blair was only 45 years old at the time, this accomplished barrister and judge believed she was “too old” to become pregnant.

I wouldn’t spotlight this example of an “oops” pregnancy if Ms. Blair hadn’t published it. I’ve heard similar stories from friends for years. Such stories support important points in my book about women’s lives and population. Many people—including some prominent economists—seem to believe that sexually active partners simply decide how many children to have and then set about having their “desired family size.” But sex happens even when couples don’t want to conceive. Preventing conception takes effort, a willingness to risk embarrassment (whether at shop counters or in royal residences), and some kind of “contraceptive equipment.” This is just as true among the wealthy as it is among the poor.

The wealthy contribute a lot more on a per-capita basis to human-induced climate change and many of the world’s other environmental problems. Yet a significant proportion of their own population growth results from “oops” pregnancies. For anyone who cares about the environment and the influence of population size on it, it’s not enough to support access to family planning in developing countries, important as that is. We also need much better contraceptive access and options in industrialized countries as well. And we need to figure out how to make contraception less of an “unmentionable” for every woman and man, right up to the level of prime ministers and their spouses.

Tough question, given that most of the responsibility for human-induced global warming stems from the past behavior of wealthier nations, most of whose populations are now growing relatively slowly or not at all. Workshop participants thus worried that taking on population would risk giving a pass to the disproportionately high carbon consumption these nations enjoy.

Many of these participants work to support a concept known by the unwieldy acronym of SRHR-for sexual and reproductive health and rights. Never heard of it? Neither have most people, and that makes the work of these dedicated professionals all the harder. They are promoting, after all, the right of all people to be sexually active when and as they choose, in safety and health, and to conceive a child only if and when they want. Should be pretty basic, but not much of the world prioritizes SRHR or strongly enough supports the health services needed to make it possible for all.

In More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, I mildly chide some in the SRHR community for eschewing a potential alliance with environmentalists who see the benefits of the concept in reducing unintended childbearing and thus slowing population growth. Disconcertingly, many on the SRHR side also see population as a purely “Southern”-or developing-country-issue. The reality is that unintended pregnancy is to varying degrees common in all countries, and it elevates the populations even of high-consuming nations above what they would be if all reproduction were intentional. The already populous United States, for example, grows faster demographically than some developing countries do-in part because nearly half of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended.

Read more at the Island Press blog Eco-Compass…

Years before Toby came into my life I wrote a story for newspapers about domestic felines as deadly hunters of migratory songbirds. Several bird species, such as the Cerulean Warbler, are becoming vulnerable to extinction as their tropical-forest habitat disappears. A comparable threat on the other end of their migration is the predatory nature of pet cats, which by scientists’ estimates kill hundreds of millions of small animals every year.

So how do I square my concern about animal-killing cats with the affection I feel for one late individual of the species? Shouldn’t I be blaming cats for killing songbirds and threatening the survival of species not only of birds but of small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles?

Of course not. Cats do what evolution has programmed them to do. What has gone awry is not cats’ wants, which are natural, but their numbers, which are not. Nature is usually balanced in ways that make extinction a rare event—unless mortality levels reach levels that tilt the balance dangerously. That’s what has happened with pet cats. The United States alone is home to some 90 million. Most of them spend some time outdoors, and many of them kill. There never could be anywhere near this many domestic cats, obviously, if there weren’t even more human beings to care for them, just as my family did ours.

It’s a pint-sized example of a point I make in More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. Environmental unsustainability tends to have much more to do with scale than with any essential aspect of our behavior. Cats aren’t bad because they kill birds; they’re just cats. But there are so many of them, and with cats, just as with humans, numbers matter. (In an endnote to Chapter 10, I note geographer Vaclav Smil’s estimate that livestock weigh 20 times as much as all the planet’s wild animals. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a similar comparison between companion and wild animals.)

Since no one would seek a sudden reduction in the population of people—or of their pets—we often focus on modifying individual behavior to reduce environmental risks. In this case, the most important step the world’s hundreds of millions of cat owners can take to protect small animals is to keep their cats indoors. Fortunately for me, Toby had no interest in wandering outside, so he never killed anything bigger than the occasional bug that crawled past him on the floor. Our house was his whole world, which is why it feels so empty and sad as I write this post at home.

Read more at the Island Press Blog Eco-Compass…