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

by Alan Weisman

  “Otherwise,” Martin concludes, “every additional person simply ratchets down everyone else’s carbon ration.”

  And with that, the fireworks are mostly over. The Street Children Africa director, a British-educated Belgian named Savina Geerinckx, poses the pertinent question Are street children the visible manifestation of overpopulation? and responds by noting the obvious: Most would not be on the streets if their parents had had access to family planning.

  “If young people are targeted for sex education,” she warns, “street children should be a top priority. Sixty-three percent have a sexual encounter within their first week on the streets. And 90 percent of it will be unprotected.” Her organization, she adds, is now dealing with third-generation street babies.

  Zoologist Aubrey Manning, OBE, the august, eighty-year-old presence on her left, swiftly summarizes the biology pertinent to the population matter: “Human beings are rapidly becoming a monoculture—a voracious monoculture. We suck resources in at the cost of the rest of life on the planet.” Every plan for the future, he says, “is totally anthropocentric: What can we do to make us better? Let us also recognize that by diminishing the planet’s resources, we are threatening our own existence. Because, like all other plant and animal species, we rely on a planet being able to renew clean air, clean water, and fertile soils to keep us alive.”

  Like other biologists of his generation, he is confounded that his own kind is perpetrating an extinction the likes of which the planet has seen only five times previously over the past 4 billion years—and previously, always due to some monumental upheaval of geology, or a disaster of cosmology when an errant bit of creation collides with our own. “I am sickened by the destruction of so many of our fellow creatures. Our descendants will be diminished as human beings if they can’t share the planet with a rich biodiversity. We will have to reduce the strain on the Earth, reduce our carbon footprint, and stop having third children. Numbers count.”

  There is an easy way to evaluate the population debate on moral grounds, suggests the Reverend Jeremy Caddick, whose Cambridge chapel was the first in Britain’s Anglican church to bless gay unions.

  “In a traditional moral debate about say, abortion rights, usually somebody says, ‘Well, that’s your opinion. I think differently.’ But if you say, ‘Adolf Hitler believed that exterminating whole races of people was acceptable; that’s just his opinion,’ that’s less credible. If the issues in the population debate are connected to the very survival of our species and culture, then the notion that different views are just people’s opinion is frankly ridiculous.”

  If the future of the human race indeed depends on tackling population increase head-on, it must be asked if it’s feasible—and if so, how quickly can or must it happen.

  “It probably will take care of itself, mostly,” offers Fred Pearce in the discussion afterward, but tonight he’s alone in that opinion. This is London, which has added more than five hundred thousand people since the millennium turned, and a million more are expected by 2020. Boroughs are warring over how many housing units developers can build, and how many the city can sustainably tolerate. With England feeling more mashed each year, its reservoirs strained, and 15 million more people projected by mid-century, it doesn’t feel like the problem is taking care of itself. The Office of National Statistics projects that thanks to health care, a third of UK babies will celebrate their hundredth birthday, and that by 2035 the number of centenarians will increase eightfold. By 2050, the United Kingdom will be the biggest country in western Europe.

  “I think we pussyfoot around this word coercion,” says Aubrey Manning. “Let’s remember that for centuries, governments and churches have been coercing people into having more children. We have to give governments the courage to recognize that we’re overpopulated and the best thing that could possibly happen is population decline.” He’s applauded.

  Even at today’s slowing growth rate, world population still will hit at least 10.9 billion by 2100, a figure that terrifies ecologists, who warn that the 7 billion we’re already at is stretching the world beyond its breaking point—and that 10.9 billion people likely will never happen, because 7 billion of us are already turning the atmosphere into something unlivable. The UK, however, is actually growing faster than at any time in the last two hundred years. By 2033, it is projected to reach 72 million (and the United States, the other developed nation that is still growing, will approach 400 million). With the UK adding the equivalent of ten more Birminghams by 2033, Optimum Population Trust’s own goal for a sustainable Britain is even more radical than the British National Party’s 30 million. Despite recently dropping the phrase optimum population for its new working name, Population Matters, publications on its website still advocate one for the UK: between 17 and 27 million.

  The BBC moderator is upset that Manning invoked the c-word. “At what point does any kind of policy merit the term coercive?” he wants to know.

  At no point, apparently. Their applause notwithstanding, everyone here abhors China’s one-child policy and the enforced sterilizations of India Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s regime. But since it’s unclear how to speed toward their goal otherwise, this question raises the objection that it should be a woman’s right, not a government’s, to decide for herself how many children she wants. Suddenly, the apparently united crowd divides over whether women will be victims or beneficiaries of hard decisions that protect nature from being crushed by human excess.

