World Population: Will This Runaway Train Crush Us All? : Only far-seeing political leadership can frame a defense against a growth that threatens nations rich and poor

The human species may be more than 100,000 years old but the bulk of its numerical growth has come in just the last few decades: 2.6 billion of today’s 5.6 billion people have been born since 1960. Demographer and writer Paul Ehrlich has long called this growth the “population bomb”; speaking of its political effects, fellow demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum has rightly called it a revolution.

The ultimate question posed by runaway population growth is: Can planet Earth sustain a human population that is growing this fast or will growth destroy the very conditions that support human existence? If unchecked growth indeed promises doomsday, then the human race will survive only by framing, in time, a political defense against itself.

ANSWERS CANNOT BE FOUND IN THE U.S. ALONE

The habitat question becomes more concrete amid the warnings raised by many scientists about global damage caused by industrialization. They say industrialization is depleting the Earth’s protective ozone layer and fostering a warming that could bring devastating climate change.

In an interview conducted for The Times, Ehrlich noted that even if China over the years only doubles its fossil fuel consumption (a grossly optimistic estimate), it will pump more carbon dioxide (which causes global warming) into the air than could be compensated for if the United States cut its own consumption by 25%. If India at its present size (leaving further growth aside) matches even China’s current energy use, then an amount of carbon dioxide will be added to the environment that could not be compensated for even by a total halt to U.S. coal use.

Changing U.S. consumption habits alone, however desirable, evidently cannot be the political answer. More important, Ehrlich suggests, could be a dramatic U.S. shift away from fossil fuels, proving to China, India and the rest of the world that there are environment-preserving energy alternatives.

En route to the ultimate, survivability question, a number of more immediate problems like these--precursor problems, if you will--present themselves.

TRYING TO GET AHEAD CAN LEAVE YOU FAR BEHIND

One of them might be called anti-development, or the often documented collapse of prosperity built on non-renewable (or unrenewed) natural resources. Lester Brown, president of the MIT-based Worldwatch Institute, notes that the Ivory Coast was briefly a model for Third World development, earning huge sums from the sale of tropical hardwoods. Unfortunately, when the last trees were gone from the West African nation--in a dizzying and ultimately self-defeating process of wood export encouraged by none other than the World Bank--the economy collapsed: Per capita income is now half what it was in 1980. Obviously, if fewer people had been making a living from the sale of the wood, this resource would have lasted longer.

Almost anywhere, production can be overwhelmed by consumption. In high-fertility countries, children often constitute nearly half the population. Although the Islamic Revolution deserves blame for failing to bring wise economic stewardship to Iran, in good part that country’s collapsing prosperity must be attributed to the fact that its population has doubled since the shah was overthrown in the 1970s. Worldwatch’s Brown blames some of the recent violence in Rwanda on poverty induced by a tripling of the population since 1950. Haiti, to name a third example, already grossly overpopulated, is expected to double in population in the next 18 years.

In more prosperous countries, the growth of the world’s population tends to manifest itself in the relatively bearable form of rising prices. In the poorest, most crowded countries, the same phenomenon can mean starvation. In interviews conducted for this series of editorials with many experts around the United States, global food shortages were repeatedly mentioned as future crisis points.

Sometimes even the successes of industrialization contribute to those shortages. Thus, China’s galloping industrialization is steadily shrinking its stock of arable land. But China’s industrialization is also increasing its supply of hard currency. “The bottom line,” Brown wrote earlier this year in The Times, “is that when China turns to world markets on an ongoing basis, its food scarcity will become the world’s scarcity; its shortages of cropland and water will become the world’s shortages.”

The interconnectedness of various population-driven problems is coming into steadily sharper focus. Rural population growth combined with the industrialization of agriculture sends the rural population streaming toward the cities, creating in high-fertility countries megalopolises like Mexico City, which has grown from 1.6 million in 1940 to 18 million today. Secondary displacement then often sends these internal refugees across international borders. Just as China’s food shortages become the world’s shortages, so the Third World’s population surplus threatens to become, by migration, the world’s population surplus.

Most major industrialized countries, their own populations now stable, have sought by strict immigration laws to prevent Third World overpopulation from becoming their overpopulation. “Must It Be the West Against the Rest?” asks a headline for Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy’s cover story in the December issue of Atlantic Monthly. Yes, these countries unapologetically reply, correlating immigration with labor needs and social stability.

The United States is the great exception in this regard, with extremely high levels of legal immigration, virtually all of it from the Third World, and with a unique family reunification policy that makes immigration quotas virtually unenforceable.

Reversing the trend of the other developed countries, U.S. population is expected to grow 22% by 2025, with immigration accounting for most of the increase. U.S. immigration law makes the world population crisis, to a unique extent, a factor in Washington’s national as well as its international population policy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States tried hard to place the problem of runaway population growth on the world agenda. Perhaps the most important vehicle for this effort was the U.N. Fund for Population Activities, begun at the instigation of President Richard Nixon and for years largely U.S.-funded. The Reagan Administration, however, brought U.S. participation in the fund to a halt and otherwise terminated U.S. support for world population control in deference to domestic reproductive politics. The Bush Administration continued this disengagement.

CHALLENGES TO AMERICAN LEADERSHIP ON POPULATION

The Clinton Administration, in its first two years, returned the United States to a semblance of its earlier leadership role. Former Sen. Tim Wirth, in the newly created State Department post of undersecretary for global affairs, played a leading role at last September’s U.N. Conference on Population and Development. During the next two years, however, the Clinton Administration will find its return to leadership challenged in two important regards.

First, it will face--in the form of the suddenly explosive immigration question--a national population question matching the world population question. As U.S. voters gradually recognize that the two are linked, the Immigration Act of 1965, America’s basic law on the matter, will come into sharp question; and it may fall to President Clinton to propose a revision.

Second, the new Republican majorities in Congress may take their cue from Ronald Reagan rather than from Nixon. In that case, they may force the Clinton Administration to withdraw from the forums where the world population crisis is addressed. But overpopulation cannot be addressed without discussing birth control, family size, women’s reproductive rights and kindred domestically sensitive “family values” matters. U.S. abortion politics and other reproductive politics did not deter Nixon--they did deter Reagan--from seeking a leadership role for the United States. So far, the new Republican majorities seem more Reaganite than Nixonian, but essentially they have yet to weigh in on either population question.

A DREADFUL CORRECTION MAY STAND ON THE HORIZON

There is a brutal simplicity about population growth. Birthrates are accelerating, death rates decelerating. With political leadership that takes the long view, there is a chance that a recent, slight but historically significant slowing of the world birthrate may be fostered and intensified. Without such leadership, alas, the correction surely will come in another form: mass death. To a point, we have been there before. Famine reduced the Irish population from 8.5 million to 4.5 million between 1840 and 1900. The Black Death reduced Europe’s by 25% during the 14th Century. If AIDS is not the Black Death of our era, environmentally induced devastation may be.

The choice, in the end, is all too clear. We can only hope that our political leaders and those of the rest of the world will recognize in time that they must make a choice.

Next Sunday: Final thoughts in this series about new departures for U.S. foreign policy.