POPULATION EXPLOSION: IS MAN REALLY DOOMED?

By Otto Friedrich

THE mathematics of the nightmare always makes it sound inevitable: the population of the world, which required centuries to reach 1 billion, took only 80 years to double that number, and only 41 years more to reach today's 3.7 billion. If the progression continues, it is widely and gloomily predicted by the spiritual heirs of Thomas Malthus, there will be 7 billion people standing in line for their rations in the year 2000. By 2050, perhaps 30 billion will be fighting like animals for a share of the once-green earth.

After the statistics come the Dantesque visions and the cries of moral revulsion. "We shall, in the rich countries, be surrounded by a sea of famine," warns British Novelist C.P. Snow. "Many millions of people are going to starve. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets." Even if some way can be found to feed the onrushing millions, they may still face a psychic fate similar to the one that befell Dr. John Calhoun's white mice. A psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., Calhoun started with eight mice in an null cage; within a little more than two years, they had multiplied to 2,200, but they were hardly alive-mere "passive blobs of protoplasm, frozen in a childlike trance." Summing up the sentiments of many population experts, Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich (who has had himself sterilized) concludes that "if we don't do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there is just no hope that civilization will persist."

This is the famous "population explosion" that President Nixon has described as "one of the most serious challenges to human destiny." Yet it is sometimes hard to believe -at least in America-that it really exists. The nation does have its slums and traffic jams, its squalors of polluted air and water, but it can also boast mile upon mile of open land, forests and farms that stretch to the horizon. Is all this doomed by the arrival of tomorrow's children?

Population growth1% a year in the U.S.; 2% in the world as a whole-is undeniably a problem. But despite the cries of alarm, it is considerably less clear just what the problem is, how grave it is, and what should be done about it. It does seem safe to say, though, that the great famine is by no means inevitable.

sb

Parts of the world-the slums of great cities like New York, London and Tokyo-are obviously overcrowded. But this does not mean that the entire planet is running out of room. Although India has a major population problem, with about 570 million people crammed into 1.1 million sq. mi., Australia has more than twice that much land and only 1/40 the population. Canada, Brazil and Russia all have vast empty spaces. And although much of this space is jungle or steppe or desert, the Israelis have demonstrated in the Negev that technology and hard work can make the most inhospitable land support new settlers.

Obviously, international migrations are not a likely prospect, but even within any one nation, crowding is generally a result of the drift from rural areas to the city. Taken as a whole, the U.S. still has only 58 people per sq. mi.-scarcely one-sixth the density of Switzerland, which does not seem terribly crowded. But about 70% of all Americans have jammed together onto 2% of the land, while half of the nation's counties lost population during the past decade.

The crowded parts of the world are, no doubt, destined to get somewhat more crowded. Nonetheless, statistics on the population explosion are something less than scientific. They are based largely on estimated birth rates in underdeveloped nations, where record keeping remains an underdeveloped art. In particular, there is the projected growth of China, which is often said to have 800 million people and to be increasing by 1,000,000 every month. The fact is, nobody really knows how many Chinese there are (the last announced census recorded 583 million back in 1953) or what the rate of increase is today. In recent years, Peking has encouraged late marriages, use of birth-control pills, sterilization and abortion. "Projections of future populations are admittedly fictions," says one of the more moderate prophets, Philip Hauser of the University of Chicago. "No one can actually predict future population, and anyone who claims he can is either a fool or a charlatan . . . The fact that man is able to consider [the] implications is one reason why the projected numbers will never be reached."

At the heart of the population problem is a paradoxical question: Is a growing population a social disaster or a social resource? Or, to put it another way, will a larger population produce more poets or just more heroin addicts? And which of the two will prevail?

sb

For poor, underdeveloped countries like India, more population surely means more poverty. But once a society has begun to industrialize, people themselves create wealth as they develop an increasingly elaborate exchange of goods and services. Thus both England and Germany prosper even though they have a population density greater than that of India. And the Japanese are demonstrating that the world's most thickly inhabited nation may also become its richest. Looking ahead, Professional Prophet Herman Kahn optimistically foresees a world population that will double by 2000 but a world economy that will grow fivefold.

This growing wealth is producing its own problems, of course. The U.S., with less than 6% of the world's people, already devours about 40% of its resources, and some critics blame the rich nations for the worst aspects of the population problem. Americans, for example, throw away more than 1,000,000 cars every year, plus 36 billion bottles and 58 million tons of paper. Aside from polluting the land and water, the critics say, this vast consumption threatens to strip the earth of its resources. In the rhetoric of Paul Ehrlich, "America's pride in her growing population may be compared to a cancer patient's pride in his expanding tumor."

Other experts are less gloomy. They point out that known reserves of oil and gas are larger now than two decades ago; that the age of nuclear power has barely begun; and that Americans are already learning that many materials can and should be recycled and re-used instead of simply being thrown away. Besides, although population density is an element in the pollution problem, it is hardly the only one. "Our life-style must change," says Harvard Population Expert Arthur J. Dyck. "If we stayed at 200 million, would air pollution decrease? Would other problems ease off? No. We have to change our values, our behavior."