  A male in the audience stands up. “When you promote family planning on the basis that too many children will doom the environment, you’re using the politics of fear and moral blackmail. You’re not giving people a choice; you’re giving them an ultimatum. This is naked moral coercion of women to make the right choices as defined by you, or they will single-handedly destroy the planet by daring to have too many children. I challenge the idea that family planning in the Third World is about female empowerment. Every Malthusian in history has been wrong. So has Paul Ehrlich.”

  He gets applauded, too, demonstrating how truly emotionally confusing the thought of restraining our natural urge to procreate is.

  “That’s the popular position of rich people in the world,” retorts Aubrey Manning. “The Earth is limitless. You just fiddle with technology, and increase food supplies. But we are now climbing a down escalator. It’s unimaginable how anybody can suppose that population growth could go on indefinitely. It’s the idea that we have some kind of right to go on the way we’re going. We are living in cloud-cuckoo-land if we believe that the Earth will go on providing. As for decisions, who’s going to speak for orangutans?”

  Another ovation.

  Strangely, two things go unmentioned. One is Europe’s aging demographics. A book currently selling in England, propounding the same crashing-population theme as Fred Pearce’s, is The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, by an American, Phillip Longman. It urges western Europeans to have more babies, lest their pensions and their economy collapse.

  The other omission is apparent from the complexions of the evening’s attendees: Everyone present is white. A two-hour discussion on overpopulation has taken place in London without any reference to the politically touchy fact that the United Kingdom’s growth is mainly due to immigration. The missing elephant in the room is anyone resembling an immigrant.

  This odd fact recalls a comment earlier in the evening by Fred Pearce that evoked no response: a large Muslim country, he said, with no coercion à la Mao Zedong or Indira Gandhi’s zealot son Sanjay, has managed to bring their once-high birth rate below replacement level.

  “In the past twenty-five years, behind the veil,” Pearce said, “the number of children Iranian women are having has crashed, from eight to less than two—1.7, on average. Women in Tehran today have fewer children than their sisters in New York, believe it or not.”

  Nobody seemed to have heard.

  CHAPTER 6

  Holy Se
e

  i. Sancta Scientia

  Behind St. Peter’s Basilica is a narrow road leading north past a gauntlet of gendarmerie and up a gentle slope. Where it crests, the pines and cedars of Lebanon that shade the Vatican Gardens’ lawns give way below to an illusion of climate shift, in the form of a stand of date palms from the Canary Islands.

  The palms flank an oval marble courtyard and a sumptuous villa encrusted with ornate stucco reliefs, a building begun in 1558 as a summer home for Pope Paul IV, who died before he ever slept there. Three years later, it was completed by his successor, Pope Pius IV, who directed its architect to sculpt an extravagant exterior montage of what at first seems to have little to do with Christianity. Instead, the imagery hearkens to mythology: Apollo, the Muses, Pan, Medusa, and even Bacchus, with the heavens represented by the zodiac. But to the erudite Renaissance mind, Casina Pio IV’s façade symbolized the Church’s triumph over pagan beliefs that preceded it, which reduced icons of Greece’s classical pantheon to allegories of the victorious Christian world. On the gleaming white walls, Hercules and Cybele evoked Christ and the Virgin—as did, on the casina’s fountain loggia, Adonis and Venus, and Jupiter and Amalthea.

  Above the tabernacle facing the courtyard was Pius IV’s coat of arms followed by the words Pontifex Optimus Maximus: pontiff supreme. The casina’s interior featured the prevailing canon, its vaulted ceilings lavishly frescoed with scenes from Genesis and Exodus to the life and agony of Christ and his encounters with various saints.

  Casina Pio 4, Vatican

  PHOTOGRAPH BY CATARINA BELOVA/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

  Since 1936, Casina Pio IV has housed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Intended to demonstrate that faith and science are compatible, it dates to 1847, when shortly after his election, Pope Pius IX resurrected a former Roman scientific academy once led by Galileo. Today, about eighty scientists from around the world are members, a quarter of them Nobel laureates. Its roster includes non-Catholics, and even suspected atheists such as physicist Stephen Hawking. Several times a year, its scientists meet to discuss relevant contemporary issues and publish the proceedings.

  In the early years of his nearly thirty-two-year reign, the Academy’s founder, Pius IX, was a popular liberal reformer. He was also the last head of the Papal States—land that encompassed much of today’s central Italy, which the Church had acquired from wealthy adherents, including emperors Constantine and Charlemagne. Italian nationalists, however, eventually stripped the church-state of all its territory save 110 acres that comprise today’s Vatican City—and turned the populist pope into a reactionary. Pius IX is best recalled not for his enlightened incorporation of a scientific body within the Church, but for convoking the First Vatican Council in 1868 to bolster Catholicism against rising secular tides.

