by Alan Weisman
They did not discuss how to bring the population back down to 1½ billion people—approximately the global population at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, one country had already embarked on a plan that, were the whole world to adopt it, within a century would bring the numbers back exactly to those of 1900. That was China, whose one-child policy was considered unacceptably brutal.
Neither the Ehrlichs, Gretchen Daily, nor nearly anyone else knew in 1993 that in an equally inscrutable, large country in another part of the world—a Muslim country—an alternative to China’s coercion was under way in which citizens would voluntarily reduce their high birth rate even faster than China, though years would have to pass before its extraordinary success would become apparent.
Two decades later, at eighty, Paul Ehrlich would still be presiding over Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. When asked why, he would reply, “To free up Gretchen Daily.” She was now the Center’s nominal director, winner of several of the world’s highest honors in science for her efforts to find a workable balance between people and nature.
To do that requires research into what species and ecosystems would continue to exist in the future. That raises a corollary, excruciating question, one that most scientists are loath to touch: Which species, from the perspectives of both science and human society, are so important that they and their habitats most merit protection?
To judge that a charismatic polar bear or cuddly panda is more significant than some inconspicuous brown bird hopping unnoticed on a forest floor, and therefore more crucial to save, is the ecological equivalent of Sophie’s Choice. No one, least of all Gretchen Daily, wants to make such a decision. Yet this is a world where many people are skeptical that species other than edible domestic animals are particularly important at all. Europeans, after all, are among the healthiest humans on Earth, despite having purged their continent of much if not most of its biodiversity. What is the justification for keeping every variety of flora, fauna, and mushroom intact—or what is the danger if we don’t?
This, Gretchen knew, was the tyranny of the Netherlands Fallacy: all Europeans were as dependent on a robust planet as any fisherman in the Philippines or hunter-gatherer in the Amazon. The resources that afforded Europe’s exalted standard of living came from farther away than Europeans could see, courtesy of all the imports their euros could buy. Rich countries fly high on the wings of distant lands that still have enough rivets in place.
Now, however, they were popping fast. Every decision of which rivet was more important than another was playing Russian roulette with the global biosphere. The truth that Gretchen Daily lived with was knowing that there will inevitably be a certain amount of Sophie’s Choice. “We can still bring a lot of life along with us,” she told her students. “But we can’t bring everything.”
No one knows which, or how many, are the essential minimum. Nevertheless, the ecologists’ job was to show that there are definitely some we can’t live without, such as pollinators and water conservers, and to help us realize that those species, in turn, can’t live without a habitat to sustain them.
As the years went by and the century turned, the estimate that Daily and the Ehrlichs had conjured from John Holdren’s energy arithmetic of how many humans the global habitat could safely sustain remained unchanged. No new technological miracle had stretched the planetary playing field.
All that did change was the number of players. There were 1½ billion more of us, all competing for space and sustenance with every other living thing.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 5
Island World
i. The Xenophobe
The River Severn is Britain’s longest, rising in a Welsh peat bog and arcing east through the Midlands until it turns south, swelling into Bristol Channel and the Atlantic. Much of its course lies in Shropshire, where, about a third of the way, it loops through Shrewsbury, a market town since medieval times.
As a boy, Charles Darwin learned as much along the banks of the Severn as he did at Shrewsbury School. His family’s garden path led down to the river, where he walked before breakfast, returning with beetles he’d collect. He encountered birds no longer seen here, such as corncrakes and nightingales, and others that still are, such as Britain’s three species of swan: mute, Bewick’s, and whooper.
Nearly every geologic period in Earthly history appears in outcroppings along the Severn’s Shropshire drainage; some of the remnant corals, limestone, marine fossils, and quartzite date to half a billion years ago, when the Midlands were on the opposite side of today’s equator—apt inspiration for young Darwin, who, at age twenty-two, was headed there himself. Upon his return in 1836 from the epic five-year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, his first night was spent back in Shrewsbury, where he dined at the Lion, a sixteenth-century inn.
