Last week, I was lucky enough to travel to Washington, DC to pick up EarthSky’s award for “Best Radio Show” from the Population Institute’s 30th Annual Global Media Awards. You don’t hear much in the media about population issues. EarthSky has been covering population for years, based on our fearless leader, Deborah Byrd’s belief that population is the foundation for many of the world’s sustainability issues.
At EarthSky, we talk mainly about population dynamics – how human population grows, lives, and impacts the world. But population is also about slowing down the rate of population growth. In past decades, “population control” and “overpopulation” were at the tip of everyone’s tongues. People were concerned about the world filling up, and food and resources running out. Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb was a bestseller.
So why don’t we talk about population anymore? This question was posed by the filmmaker Robert Stone, whose documentary “EarthDays” won the award for best film.
Michelle Goldberg, author and awardee for her book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World answered, that’s because Paul Erlich’s predictions were disproved and discredited. Somewhere along the way, population became not the big deal that it once was.
Today, the discussion around population is much different. It’s evolved from population control – which feminists say viewed women as carriers for a worldwide disease – to women’s rights, empowerment, and education. Giving women choices in their lives, including the ability to choose the size of their families, has been shown to lead to smaller families and declining fertility rates – not to mention better lives for women around the world.
This all comes under the heading of “family planning.” Family planning involves controversial questions about birth control, abortion, culture, and human rights. Family planning services have come under repeated attack by religious leaders and politicians, with US funding for women’s health in developing countries being revoked or restored depending on the political affiliation of the American president. For these reasons, Grist’s David Roberts has called population “political poison” – and refuses to write or talk about it.
Roberts’ declaration motivated John Feeney (winner of the Media Outreach award) to start Global Population Speakout, an event that encourages people to write and talk about population. But just how to do this? There is no consensus about the best way to get people talking about population once again. A heated debate was sparked between the award winners, when a long-time feminist stated that we can’t talk about population unless we talk about abortion. Many among the collection of academics and journalists disagreed, saying that abortion alienates the public.
Sure, everyone can agree that a woman should be empowered to make her own choices, but can we agree that it is her right to safely terminate a pregnancy she didn’t choose? In a word, no.
Understanding the history, forces, and issues of population is not an easy thing to do, and communicating about it – in a way that would appeal to a mainstream audience – is difficult. But still, there’s that belief that population underlies all those issues that we do talk about, those issues we have resolved to solve. So we have to keep talking about it. And we will.
Take a listen to some of our population-related podcasts: economic challenges for the world’s aging population, how to feed an estimated 9 billion people in 2050, and how climate change will influence human migration.
Congratulations… keep up the good work
Lindsay,
Like so much in the world around us now, the issue of still-rising global population numbers versus the belief (by some) that women should not have abortions seems strangely contradictory. Did any of the population-oriented journalists or scientists you spoke to at last week’s awards dinner have suggestions for a way out of the dilemma?
Deborah
Deborah–
This is a reply to a 6-month old comment on earthsky.org.
Yes, at least this biologist believes there is a way out of the dilemma. Talk about the inadequacies of today’s contraceptives. Better contraceptives will certainly lead to fewer abortions, since fewer pregnancies will be unintended.
Thanks Lindsay.
Anyone and everyone can join the Global Population Speak Out. Just email the phrase, “I Pledge” to gpso@populationinstitute.org
Poverty breeds survival instinct. Abortion/birth-control is just a patch and is not the solution you’re hoping it is. And it shouldn’t be, as it helps foster another set of problems that we try to pin solely to “religious dogma”. No, “unfortunately”, the way we live and how we treat others in the world is going to have to change drastically. A little pill and blaming religion won’t solve it, it’ll actually take some work and sacrifice. Think about it.
We’re not talking about population, but maybe we’re starting to talk about why we’re not talking about population. And that may be a foot-in-the-door.
Besides abortion, the broader issue of sex is a traditional taboo, yet an essential component of the population issue.
“The broader issue of sex is taboo”. Is it really? Have you turned on your tv or radio lately? From what I see on a daily basis, talking about education, poverty and “certain communities” is the actual taboo. Sex is the soup de jour.
we can choose to talk about abortion or we can wait till nature aborts us.
The choice is ours.
The main reason–I think–that we don’t talk about population is that we get into too much wrangling with churches (especially Roman Catholic), that the world economic system is predicated on growth, and that different racial and ethnic groups are breeding competitively for power. That’s why population control advocates are accused of having genocidal ambitions.
Population and pollution; the two go together. The last 300 years of industrialisation and globalisation have served only to accelerate the already unsustainable exponential growth of people and the waste products created therefrom and thereby. In a minute fraction of geological time, man has had more impact on ecosystems than at any other period in history. We cannot turn back the clock; man’s fate was sealed as soon as we discovered that we could improve our survival at the cost of denying the survival of something else, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral. Serious scientific debate will produce solutions, but only in those advanced societies which have avoided the fatal commingling of politics and religion……………
Mike…it’s just so rare for politics and religion to actually be fatal in combination like in _Hokuto no Ken_ series or _Yentl_. Guaranteeing choices and botching the job is common; there are bad defaults. Almost nobody’s fronting the bumpless career-optimized motherhood track in the US; or genital tubing that performs great but is set to not conceive for 15-year windows (surgically); medical research libraries for laity; or cryogenic options and calls (leverage limits, etc.) It’s slacking governance and our thin tentative words for congress are to blame.
Nice article,
I have seen a scientific paper about simulation of population dynamics with differential equations, i will search for it and i will post it
here it is the paper http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/9/3/552.abstract
Most religions and tribes regard breeding as a means to increase their power.