It’s Population Growth, Stupid!

By Donald A. Collins | 11 November 2024
Church and State

(Image by Puran singh chouhan from Pixabay)

When I first began working on the issue of family planning in 1965 the population of the United States was under 200 million and is now 340 million. In the past election cycle, we have been told of the impact of unbridled groups by the majority of voters who failed to believe they were finding adequate help with inflation and other concerns including fear of immigration.

Since Trump won in a landslide, Democrats are blaming each other for why they lost and what must be done to revive their party’s fortunes. Trump meantime is preparing to enter office by asserting that climate change is a hoax and that he will end current wars quickly and “make America great again”.

The economy for the wealthier in the US is doing fine with the stock market at record levels, but the Trump’s plans to squeeze the poorer voters who elected him are underway. The gap between the working class and the super wealthy harkens back the Gilded Age of the 1890s!

Neither major party has proved able for decades to sustain adequately all our citizens without addressing the most serious planetary issue of all. As the figures noted above, an excess of human numbers cannot be sustained in a way that could possibly be satisfied at the present level the wealthier do on our finite planet.

The overpopulation that exists not only in the United States but also in the world has grown since my birth in 1931 to over 8 billion and likely will reach 10 billion if the world does not fall into nuclear war or other major environmental ills.

That most of the US’s efforts that under Biden we are making now to save the planet from further desecration will at least be interrupted for four years under the Trump administration which likely will refuse to recognize the enormity of this rapidly growing environmental woes, which was so incisively discussed in The Sixth Extinction, a book by Elizabeth Kolbert, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

Born in 1931 when world homo sapiens numbered about 2 billion, in the USA 123 million, I grew up in a small orderly city where most people had good jobs and no one seemed much richer than their neighbors. I finished high school in 1949 and then went off to college which then cost $3300 per year. The sticker price for one year without a scholarship at my college alma mater now costs over $80,000.

The Korean War nearly ended in 1953 with an armistice still in effect between North and South Korea when I entered the US Navy and served until almost 1957.

Then married with 2 sons, I got a NYC job in a commercial bank paying $4900 a year and found an apartment in the Bronx for $100 a month.

For my Navy service the GI bill allowed me at night to get an MBA in economics at NYU. By 1962 I got a better job managing a small venture capital company in Pennsylvania where I worked until 1965 when I joined the staff as a program officer with a charitable foundation for which I managed its major voluntary family planning projects seeking to help women worldwide achieve the number of children they wanted.

Travelling widely in the states and the world pursuing suitable grant making opportunities over many years I could see first-hand the burgeoning growth of poor often oppressed women and often the general adverse conditions for many less developed nations. Fortunately, as I sought opportunities I was ably abetted in making decisions by outstanding experts, doctors, demographers, and other specialists whose friendships I have relied upon for over 50 years.

In 1974 I moved to California and continued to serve as a board member or officer of various national and international family planning NGOs. In 1976 I founded a non-profit NGO to assist with that vital issue. Those efforts thanks to generous support from donors with similar interests continue to the present time

In retrospect, I now realize my idealistic folly of believing that enough foresighted and politically powerful leaders could despite herculean efforts at the UN and with sympathetic government leaders worldwide not awaken sufficient support to solve a totally manageable population growth by providing women the voluntary means to have the number of children they desire and can support.

Perceived self-interest has kept ethnic, religious or national leaders still wishing to grow their human numbers. Thus, for many complex religious or secular reasons simple safe methods of family planning including abortion have kept many women here and elsewhere in unfair bondage.

Presently almost 50% of yearly births in the US are unintended!

Under Trump attacks on family methods will continue. The good news is a growing intense desire of the world’s women for relief from childbearing to equal life choices with men and vocational opportunities –even the recent backward US failures to elect a fully qualified woman with integrity and empathy as President gives me hope that the falling birth rate will occur in time to take obvious action to avoid the 6th Extinction which has already well begun as the onset of more than ever hurricanes, wildfires and artic ice melting give urgent warnings of worse to come.

Still, the population for now numbers still go up based on the larger base of population.

Substantial efforts as noted above have been made to offer women fertility treatments but despite the current lower birth rates the excess numbers will continue to push us toward head the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse —pestilence, war, famine and death!

Einstein predicted that a World War III nuclear holocaust might leave some of us alive who would “fight WW IV with rocks”.

Many of Greta Thunberg’s generation already understand that human numbers need to rapidly diminish, but Trump thinks environmental changes are a hoax and too many of our world’s dictators stand ready to continue war or go to war.

So, to borrow the brevity from political strategist James Carville’s succinct phraseology to identify the key problem humanity faces, “It’s population growth, Stupid!!”

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 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”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

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