Still, there is a finite limit to the physical resources of the globe, which means, in turn, a limit to the number of people the world can support. But how many people is too many? At what point is the "optimum population" reached?

"We have already exceeded it, gentlemen; we have already exceeded it," says Dr. John H. Knowles, director of Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Ehrlich is more specific: he believes that the U.S. population should be about 25% less than at present. Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior, goes even further. Without suggesting how it could be achieved, he favors a cut of about half.

sb

More sanguine experts suggest that America's optimum population is still to be attained. Professor Donald J. Bogue, director of the University of Chicago's Community and Family Study Center, speculates that the U.S. population can be "twice what it is now without much difficulty," and that there will be even less difficulty if "the cities of this country can be greatly decentralized." Ben Wattenberg, a demography expert and former White House staffer, adds: "There is no optimum population as such. Whether we have 250 million people or 350 million people is less important than what the people, however many of them there are, decide to do about their problems."

The first of these problems is how to feed the increasing population. In the U.S., at least, food is scarcely a problem at all (except for the nation's shameful failure to find a system for feeding surpluses to the poor). On a global scale, too, the so-called "green revolution" -hybrid grains, new fertilizers -has vastly increased harvests. According to American correspondents who have recently visited China, a nation that once knew famine as a recurring torment now boasts rich crops. To be sure, the green revolution is not totally victorious, and there are many political obstacles between the agronomist and the hungry child. Nevertheless, it is estimated that the world's farmers can theoretically feed a population 40 times as large as today's.

But even if technology succeeds in providing both the food and raw materials to support a large population, some Americans worry about the probability of a basic deterioration in the affluent society that they have come to take for granted. "How will we house the next hundred million Americans?" asks President Nixon. "How will we educate and employ such a large number of people? How will we provide adequate health care when our population reaches 300 million?" Some birth-control enthusiasts want to answer with a barrage of coercive measures ranging from special taxes on any family with more than two children to sterility drugs in the public water supply. Indeed, about the only tactic they have not yet proposed is euthanasia. Mr. Nixon answered his questions with a more modest approach: a $382 million program to encourage birth control.

Although America can theoretically support many millions more than it does now, there must be a point-400 million, 500 million perhaps-at which the increase has to stop. And partly because the alarmists' warnings have been heard, this stabilization point seems to be approaching. In actual fact, the American birth rate has been dropping for most of the past decade (it is medicine's victories over death that have caused the population increase), and it now stands at an average of 2.5 children per family. This is not much more than the 2.1 figure that represents, when combined with current death rates, the concept of zero population growth. "To say you believe in zero growth is like saying you believe in the law of gravity," says Chicago's Hauser. "It's going to come whether you believe in it or not. The only question now is how we will achieve zero growth and over what time period."

The first step, already partly taken, is to prevent the birth of unwanted children. According to one major survey, at least one American child in five is unwanted. The obvious solution -making both contraceptives and abortion cheaper and more available-would reduce the birth rate to below the magic 2.1. The principal question-raised anew last month by Milton Eisenhower and ex-Senator Joseph Tydings, founders of the Coalition for a National Population Policy-is whether Americans can be persuaded to want fewer children. A recent Gallup poll showed that the trend is in that direction: the percentage favoring large families (four or more children) has dropped from 40% in 1967 to only 23% today. As liberated women seek careers outside the home, and as contraception becomes accepted as an obligation, it is probable that both the ideal family size and the actual birth rate will continue to decline. The Census Bureau has already lowered its estimates for the year 2000 by a minimum of 17,000,000.

That fact alone might suggest that the predictions of a population doomsday, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned, have been exaggerated. It should be added, though, that the children of the post-World War II baby boom are now getting married, and even if the birth rate dropped to 2.1 immediately, it would take two generations for the American population to level off at about 275,000,000.

In the underdeveloped world, where no predictions are much more than guesses, there is still a sorry gap between the need for family planning and the desire for it. Many major governments have committed themselves to birth control, but in a poll of Mexican political, religious and professional leaders, for instance, 80% thought that the ideal family would number five or more children.

Under such circumstances, it will take many years for the underdeveloped nations to stabilize their populations. But the odds are that they eventually will. As Stanford Sociologist Dudley Kirk puts it, "When people get a higher level of civilization, they realize they don't have to have eight children for three to survive. So they have fewer children and higher aspirations for them. This is universal."

sb

After all, children are not just transients in the world's boardinghouse, to be welcomed or turned away at the convenience of the older boarders. And if it is true that every newborn child should have a right to its share of food, it is also true that those who control the food supply should think twice before declaring that they no longer have enough for strangers and newcomers. In other words, the essence of the population problem-so far, at least-is not that mankind has propagated too many children but that it has failed to organize a world in which they can grow in peace and prosperity. Rich nations and poor alike have grossly misused the world's resources, both material and intellectual; neglected them, wasted them, and fought each other over how to share them. Thus the basic question is not how many people can share the earth, but whether they can devise the means of sharing it at all. . Otto Friedrich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.