Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  At that point, projections of which side will win this demographic derby—or lose, depending on point of view—get hazy. Historically, much of Israel’s growth has depended on immigration of Jews from elsewhere. More than a million Russians arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet the trend of Jews making aliyah to Israel has slowed dramatically. Far more Jews now move from Israel to the United States than vice versa. Nevertheless, as the birthrate of haredim increases exponentially, Jews may retake the majority in the 2020s. At least for a while.

  Even more important than who’s leading is something neither Jewish nor Arab demographers deny: If things continue as they’re headed, by the middle of this century the number of humans jammed between the sea and the Jordan will nearly double, to at least 21 million.

  Even Jesus’s miracle with loaves and fishes might not come close to slaking their needs. Such relentless arithmetic begs a new set of four questions:

  The First Question

  How many people can their land really hold? For that matter, since the influence of this Holy Land extends far beyond its disputed borders, how many people can our planet hold?

  It is a question that, anywhere on Earth, requires panoramic knowledge, expertise, and imagination to attempt an answer. Which people? What do they eat? How do they shelter themselves, and move about? Where do they get their water—and how much water is there for them to get? And their fuel: how much is available, and how dangerous is its exhaust? And—getting back to food—do they grow it themselves? If so, how much can they harvest, meaning: how much does it rain, how many rivers flow through the land, how good and plentiful are the soils, how much fertilizer and other forms of chemistry are involved, and what’s the downside of using them?

  The list continues: What kinds of houses, and how big? And made from what? If of local material, how much is on hand? (Although half of Israel is a desert, it is already worried about running out of construction-grade sand—let alone water to mix cement.) How about suitable building sites—and all the roads, sewer pipes, gas lines, and power lines that must connect to them? And the infrastructure for all the schools, hospitals, and businesses to serve and employ… how many people??

  Any complete answers to such questions demand input from ecologists, geographers, hydrologists, and agronomists, not just engineers and economists. But in Israel and Palestine—like everywhere else—most decisions are made by none of them. Politics, which includes military strategy along with business and culture, has been the ultimate arbiter here since civilization began, and still is.

  A business-savvy and politically astute nonprofit director, for a Hasidic rabbi Dudi Zilbershlag is also a cultural realist, at least to a point. He accepts that Israel needs secular as well as religious Jews—who else will support all the Talmudists?—and even, he adds, that ultimately his children and Arabs will have to live together. “We must find a common language and let peace prevail.”

  What he cannot do, however, is ever imagine restricting the numbers of children his people bring into the world.

  “God brings children into the world. He’ll find a place for them,” says haredi environmental educator Rachel Ladani.

  If the phrase population control evokes Malthusian shudders or nightmares of Chinese totalitarian rule for some, to Hasidic Jews like Ladani and Dudi Zilbershlag, it’s plain unthinkable. Ladani lives in ultra-Orthodox Bnei Brak, Israel’s most densely populated city, just inland from coastal Tel Aviv. She finds no conflict between teaching environmental awareness and being the mother of eight. Her family’s Hasidic lifestyle means walking to stores, school, and the synagogue, rarely venturing beyond their neighborhood. None, including Rachel, has ever been on an airplane. “My two daughters and six sons produce less carbon dioxide in one year,” she enjoys saying, “than someone from America visiting Israel does in one flight.”

  Perhaps: But they all eat food and need shelter, which in turn require building materials and all the connecting infrastructure—as will their own myriad offspring. And despite the proximity of services—within two blocks are grocers, kosher butchers, falafel outlets, and many shops selling baby goods and wigs (acceptably modest head covering for Orthodox women; Rachel’s is auburn, cut in a pageboy)—it’s clear that austere haredim aren’t immune to modern, energy-hungry temptations. In Bnei Brak, parked cars are everywhere: on road dividers, wheels halfway up sidewalks. Motorcycles swarm through streets crammed with houses encrusted with satellite dish antennae.

