By Donald A. Collins | 21 June 2018
Church and State
Edd Doerr, President of Americans for Religious Liberty, called my attention to the June 19, 2018 opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled “Talking about overpopulation is still taboo” which he pointed out had gotten virtually no response from the Post’s readers.
No surprise to us as the pro-growth mind set of business and the all births are good crowd keep denying the fact that we live on a small planet with its now evident incapacity to tolerate our growing numbers.
Our media daily tells this overpopulation story without fingering its root cause, presenting a flood of news stories about the growing numbers of deaths from murder, mayhem and dislocation occurring worldwide.
The authors begin by saying “Fifty years ago, Paul Ehrlich’s bestseller ‘The Population Bomb’ predicted that the world’s population would double in less than 35 years — a frightening speed. The book had a major impact but spurred a backlash that made almost any further discussion of population radioactive.
“As it turns out, Ehrlich’s predictions were extreme. At today’s growth rate, the next population doubling will take nearly 60 years. That slowdown gives us time to find ethical ways of sustaining ourselves and the opportunity to collaborate with stakeholders with differing perspectives on how to do so.”
You can read the whole story here.
This well written piece — like the hundreds of similar articles written before it — goes on to tell us about the need for more education and more contraceptives, but these nostrums however worthy seem to them (and me) likely not to emerge as rapidly or in adequate amounts to stop the potential apocalypse in progress. The authors don’t fail to give the grisly details of growing unserved human numbers and still point out that actions to fix the obvious cataclysm don’t even get talked about.
Where, pray tell, do we think this international immigration problem comes from? In the controversy over immigration world wide and at our own borders I hear no urgent voices for looking broadly at the urgent need to fix population growth.
China had a one child policy which had some latitude for workability but now that policy has been done away with. Many countries in Africa see the failure of their economies and their ability to govern thwarted by out of control births, yet in Europe many complain that the birth rates are below replacement and thus affect retirement funds and many fear this opens the way for present residents to be overcome by migrants of a different color, religious beliefs or customs.
Hopeless? Not at all. Because as this coziness of people evolves, the alternative to war, particularly a nuclear exchange, will finally get the attention of leaders as well as those who elect them. The end game to getting to a sustainable number of humans will be a bloody and contentious one.
But I am an optimist. I see more and more people looking to the kind of overall solutions to their unserved needs such as I described in my June 8, 2018 op ed piece on how women worldwide are using chemical means to get abortions without interference from authorities, secular or religious. Necessity finds solutions.
For example, a possible next worldwide awakening about this issue might emerge with continued global warming which is even now causing and rising sea levels. Since some 40% of all people live along our oceans they will be wanting solutions.
Will the obvious next trigger be the fossil fuel effect on global warming? Renewable energy sources are coming on line rapidly now.
In short, the clear signs of disaster which are now already identified will finally be acted upon, albeit somewhat too late, but likely in time to save the majority.
Furthermore, I believe these threats are now already well understood by those who have the most to lose in terms of wealth and power in the event of such untreated pressures. I suspect these leaders will ultimately not take the head in the sand approach or try, as Edgar Allen Poe’s courtiers in his “Masque of the Red Death,” to find an isolated aerie for an escape because there will not be any.
The evident follies of today’s religionists or the unheeding dictators are now blasted onto our visual screens daily. The chance for all of us to see the future now exists in our cell phones and electronic communications. We know the future if we do not act. The authors of this “taboo on population talk” piece are absolutely right for now, but not for very much longer in my view.
Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.
From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013
By Donald A. Collins
Publisher: Church and State Press (July 30, 2014)
ASIN: B00MA40TVE
Kindle Store
Back in 1991, the NGO Don Collins founded in 1976, International Services Assistance Fund (ISAF), co-produced a TV quality 22-minute film called “Whose Choice?” which Ted Turner arranged to broadcast on September 21, 1992 in prime time on his then independent Turner Broadcast System (TBS). Other outlets such as PBS and several of its affiliates Collins and his colleagues contacted then refused to run it because of its forthright treatment of the abortion issue, arguing for all women’s right to choose not to have a baby. ISAF has made a new edition of that DVD. The purpose for reissuing this 3rd version of “Whose Choice?” was simply to show the historical urgency that attended those times, still blocked and attacked over 40 years after the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. This video is available for public viewing for the first time.
Vatican control of World Health Organization population policy: An interview with Milton P. Siegel
Catholic Church – Unethical Obstruction of Family Planning
Professor Paul Ehrlich: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
Human Population Through Time
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