One hundred and seventy-five years later, Simon Darby sits in the Lion, frowning over his shepherd’s pie. In his mid-forties, he has pale blue eyes and thick flat eyebrows, with tightly cropped black hair that feathers into a thinning widow’s peak. Darby was also raised in the Midlands, just outside industrial Birmingham. In 1709, his ancestor Abraham Darby invented the coke-fueled blast furnace that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Darby cast-iron foundries changed the future of England, and of the planet. The world’s first iron bridge still spans the Severn. The first iron-framed building, a flax mill on Shrewsbury’s outskirts, is the ancestor of today’s skyscrapers. The Darby company also built the world’s first steam locomotive.
Both the Industrial Revolution and the family fortune had vanished into history by the time Simon Darby was born. Like Darwin, he studied biology and chemistry, but he never used his degree. He got into computers, and then into postindustrial Midlands politics, ending up as deputy chairman of the far-right British National Party. He often stands in for the BNP chairman, Cambridge-educated Nick Griffin, who has been charged more than once for inciting hatred toward Jews and Muslims. In 1998, Griffin was convicted for a series of articles that mocked the Holocaust. Yet by 2009, he and Darby had recast their fringe party’s former skinhead-and-leather image with neat haircuts and neckties, and Griffin was elected to the European Parliament, representing North West England. The British National Party polled nearly a million votes nationwide.
As party spokesman, Darby has earned his own notoriety, most famously for a reply to the Archbishop of York, a Ugandan native, who’d criticized a BNP demand that black and Asian Britons be described as “racial foreigners.”
“He said everyone who wanted to be English could be English,” Darby explains in the Lion’s restaurant. “But what about the real and proper English? That’s my heritage. It cheapens my own identity, you see.” Even as his color rises, his voice remains a soft tenor. “So I said that if I went to a Uganda village and told them that they were all genetic mongrels and that anyone could be Ugandan, I’d still be picking spears out of myself.”
He shrugs. “It was a perfectly rational thing to say about a nation whose coat of arms has spears on it.” He sets his fork down. “Look: We’ve got an increasing generation of people who don’t really belong to the island. They don’t have a common history here. They don’t feel that it’s their heritage, and they don’t look after it. I mean, why would they?
“There’s an Oxford demographer,” he continues, “who is debunking this mongrel Briton kind of assumption. He says that 90-odd percent of everyone with a maternal grandparent born in this country can trace their ancestry back ten thousand years. Right to the Ice Age. I put it to the test: I used genetic mapping on both my maternal and paternal DNA. And sure enough, I’m what was referred to in the database as a native son of Europe. Which is good enough for me.”
A waitress appears, wide-cheeked, with blond hair pulled behind her ears. “Excuse me,” she says. “Are you finished?”
Darby stabs a final bit of shepherd’s pie. “Yeah.” He stares at her as he chews, until their blue eyes lock. Her prim smile turns puzzled.
/> “Everything was… fine?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He leans forward and squints. “Are you from Poland, actually?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I just noticed the accent.”
“My accent. Yes.”
“There’s a program on the BBC called Lead Balloon. Have you heard of it? A girl on there called Magda who plays a Polish girl.”
On the program, the character Magda, an eastern European housekeeper, is regularly perplexed by the ways of the British. “She has the exact same accent as you.”
“Exactly the same?”
“Exactly.”
“What’s the program of this? Red Balloon?” she asks, gathering plates.
“Lead Balloon. L-e-a-d.”
“Okay. Thank you.” She retreats.
He leans back. “Nice lady. Does her job. But how do our people feel when they need a job and she’ll work for a lot less than they do? I quite like Polish people. But I’ve asked them, how would you feel if the Polish government told you, ‘We’re going to import millions of Vietnamese, who will undercut your wages and work for next to nothing’?”
He swirls his empty glass, clinking the ice cubes. “They wouldn’t put up with it, would they? There would be riots in Poland.”