  This is the thickest concentration of humans in Israel’s northern, nondesert half, which, at 740 people per square kilometer, has higher population density than any country in the Western world. (Holland, Europe’s densest, has 403 people per square kilometer.) So what does Rachel Ladani think will happen when her country’s population doubles by 2050? Or to our world, which, according to the United Nations, by mid-century may host nearly 10 billion of us?

  “I don’t have to think about it. God made the problem, and He will solve it.”

  There was once a pine forest nearby, where Rachel’s Russian immigrant mother taught her the names of flowers and birds. When she was only ten, she met a female landscape architect—a double revelation: she had known neither that anything like landscape architecture existed, nor that women worked. When she married at nineteen, she didn’t tell the rebbe who officiated that she was also enrolling in Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. It took her five years to get her degree, as during that time she also had three children.

  She and her husband, Eliezer, principal of a school for learning disabilities, managed to have five more even as Rachel worked to keep their bursting city beautiful. When she was forty, she discovered Israel’s premier environmental think tank, the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in Tel Aviv. Like Technion, it wasn’t Orthodox, but it opened her eyes and changed her life without changing her faith.

  “The environment is like Torah. It’s a part of you,” she tells the girls she teaches in religious schools. In a country where schoolchildren once sang patriotic songs about Zionists transforming the land by covering it in concrete, she teaches them to open their own eyes by watching seeds sprout, and by gazing at nature until they begin to really see. She quotes an ancient midrash, a rabbinical commentary on the Torah, in which God shows Adam the trees of Eden, saying “See my works, how lovely they are. All I have created I have created for you.”

  Yet as Heschel Center founder Jeremy Benstein noted in a 2006 book, The Way Into Judaism and the Environment, in the same midrash God goes on to warn Adam: “Take care not to corrupt and destroy My world, because if you ruin it there is no one to come after you to put it right.”

  When he cited that, Benstein was replying to the theological optimism of the deeply devout that somehow God will not let us down if we’re doing the right things in His eyes. “We are bidden,” he reminded in his book, “not to depend on miracles to solve our problems. God makes it clear that there will be no one to clean up after us.”

  Benstein grew up in Ohio and attended Harvard before coming to Israel. He earned a doctorate in environmental anthropology from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. With other emigrants from America, he founded Heschel and taught at the Arava Institute, a sustainability research center at a southern Israeli kibbutz. The Intifadas made two things about population clear to him: it had a huge impact on the joint Israeli-Palestinian environment, but discussing it was nearly taboo.

  “Because, we’re still recovering from the massacre of a third of the world’s Jews,” he says, straddling a chair in the Heschel Center’s library. The Holocaust, which led the United Nations to cleave Palestine in two to create a Jewish homeland, is eternally fresh here. “The meaning of six billion,” he wrote in his 2006 book, “should rightfully take a backseat to the six million.” Especially, he adds, since a million of the slaughtered Jews were children.

  “There are fewer Jews in the world now than in 1939. We see ourselves like any indigenous population decima
ted by Western culture. We have the right to replenish ourselves.”

  Yet Benstein, himself the father of twins, knows it took only twelve years for the world to go from 6 to 7 billion. Researching Torah and biblical tractates for environmental guidance, such as the edict in Exodus 23:11 to let the land lie fallow every seventh year, he has also looked for clues to what exactly God meant when He directed humans to be fruitful and multiply.

  “It seems to imply that there is a limit. Because it doesn’t say, be fruitful and multiply ad infinitum, or as much as you can. It says, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill up the Earth.’ ”

  Benstein, whose Harvard degree is in linguistics, has probed the nuanced language of Genesis. “If we take that seriously, then there will be a time when we will have fulfilled that commandment, and we can stop. The question becomes: When? Have we gotten there yet? And rabbis can’t answer the question of what does it mean for the Earth to be full. That’s a question for ecologists.”

