🚀 go-pugleaf

      Population control does not solve very much in itself. Our
resource gobblers in the "first world" use up over one hundred
times as much of the earth's resources and energy as those in the
third world. And history teaches that we in the first world did
not limit our population voluntarily until we had achieved a
raised standard of living including universal medical care that
raised average life expectancies to a high level and insured the
survival of most children born into adulthood. Although this
brings population levels UP temporarily, it seems to have been
the necessary precondition to the creation of a feeling of
security in a population, wherein they feel they can now settle
for only two children instead of ten, because the chances are now
high that those two children will survive to adulthood. No ethnic
group anywhere or at any time in history has ever lowered its
"fertility rate" before infant mortality rates are reduced.
Additionally, educational levels have to be raised.
     So history teaches that it is precisely the other way
around: FIRST you lower infant mortality rates, educate and raise
living standards, reduce poverty, and THEN population CAN be
controlled. To expect the third world to do it any other way is
unrealistic and, in fact, it could not be done without a fascist
dictatorship world wide, which I don't think anyone would
advocate.
     The presence of modern medical facilities in most parts of
the third world, as inadequate and poor as they often are, has
nevertheless managed to bring infant mortality rates down
considerably from what they were in precolonial times. One
posting has rightly pointed out that in the third world, family
is so greatly valued that even getting rich does not guarantee
that people will want to limit their family size. My experience
of five years of teaching in Nigeria confirms that as true. But I
also noticed that by 1985 the Nigerian middle class was talking
more and more about the necessity of limiting family size if you
wanted to have the means to educate all of your children, which
increasingly is the goal of the average Nigerian. So at the grass
roots level, family planning was starting to become a popular
idea at that time. This was definitely not the case a decade
earlier. Much had changed in a short space of time, and it was a
grass roots level phenomenon too, the key factor in securing the
success of any "programme". So I do have hope that there are ways
to solve the environmental crisis in a manner that respects local
culture and values. If we are to do that, population control
cannot be made the top priority. It should be part of an overall
programme of medical care and promotion of sustainable employment
to eliminate or reduce poverty, then we will find that population
control comes much more easily.
     At the same time, our environmental crisis requires that the
so called "first world" must BOTH control its population AND cut
down its consumption of resources, for the impact of our
population and ridiculously exorbitant consumption patterns are
greater than the earth can bear already, that is why we have
disastrous ozone depletion, global warming, and toxic ground
water. The earth is now convulsed in several types of
environmental crisis at once and therefore we have to work on
several fronts at once.

Yours, Ian Ritchie,
Anthropology of Religion,
McGill University, Montreal.
CXIR@MUSICA.MCGILL.CA.