by Alan Weisman
A slight man in his eighties in a high-button black pin-striped suit, Naseem has seen the number of Muslims here quadruple, a growth now slowing as immigration tightens. Also, he notes, as succeeding Muslim generations whose language is English spread beyond the nationality enclaves of their parents, they don’t have eight children like their Bangladeshi or Pakistani mothers. There is no injunction in the Qur’an against contraception—there is even discussion of the seventh-century version, coitus interruptus, in the Hadith commentaries. It’s common today to see women in headscarves in the waiting rooms of local family-planning clinics.
“But the damage was already done,” says Naseem, a medical doctor. “Their parents arrived with a history of centuries of children dying, of always needing more hands to do the work. A new passport doesn’t instantly change that.”
Only time does, he says. The present generation might have far fewer children, and Muslim girls might now prepare at Oxford and Cambridge for careers, but it is a much larger generation, so for a while their swathe in the tapestry of British society will continue to widen. In the meantime, a new growth spurt in the Muslim community is due neither to procreation nor immigration.
“Converts are increasing. West Indians, even indigenous white Britons,” he says, as a white-robed, bearded Caucasian British acolyte appears with a tray of tea.
“The majority,” interjects the acolyte, “are women.”
Why are Englishwomen converting to Islam?
“Because of the protection that Islam offers them. They say they feel more secure covered by a hijab or wrapped in a chador. Safer.”
“Fifty countries, and one-fifth of the planet’s people are Muslim,” says Haji Fazlun Khalid. “Some fear that. I see it as an opportunity. The Qu’ran tells us to remember Allah’s blessings and to not defile the Earth. If Muslims heed that, we can make a big difference.”
Khalid, founder of the Birmingham-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Science, sits on the café terrace of the public library in Burton-Upon-Trent a half-hour north, drinking lemonade. The view overlooks the Trent Washlands, a chain of river meadows dotted with old pollarded willows and marsh marigolds. Khalid, a tall, bald man in wire-rimmed glasses with a trim beard, often comes here to think.
An immigrant from Ceylon (today Sri Lanka), after serving in the Royal Air Force and then for years as Midlands director of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, he resigned the civil service to take a graduate degree in Islamic theology. Having watched the jungles of his boyhood razed for tea plantations and then seen the Midlands countryside where he hiked fill with houses, he was curious to know if Islam offered guidance about the besieged environment.
Early in the Qur’an, in a surah that describes how Ibrahim embraces monotheism, he found that the Prophet Muhammad appointed Muslims as khalifas, guardians of the Earth, and warned against excessive exploitation. In the Sunnah—collected sayings and acts of the Prophet that, with the Qur’an, form the basis of shariah law—Khalid read that Allah is the sole owner of the Earth and everything in it. He loans the world to humans to use, but not to abuse.
His nonprofit group has published Green Guides for Muslim households and mobilized urban Muslims into “Clean Medina” campaigns. They’ve held conferences on whether genetically modified food is permissible halal and on the Qur’anic grounds for recycling. They’ve helped establish a shariah-based conservation zone in the Zanzibar archipelago to save Indian Ocean coral reefs, and given workshops there to dissuade fishing with dynamite. In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population and one of its richest ecosystems, they convinced Sumatran religious scholars to issue the world’s first environmental fatwas, warning that illegal logging, mining, and burning forests are haram: forbidden under divine law.
The 2007 Live Earth Initiative named Fazlun Khalid one of the world’s fifteen green religious leaders, along with the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope. “Many of the world’s nearly 1.5 billion Muslims are from poor countries that use far less fossil fuel than the rich,” he says. “But many also live in fabulously wealthy nations that produce oil. We are equally culpable. Rich petroleum states by their sheer wealth, and the rest of Muslims by our sheer numbers.”
In the Qur’an, Khalid says, the Prophet counsels people to have no more children than they can provide for. Countries awash in oil, he adds, also have a sacred responsibility for the consequences of their industry. “The Maldives are now destined to vanish under the sea. That means the first country to disappear from the face of the Earth due to climate change will be a Muslim nation.”
He has advised the Secretary General of the United Nations, and consults to Prince Charles. But he’s not sure how well they’ve listened.
“At the root of the environmental crisis is our financial system. Banks charge interest, and create money out of nothing.” In four different surahs, the Qur’an prohibits riba, or usury, as one of Islam’s most heinous sins. But he considers Islamic banking, which avoids charging interest through machinations that still earn banks profits from borrowers, to be an oxymoron.
“If we continue to create money infinitely and then apply it to resources Allah created as finite, the only long-term scenario is environmental destruction. Money is a virus. If we cure it, we will heal our environment. Population and consumerism will take care of themselves.”