  In Genesis, however, he finds an interesting hint. It occurs after forty chapters of men taking wives and subsequent lists of begats and generations of sons. Old Testament people had no problem obeying the commandment to multiply, which they did with vigor and frequently with lust. But then comes Joseph, one of thirteen offspring of the patriarch Jacob.

  Joseph has two sons before he interprets the Egyptian pharaoh’s dream. At that point, Benstein writes: “He stopped procreating before the famine he knew lay ahead. The Talmud uses this example to state: ‘It is forbidden to engage in marital relations in the time of famine.’ ”

  A parallel Talmudic passage, he adds, “sees the prohibition as a call to population control, stating bluntly: ‘When you see great deprivation entering the world, keep your wife childless.’ ”

  But a mere head count, Benstein says, doesn’t fully explain the hunger and thirst afflicting much of humanity, predicted to worsen gravely during this century. While human population quadrupled over the past hundred years, he calculates that our consumption of resources, as measured by combined gross domestic products worldwide, increased by a factor of seventeen. This gorging at the planetary buffet has been enjoyed by a comparative few, and at the expense of many. An unequal distribution of goods, which caused woes and wars even in biblical times, has never been so skewed as today.

  Yet consumption and population are two faces of the same coin, he acknowledges. As it spins ever faster, it raises questions that transcend his divided nation, because the entire world is growing dizzy from forces whirling out of control.

  ii. The Water

  The Second Question

  If, in order to have an ecosystem robust enough to insure human survival, we have to avoid growing past 10 billion—or even reduce our numbers from the 7 billion we’re already at—is there an acceptable, nonviolent way to convince people of all the cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems of the world that it’s in their best interest to do so? Is there anything in their liturgies, histories, or belief systems—or any other reason—that potentially embraces the seemingly unnatural idea of limiting what comes most naturally to us, and to all other species: making copies of ourselves?

  Ayat Um-Said knows one. “Not religion. Reality.”

  With wide eyes lined with blue eye shadow that complements her lavender hijab and purple wool coat, she glances over at her mother. Ruwaidah Um-Said, bundled in a green velvet dress and a black wool head scarf against the January chill, leans on the arm of her white plastic chair and ticks off the ages of her children: “Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty, nineteen, sixteen, fourteen, thirteen, and ten.” Six boys, four girls. Her youngest leans against her knee, bundled in a black zip-collared sweatshirt over a turtleneck and a fleece-lined nylon jacket over that. The only heat in their home—three rooms on the ground floor of a five-story concrete box in Al-Amari, a refugee camp that’s now a permanent neighborhood in the West Bank city of Ramallah—emanates from the bodies of the people living here, which are always plenty.

  Ruwaidah was born here in 1958, ten years after her family was expelled from Lydda—Lod, in biblical times—when Israel was created. Back there, her father had an orchard of pomegranate, orange, and lemon trees, and also grew onions, radishes, spinach, green beans, wheat, and barley. “He always assumed we would be going back, so he refused to buy property around here.” She looks around at the dank blue walls she’s seen all her life, bare except for darker blue wainscoting. “The United Nations owns this land.” She spits. “We own the house.”

  As several thousand Al-Amari refugees gradually realized that they weren’t returning to their villages anytime soon, over a decade concrete and mortar replaced the UN’s tents. After another decade and a Six-Day War, when there were no longer borders because everything had become Israel’s, her father took them to see their land. He still had a deed, but it didn’t matter. He finally gave up when their trees disappeared under a runway of what is now Ben-Gurion International Airport.

  Something else gradually changed. “Every Palestinian family had someone in jail, or wounded, or killed. So families that used to have five or six children started having more.” Ruwaidah points at a school photo of her thirteen-year-old, Yassim. “When a relative gets killed, you have another child to bear his name. And we’re going to need a lot more,” she adds, turning to her daughter Ayat, “to liberate the whole land.”

  Ayat smiles sweetly but shakes her head. “Just two,” she says.

  Ruwaidah shrugs helplessly. All her daughters only want two, hoping for one of each.

