The Crow - Brief Article

THE CROW family: collectors of fascinating trinkets, portents of doom; symbols of spirituality, emissaries across the flood. And if THE CROW should make wing to the rooky wood, then the world will be turned on its head. To see which way the wind blows, keep your eye on THE CROW.

PEOPLE, PEOPLE EVERYWHERE!

THE CROW examines Malthus' population predictions, and draws some controversial conclusions.

The year 1998 marked the bicentenary of the publication of the famous Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus, in which he argued that the population of a region would always grow until checked by famine, pestilence or war. Even if agricultural production were improved, the only result would be an increase in population, and people would be no better off. The Malthusian principle can be summed up in two short sentences: Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical rate; subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

According to Malthus' calculations, the unchecked world population would tend to double every 50 years. Estimating that it was about 500 million at the time he wrote his essay in 1798, he arrived at a figure of 8 billion (equal to four doublings) at the beginning of the third millennium. Written at the dawn of the industrial revolution, the First Essay -- as it has come to be known -- has proved itself to be remarkably prophetic. Now that an exploding world population, currently growing at the rate of 90 million a year, is incurring irreversible damage to our biosphere, the premise of Malthus' principle -- geometrical multiplication -- is more relevant than ever before in the history of the human race.

After increasing by a scant I million a year during the first nineteen centuries AD, reaching 2 billion in 1925, world population has more than tripled since then and now exceeds 6 billion. Put another way, about three times as many people have been born in the 20th century as during the entire previous history of mankind. The UN predicts that it could double again in the next half century -- an unlikely scenario, as we are already stretching our planet's resources to their limit. The problem is, says Charles Westoff, professor of demography at Princeton University, that 'population growth is never an immediate problem; since politicians gain little by identifying with the long term, the pressure is to act on short-term interests'.

Of course, it is not just the sheer number of humans that impacts our biosphere: above all, it is the way we manage, or mismanage, the natural resources -- the land and the forests, the ocean and its reefs, the potable water and the very air we breathe -- that determines what is a sustainable population. But it doesn't take an Einstein to realise that six billion people -- given a certain standard of living -- will use up twice as many non-renewable resources and wreak twice as much havoc on the environment as half that number.

According to the World Health Organisation, some 60 million 'unplanned' babies are born each year, of which about 12 million are doomed to die prematurely. This is one reason why such authorities on population policy as Professor Virginia Abernathy of Vanderbilt University warn against 'inappropriate aid [which] actively harms intended beneficiaries, because it neutralises environmental signs that would otherwise alert individuals to the need to limit childbearing. The proper scope of assistance is narrow: facilitating access to modern contraception'.

A case in point is the nation of Bangladesh, which in its 50-year existence has lost some 600,000 people to typhoons and other natural disasters, because a rapid population expansion (from fewer than 50 million to more than 120 million) has forced people to settle on flood-prone or otherwise marginal lands. This prompted the government of Bangladesh to put in place an aggressive family planning programme, so far credited with preventing another 20 million unwanted births. That point of view is a radical departure from the official US aid policy, which, under pressure from the Catholic Church and various 'pro-life' groups, withholds contributions to any relief organisation advocating birth control.

One could have hoped that other 'developing' countries, which have seen their populations double or triple in the past half century, would have had the foresight to institute similar policies. A prime example is Ethiopia, where millions of people are now threatened with starvation -- just 16 years after another devastating famine laid waste that country and its neighbours on the Horn of Africa. Instead of learning from past experiences, the government of Ethiopia has chastised Western nations for not responding fast enough to its pleas for international aid. But sadly, many people in the West suffer from what might be termed 'image fatigue' -- you can only cry wolf or show pictures of starving children so many times before the public becomes inured to your pleas.

As the Nobel Laureate Dr Albert Schweitzer put it: 'Man has lost his capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.'

The Crow is a mouthpiece for thinkers with individual and strong views. This month, the role of The Crow was taken by Gard Binney.

COPYRIGHT 2000 MIT Press Journals
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group