But the European Union–sanctioned labor mobility that allows thousands of hardworking Poles to seek employment in the UK is merely an irritant to Simon Darby’s British National Party, compared to what they and their counterparts in other western European nations see as a far deeper threat.
“There is now a war on Western civilization—a cultural war on white society. Muslims in this country have six children as an average, whereas we don’t even maintain our own population. Muslims believe that the more kids they have, the more power they’ll have. This country’s population is headed to 70 million. That is simply not sustainable.”
Currently, there are nearly 63 million Britons. “Right,” he says, standing. “And we’ve got all the overpopulation problems: transport, stress levels, the violence when people live on top of one another. It’s bad enough in a monocultural society. In a multicultural society, it’s destabilizing.”
Outside the Lion Hotel, Shrewsbury seems a postcard of stability. Some cobbled streets have given way to asphalt, but their configuration hasn’t changed since medieval English was spoken here. The palette of the pedestrians is richer than in Darwin’s monochromatic era, but there is no overwhelming Muslim presence—although the next parish to the east, Telford, near the famous Iron Bridge, has thirteen mosques and is one of the UK’s fastest-growing towns.
“And Bradford in Yorkshire is an Islamic town now. They run it. In much of Birmingham, we people don’t show up anymore. In London now, only 17 percent of the kids are like me.”
It is June; the sun has pushed morning’s clouds to the green horizon. In shirtsleeves, Simon Darby heads toward the English Bridge, where steps lead down to the river. Two girls in hijabs and blue jeans exit an herbal shop and pass without a glance, intent on their mobile phones.
Darby shakes his head. “They’ll push us out.”
It’s a fear that oozes through much of western Europe, giving rise to quasi-fascist political movements in previously welcoming, liberal places like Denmark and the Netherlands. This fear is often summed up with a vivid neologism: Eurabia. A virtual epidemiology of lurid Internet videos mutate around a theme of Europe becoming a vast Islamic nation by mid-century. Among their claims:
French Muslims average 8.1 children per family. Southern France already has more mosques than churches. Thirty percent of French children are Muslim. In Paris, 45 percent. By 2027, one in five Frenchmen will bow to Mecca five times daily.
Fifty percent of Dutch newborns are Muslims, as will be half the Netherlands by 2023.
A quarter of Belgians and 50 percent of newborns are Muslims. In Brussels, the EU says that one-third of European children will be Islamic by 2025.
With just 1.3 children per woman of childbearing age, the collapse of the German population is irreversible, and by 2050, Germany will be a Muslim state.
Forty percent of the Russian army will be soon be Islamic.
None is remotely true. The high range of projections suggests that Europe’s 20 million Muslims—about 5 percent of the population in 2011—will increase to 8 percent by 2025. What is real, however, is Islamophobia. At the English Bridge’s stone arch, Simon Darby gestures at riverbank strollers and anglers casting for pike below, all who appear to be Caucasian.
“Those people have mortgages. They’ve got kids and pets and pay council taxes. But a third-world immigrant can live in a flat for twenty-five pounds a week. He’s got no overhead, so he can afford lower wages. So our guy loses his house. My people have rights, too. Japanese do what they want in their own country. We feel we should remain dominant in this country. Because it’s ours.”
He pauses on the steps. “If I went to Iran, I wouldn’t expect churches. But if I do the same in this country, then I’m a racist villain.”
But below, where huge old riverbank willows droop over the water, Simon Darby is not a villain, but a boy again. The petulant ultranationalist fades, and the naturalist reemerges. He delights in swallows and martins dipping above the river’s surface. “And those swifts—beautiful little birds. All the way from Africa!” He spies a brood of cygnets following a mute swan hen. “This is our biggest British bird. We have three swans in Britain: these resident mutes, and the wintering whooper and Bewick’s swans, which come from Russia and that area. Some like it so much they’ve settled here,” he says proudly.