But the global financial system is now as intrinsic to civilization as the atmosphere. Can it be changed? Gazing at the River Trent, golden in the afternoon sun, Khalid quotes from the Qur’an, Surah 30:41: “ ‘Corruption has spread far and wide over the land and sea, due to the actions of humankind. Allah will make them taste of their own actions as a means to find a way back to Him.’ It means that God will make us feel the error of our ways, then give us a second chance. We must seize the chance God gives us,” he says. “In our race to grow to infinity, we put too much pressure on this Earthly space. If pressure is instead placed on our population, universally and fairly, that may be a good step.”
iii. The Optimum
The 1993 World Optimum Population Conference in Cambridge, where the Ehrlichs and Gretchen Daily presented their calculation that the Earth could safely handle a population of 2 billion humans, was organized by the Optimum Population Trust. An environmental think tank, OPT had been founded a year earlier by David Willey, an Oxford classics scholar who started language schools throughout Europe. A world traveler, he’d lately noticed how crowded the planet had grown, and wondered what might be done.
OPT’s mission was to promote research that might determine the optimum, sustainable human population for given regions, as well as for the entire world. Although its goals were grand and it attracted illustrious patrons—esteemed naturalist and BBC broadcaster Sir David Attenborough; primate biologist Dame Jane Goodall; and former UK representative to the UN Security Council Sir Crispin Tickell—its research resources were limited. Its chief focus became its campaign to lower the population of the United Kingdom.
It was a campaign that inevitably risked accusation of encouraging racial politics that spawn the likes of the British National Party. OPT’s members and patrons would respond that in 1973, long before Europe’s current wave of xenophobia, a UK government population panel had concluded that the Britain must accept that its “population cannot go on increasing indefinitely.” As nothing had been done since to enact the panel’s recommendations, the Optimum Population Trust formed to urge government to integrate population policy into its decision making.
Nevertheless, being called bedfellows to racists hearkens uneasily to old associations of birth control with eugenics. Their reason for seeking to determine the optimum population for their island nation was based on environmental carrying capacity, not hatred or exclusionary politics, yet with two-thirds of Britain’s population increase due to immigration, it was a delicate job to convince others that to oppose more immigration didn’t mean opposing immigrants themselves.2
&n
bsp; OPT had two further goals, neither apt to make it more popular. One was to “oppose the view held by many politicians and economists and those in the commercial world, that a perpetually expanding economy, alongside perpetual population growth, is desirable and possible.”
The other, ominously: “To make it widely understood that failure to reduce population is likely to lead to a population crash when fossil fuels, fresh water and other resources become scarce.”
June 2010: Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, finishes his afternoon tea in the bar of the Hotel Russell in Bloomsbury, central London, and heads up the street to the St. Pancras Church, where the debate will take place. A tall, thin, graying man, he wears a dark red tie and lightweight suit with a white pinstripe. His leather briefcase looks as though he’s carried it for years. He is a retired foreign officer who returned after years in Africa with an idea of what was going very wrong in the world, and he looks weary from knowing.
The debate is in conjunction with an art installation about overpopulation in the Crypt Gallery, a converted catacomb beneath the church. Like many such crypts in London, this one was dug in the early nineteenth century to answer a need for more burial space, as rising Industrial Revolution populations filled village graveyards to overflowing. After a few decades, church crypts were closed to further interments for health concerns, presumably because smallpox could linger in long-dead corpses, but the brick-lined tunnels here still hold the remains of 557 people.
The exhibit features fifty canvases by British painter and environmental architect Gregor Harvie. Each has a distinct palette, but all resemble swarms of proliferating cells as viewed under a microscope. Tightly hung under the cramped ceiling, the effect is of the swarms mutating from canvas to canvas, out of control. They are accompanied by fifty “elegies” on wall-mounted placards, by the painter’s wife, writer Alex Harvie. Each memorializes a past society in which rapid growth was followed by collapse. They start in the Pleistocene, when the first Australians and North Americans expunged the resident megafauna from their new homes. They range through the tragedy of Sumerians who turned Garden of Eden soils between the Tigris and Euphrates into sterile salt flats; the stripped, treeless hills that were the undoing of classical Greece; Peru’s vanished Nasca people and Mexico’s Olmec; the acidification of once-lush British moors by Bronze Age tin smelters; the hapless Viking farmers who perished in Greenland when the climate shifted.
They conclude in recent memory: China’s Great Leap Forward, which overshot its capacity to produce food, starving 40 million; the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in bursting Rwanda; the calamitous shriveling of the Sahel; the horror of Haiti; Madagascar’s red soil bleeding away to sea. It is unsettling to read them in a crypt, alongside plaques commemorating those interred here.
The debate takes place aboveground, in the church’s main sanctuary. Yet again, the topic is what to do about rising population. Six people are on the panel, three associated with OPT, including Roger Martin. The others include a woman who heads a relief agency for urban African street children, a Cambridge University minister, and an environmental writer for New Scientist magazine. The host of a BBC Radio 4 science program is the moderator. The panelists sit at a long table in front of six marble-painted pillars in the church’s colonnaded, semicircular apse, facing an audience of about a hundred fifty in dark oak pews.
The first to speak, Dr. John Guillebaud, is professor emeritus of family planning and reproductive health at University College, London. Guillebaud, his dark suit punctuated by an orange daisy in his lapel, notes that every year the world adds the equivalent of another Germany or Egypt. He invites people to try to imagine where to fit another of either on the planet. He talks about the human gluttony behind the recent BP—née British Petroleum—outrage in the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of a bit more of the world’s remaining known oil.
