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A full house at the Crawford Family Forum barely seemed to breath on May 29 as journalist Alan Weisman laid out the news that Earth’s human population is growing at a breathtaking and unsustainable rate—by 1 million people every four and a half days — ”outside of microbial blooms, the biggest and most abnormal population spurt in the history of biology.”

Unless we do something soon to stop our exponential growth, “nature is going to start handing out pink slips,” said Weisman, author of “Countdown, Our Last Best Hope for the Future on Earth:” But luckily, he said, the solution is relatively simple: Educate people, especially girls, and make contraceptives easily available.

We don’t need to mandate birth control, like China’s one-child policy, Weisman said. Given the information and the contraceptives, people choose all by themselves to limit their procreation.

Here are some highlights from his 90-minute talk with KPCC’s environment reporter Molly Peterson, which you can watch in its entirety above.

Highlights

Why has the human population exploded in our lifetime?

“For about 95 percent of our history as homo sapiens, our population was almost a flat line, because people died as fast as others were being born,” Weisman said. In 1815, after the discovery of the smallpox vaccination, the world population hit 1 billion. In 1900, it was 1.9 billion, and today, just 115 years later, it’s jumped to more than 7 billion.

What happened?

There was the discovery of antiseptics, pasteurized milk, better hygiene in hospitals, and vaccines to stop many deadly diseases. But the two most important discoveries made it possible to keep all those people from starving to death — German chemist Fritz Haber and engineer Carl Bosch discovered a way to create nitrogen fertilizer around World War I, to significantly increase our crop yields, and American biologist Norman Borlaug, founder of the "green revolution," developed a sturdier, high-yield wheat in the 1960s that is credited with saving a billion people from starvation.

So why can’t we rely on new technology to manage our growing population?

Because we are running out of resources, especially water, says Weisman. “All we did was buy ourselves a generation of time,” he said. “Borlaug, who was credited with saving more human lives than anyone in history, said when he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 that unless enhanced population control and food production join forces, we will have enormous problems within generation or so, which is where we are now.”

The fallout from nature is already happening in many places, he said. In the Punjab, the breadbasket of India, thousands of farmers—270,000 since 1975–have committed suicide because the water table has dropped so low, they can no longer afford to drill their wells deep enough to water their crops. Their preferred method of death? Drinking the pesticides that once helped them grow so many crops. And India, by the way, is poised to soon pass China as the most populous country in the world.

What are our options?

“We’ve discovered that the best contraception of all turns out to be educating girls, because when girls are studying, they defer their child bearing until their studies are done,” Weisman said. “Then once they get out of school they realize they now have something interesting to do with their lives, which is hard when you have seven kids hanging off you.”

Making contraceptives easily available is key to reducing the population, he said, but requiring birth control isn’t the answer. Many countries have been able to successfully lower their birth rates through an artful combination of propaganda, education and readily available birth control. For instance, Mexico, Weisman said , had the largest city in the world in the 1970s and knew it was headed to trouble because of its huge population growth. So the government started a program that combined birth control with vaccinations and better health care for children, so parents didn’t feel the need to keep having babies, and it also used the countries widely popular soap operas—telenovelas—to spread the idea that having large families just wasn’t a good idea anymore. As a result, Mexico’s population growth has almost leveled.

Iran used a similar strategy, Weisman said, but added patriotism to first encourage Iranian women to have babies so the country could build an army to defeat Iraq, and then, when it became clear the country could not employ or otherwise sustain such an enormous number of people, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decreed that devout Muslim couples could have as many children as they wanted, but “when wisdom dictates that you do not need more children, a vasectomy is permissible.”

The Iranian government also sent doctors out into the countryside to perform vasectomies and required that couples participate in premarital planning before they were wed, which included information about birth control. Women were also encouraged to attend school, and as a result 60 percent of Iran’s university students are now female and Iran’s birth rate is now at two children for two parents, a drop in birth rate that happened a year faster than China’s mandated one-child policy.

“Only a few private foundations and Western governments, principally our own, are providing contraceptives to poor countries,” Weisman said. “We (the United States) are the biggest donor for contraceptives worldwide. Now I’m not a member of any political party, and I’ve voted all over the map, but had Obama and Biden’s opponents won the last election, they made it clear they would have severely cut our funding for contraception in the world, and had they done so, adding just half a child more per woman in the world, we would be adding 1 million to the world every two days, and we’d be at 16 billion by the end of the century, instead of the 10 billion projected now.”

If we can reduce the population by half a baby per woman? The population is projected to be at about 6 billion by the end of the century, 1 billion less than we have now.

So no more big families?

Not at all, said Weisman. If you want a big family, have two children and then go out and adopt. “One resource we are not running out of is children who need a home,” he said. “Look, one way or another the population is going to come down in this century. Either we manage it gracefully or nature will do it to us, and that will not be very pretty.”

By Jeanette Marantos

Guests

Molly Pe terson: Molly has reported, edited, directed programs, and produced stories for NPR and NPR shows including "Dayto Day" and KQED's "California Report." She reported for "Living on Earth" in the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricanes Katrina & Rita. Prior to joining KPCC as an environment reporter, she produced a nationally-distributed radio documentary about New Orleans called "Finding Solid Ground."

@KPCCmolly

Alan Weisman: author of the New York Times best seller The World Without Us; winner for Countdown of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science and technology; senior editor and producer for Homelands Productions; journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Discover, Orion, and on National Public Radio.

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