“But it’s not the same. People trap and eat them now. Eastern Europeans. Very unfortunate.” He points at a big mute swan probing the bank with its yellow bill. “They see something like that as a free lunch. They aren’t rooted in the ecology, the nature of this island.”
Darby’s party frequently plays the environmental card, calling for halts to fracking and bans on shale gas exploration, claiming agreement with its political opposite, the Green Party. They embrace the tenets of an organization of distinguished British doctors, activists, and scientists, the Optimum Population Trust.1 Although the embrace is not returned, some of their concerns do coincide: This is an island ecosystem, its limits starkly delineated by its shores. The 70 million that Darby cites are expected by 2030. That will be the equivalent of adding another London, the biggest city in Europe, to this increasingly crowded British isle.
More than two-thirds of that increase will come from foreign immigrants and their offspring. As an EU member, Britain must welcome job seekers from any other EU country, on top of its custom of accepting subjects from its former empire (via a system that has segued over the years from unlimited entry to work permits, then to selective, points-based immigration). Back when that mainly meant Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, nobody much noticed. Later, the unexpected arrivals of citizens from so-called “New Commonwealth” countries—the Nigerias, Pakistans, Jamaicas, and Bangladeshes—gave rise to nationalists like Simon Darby.
There is environmental justification, he says, for his party’s goal of stopping immigration and “deporting all the illegal immigrants.” As this presumably would take time, the BNP also advocates financial penalties for “communities that continue to have excessively large families.”
The ideal number of United Kingdom citizens they propose is 40 million. Leaving aside the environmental and economic implications of such an implosion, census figures show that more than 50 million Britons are white. Evicting every person of color from Great Britain would still leave more than 10 million extra Caucasians.
Of UK nonwhites, just 2.7 million are estimated to be Muslim. Yet what Simon Darby sees is the Britain he thought he inherited disappearing under an unfamiliar sea of sepia, where one of six Britons no longer looks like his image of the English, Welsh, or Scottish.
“It’s sad. The idea that we’re now a rich rainbow of cultures is nonsense. Go to Birmingham, where I w
as born. See the Islamo-Marxist liberals who hide their own inadequacies by destroying the very system that makes them inadequate. They drag it all down.”
He walks back into the old streets of Shrewsbury. “This city produced Charles Darwin. My ancestors invented industry. We Brits were clever and strong. We were wealthy. We had pride. We used to build the Concorde. Now our aircraft industry can’t make anything but the wings for the Airbus. Jaguar is owned by an Indian company. British Land Rover is gone, MG is gone. No steel industry, no coal, no shipping, our fishing industry barely clinging.”
He turns his palms up helplessly. “All that, in my lifetime.”
ii. The Rainbow
Birmingham, England’s second largest city, is where Simon Darby’s forebears cast iron, forged steel, and mounted their great Industrial Revolution. The original Anglo-Saxon hamlet here was just south of today’s city center, in an area now called Highgate. It is characterized mainly by its lack of character: a succession of blank high-and low-rises, built atop World War II Birmingham Blitz rubble. The striking architectural exception in Highgate is the Birmingham Central Mosque, one of the largest in western Europe.
The rectilinear red masonry exterior of its first two stories recalls the factories of Birmingham’s past. It then rises into the postindustrial, multicultural present with a dramatic white dome—and twice the height of that, a single minaret topped by a crescent, its points heavenward.
Three to four thousand fill its green-carpeted prayer hall and women’s galleries every Friday. On festival days, twenty thousand may appear. Birmingham also has 290 smaller mosques, serving a Muslim population of about two hundred fifty thousand, around one-fourth of the city’s total. The assorted mosques reflect an immigrant tendency to congregate with fellow nationals: Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian. Although most are Sunnis—as were the Islamic lands once ruled by the British Empire—the Central Mosque is nondenominational—“to promote thinking, not religious laws,” says its Indian-born founder, Dr. Mohammad Naseem.