“Resource shortages are mainly caused by ‘long-ages’ of people,” he says. “If the world were run by biologists and not economists, everyone would know that no species can go around multiplying indefinitely, humankind included, without eventually running out of vital resources like food, and ultimately ending with the collapse of numbers through deaths. Unremitting growth, folks, is the doctrine of the cancer cell.”
He speculates as to why something so logical has become such a taboo, concluding that it’s become inextricably tangled with our fear of being coerced. The phrase population control, he says, has become repellant.
“It suggests China; control by Big Brother. Please don’t say population control. It does damage.” He ends by explaining that even though worldwide birthrates are going down, “Due to a bulge of births from previous high birth rates, we are still in trouble. It’s called population momentum, and it’s the reason why we’re absolutely certain to get at least another two billion more people, because all of tomorrow’s parents are alive today.”
Next is the one whose presence qualifies this event as a debate, because he’s the only person on the panel expected to take a contrarian view. Fred Pearce, writer for New Scientist, recently published a book whose title in the UK, Peoplequake, is less to the point than its American title: The Coming Population Crash. “The truth,” he says, reiterating the book’s premise, “is that the world is now defusing population bombs.”
The world’s total fertility rate is down to 2.6 children per woman, he explains, when little more than a generation earlier it was at 5. Not just in wealthy countries, where career women don’t want to be tied to the house by too many children. “It’s being done by the world’s poorest and least educated women, who other people often see as villains in the population story.”
Even in Bangladesh, where women marry in their teens, the average is down to 3, he says. In the world’s biggest Catholic country, Brazil, “Most women have two children now. Nothing the priests say can stop millions of them from getting sterilized. What’s going on? Something very simple: Women are finally choosing to have smaller families, because for the first time, they can.”
Pearce, with sandy gray hair parted in the middle and a scruffy gray beard, says he wants to focus on the good news that the world is winning the population battle. By the stony silence, it’s not clear that this audience is convinced, let alone the other panelists. He explains that with modern medical advances, mothers no longer need six children so that enough survive to ensure a next generation.
“It took a while to realize that. While people were still having five or six and most reached adulthood, that’s when the population bomb happened. That’s why world population quadrupled in the twentieth century. But we’re reaching the end of that phase. Two or three is enough, we now realize. Rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslims or Catholics, secular or devout, tough government controls or not, small families are the new norm in most of the world.”
The trouble, he acknowledges, is that even at this new, decreased fertility rate, the world is likely to add another 2 billion people by mid-century before numbers begin to decline because of the population momentum that John Guillebaud described.
“But rising consumption today, in my view, is a far greater threat to the planet than a rising head-count. The richest 7 percent are responsible for 50 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. The poorest 50 percent are responsible for 7 percent of the emissions. There’s no way that halting population growth will do something about climate change. The population bomb is being defused. We haven’t begun to defuse the consumption problem.”
His book made the same points: population is already coming under control nicely, and to worry about it distracts from the real menace, consumption. It went further, saying that thanks to the Green Revolution “with one bound, the world was free of its Malthusian [and] Ehrlichian bonds.” And in a chapter titled “Winter in Europe,” he warned that “a birth dearth is about to plunge the continent into a tailspin of ever-declining numbers…. Demographically, Europe is living on borrowed time.”
It is his images of
empty Sardinian villages and former East German towns now overrun by wolves that OPT chairman Roger Martin has in his mind as his turn arrives. His voice is calm, but color singes his pale cheeks. “It’s not either-or, either consumption or numbers. It’s obviously both. The total impact is one multiplied by the other.”
He quotes OPT patron Sir David Attenborough: “ ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, and utterly impossible if there were more.’
“We all agree that the solution is to empower women to control their own fertility. It doesn’t help, frankly, for people to say, ‘That’s happening anyway, don’t worry.’ This is not an automatic process that will happen if no one tries to make it happen. It needs priority in budgets to fund programs to make it happen.”
Martin turns to face Pearce. “This is not, Fred, us blaming the poor”—adding, as he turns back to the audience, “a phrase he likes to use about us. It is helping the poor to achieve what they want to get, which is stable populations.”
He acknowledges that the rich must emit vastly less carbon. But he also points out that to achieve some semblance of equity, the poor will have to emit more carbon. “And that figure will be much higher, the more we are. The sooner we cut our numbers, the more carbon we can emit and the better quality of life we can support.”
His candor causes a stir in the audience. Discussions of carbon emissions usually lead to calls for clean renewables to replace dirty fossil fuels immediately. Martin, however, has alluded to the growing understanding that this can’t happen anytime soon, if ever: renewable technologies potent enough to run all the world’s factories, vehicles, heating, and cooling simply don’t exist yet, even if the political will to switch tomorrow existed. And the amount of fossil fuel required to mine component metals and to build solar and wind power installations incurs an emissions debt that takes decades to environmentally amortize before their output can be considered truly carbon-free. In the meantime, he argues, the best hope to keep the planet livable is to reduce the number of us making all the demands.