  “Everyone my age,” says Ayat, “is sick of living six to a room. And who can afford so many kids? Life’s so expensive.”

  There’s no place to grow their own food—and even if there were, with water often flowing from West Bank taps just twice a week, they couldn’t irrigate. The UN used to allot them sugar, rice, flour, cooking oil, and milk, but that budget ended. “The only chance to earn a living,” says Ayat, her arms around her son, Zacariah, and her daughter, Rheem, “is education. Which costs money.”

  Two of her brothers made it to university. Another, miraculously, gets paid to play football in Norway. For the rest, jobs are rare and usually pay miserably. “And now, with most of Israel closed, finding work is even harder.”

  The walls that tower over Ramallah and the interminable waits at ubiquitous Israeli military checkpoints make it all but impossible to go where there might be work—or go anywhere. Women in labor give birth waiting to get through; one even named her baby Checkpoint. Security walls are visible practically everywhere on the West Bank, in many places separating farmers from their olive groves. Like the Israeli settlements—towns, really, with high-rises, shopping malls, industrial parks, and expanding fringes of mobile homes—they crowd Palestinians into ever closer quarters.

  With housing so scarce and everyone so cramped, there’s no more preaching in the mosques about babies. “It’s not the imam’s business anyhow,” snaps Ayat.

  “That’s exactly what Israelis want you to think,” says a neighbor woman who’s entered, wrapped in a fringed brown hijab.

  “So let the politicians liberate Palestine already, not ask us to do it by having a lot of kids. How come Arafat had only one daughter himself?” On TV, Ayat sees that Israeli politicians pay haredim to have more babies. “Here, the more babies you have, the more you pay.”

  At least the UN clinic still dispenses free IUDs.

  In Bethlehem, Abeer Safar studies a wall map of the kidney-bean-shaped West Bank. Where the bean bends is Jerusalem. Bethlehem, her hometown, is just a few kilometers below.

  Abeer trained as a chemical engineer at Jordan’s University of Science and Technology. Here she’s a water specialist with ARIJ, a Palestinian research institute. She wears jeans, a black sweater over a lime turtleneck, a gold pendant chain, and her long brown hair uncovered. She and her husband live in his family’s home, which, like most houses here, is growing taller. With the birthplace o
f Jesus hemmed in by Israel’s security walls—segregation walls, as Palestinians call them—there’s no choice.

  It makes no sense to her. If Israel keeps carving Palestine into shards, no viable Palestinian state can ever form. But if it stays a single state, Jews risk ending up the outnumbered minority. The only way a minority could stay in power would be by apartheid, not democracy. Then again, Abeer, in her late thirties, is only now expecting her first child. Other professional Palestinian women have also deferred their childbearing, and girls today now want schooling and jobs before babies.

  Even so, it will take time before the sheer pressure of numbers drops, and meanwhile there are more immediate concerns. “We share the West Bank aquifers with Israel,” says Abeer, “but there’s no basin-wide management.”

  Meaning that Israel manages it alone, and Palestine is not allowed to tap new wells. The main recharge areas of the region’s principal Western Mountain Aquifer now fall inside the undulating security wall. Nevertheless, three-fourths of the groundwater originating in the West Bank highlands goes to Israel. “And,” says Abeer, “the settlements take whatever they want”—including for keeping swimming pools full. Per capita, Palestinians claim, Israelis get 280 liters per day while they get just 60. World Health Organization guidelines recommend at least 100.

  Israeli environmentalists agree that it’s madness that half their country’s allotment of precious water goes to agriculture, which produces only 1 percent of Israel’s income. Although Israel has pioneered techniques like drip irrigation and recycling wastewater for crops, they argue that to raise thirsty plants like cotton and flowers to sell to Europe, or potatoes for Poland, which can surely grow its own, means exporting its most vital resource. (“The good news,” notes the Jerusalem Post, “is that by 2020, all Israelis will be drinking recycled sewage. The bad news: There may not be enough.”)