  The most memorable achievement of Vatican I was the declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility. Unprecedented in Church history, it stated unequivocally that on matters of morals and faith, the Pope’s teachings are divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, and thus irreversible. That declaration would later bring the Church and Pius IX’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences to an embarrassing impasse.

  Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, sits at a long, polished hardwood table in Casina Pio IV beneath a Zuccari fresco of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. He is Argentine, in his early seventies, tall with a straight nose, thick eyebrows, and a receding gray hairline that has reached the top of his head. A gold cross on a chain and rimless reading glasses hang over his black jacket and black clerical shirt. A professor of philosophy, Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo assumed his position here five years after the events of 1994 that caused that impasse and enraged Pope John Paul II, who appointed him.

  In September 1994, the third decennial United Nations Conference on Population and Development was scheduled to meet in Cairo. Two years earlier, the Vatican had scuttled efforts by ecologists to address the matter of population at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Now, it again had to ensure that, as the Pontifical Council for the Family described it that spring in a treatise titled Ethical and Pastoral Dimensions of Population Trends, “alarmist views concerning world population” would not prevail among attending nations.

  Strategizing to thwart family-planning programs was nothing new here. For decades, the Holy See had infiltrated groups such as Planned Parenthood with moles. After years of pressure, Catholic U.S. congressmen, backed by the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, had forced out the director of USAID’s Office of Population, Dr. Reimert Ravenholt, author of the agency’s international family-planning programs since its inception. For the coming UN population conference, John Paul II directed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to prepare a white paper on the state of population on the planet. He had reason to feel confident: The Pontifical Council for the Family, which he created in 1981, was reporting that world population growth rates had peaked between 1965 and 1970 and were now naturally declining. In the coming century, they predicted, there would be no more quadrupling; growth rates might be only one-third of the former exponential frenzy.

  The Pontifical Council for the Family was comprised of cardinals, bishops, and married couples, but no scientists. Now, three members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, along with demographers and an economist, were chosen to produce a report that ostensibly would concur with the Council, and validate the Vatican’s position at the Cairo population conference.

  In June 1994 they released their report. Over seventy-seven pages, Popolazione e Risorse (Population and Resources) tracked global and regional demographic and economic trends. It examined natural resources, technological development, water, and food production, including the Green Revolution. It considered education, family issues, women’s issues, labor, culture, religion, morals, and ethics. Taking into account the time frame in which all these variables interacted, it concluded:

  It does not seem possible that population can grow indefinitely in the long term. With the capacity humans have acquired to control sickness and death, which will plausibly increase, it is now consequently unthinkable to sustain indefinitely a birthrate beyond 2.3 children per couple to guarantee replacement. The contrary demographic consequences would be unsustainable to the point of absurdity…. [Given] the long-term consequences created by the decline of mortality, there is an inescapable need for a global containment of births, which must be met with scientific and economic progress and all the intellectual and moral energies of mankind to assure respect, equity, and social justice among all parts of the planet, and between present and future generations.

  “That,” snaps Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo, “was the committee’s opinion. Not the Academy’s.”

  In the days that followed the report’s release by the Italian bishops’ conference, Vatican spokesmen attempted to parse the Vatican’s policy from the recommendation of its own august scientific body.

  “It was not,” declared the secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family, “a synthesis of the work done, but merely an illustration of the data and of the problems which emerged, accompanied by some editorial considerations.”

  “The Academy’s task,” said Vatican Radio, “is to contribute to scientific progress, [not to be] an expression of Church teachings or of the Holy See’s pastoral strategies.”

  The Pope, reportedly livid, may have wondered why he hadn’t assigned the task to a new advisory team of scientists he had recently founded, the Pontifical Academy for Life, to support the Vatican’s antiabortion and anticontraception campaigns. But with its Nobel laureates and international credibility, he did not have the option of disbanding the esteemed Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

  Five years later, when Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo became the Academy’s chancellor, following a study week titled Science for Survival and Sustainable Development, Academy members issued another provocative statement:

  Our planet is threatened by a multitude of interactive processes—the de
pletion of natural resources; climatic changes; population growth (from 2.5 billion to over 6 billion people in just 50 years); a rapidly growing disparity in the quality of life; the destabilization of the ecological economy; and the disruption of social order.

  Like the warnings of Greek choruses depicted on Casina Pio IV’s façade, voices of Academy scientists rise to counsel cardinals and Popes about extraordinary developments at an extraordinary point in God’s creation, warranting extraordinary measures. Today, with population at 7 billion and racing beyond 10, what is the Church’s response?

  “When I was in the seminary,” says Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo, “people said a time was coming when we wouldn’t be able to eat because of population growth. It never happened. When sociologists of my generation recommended birth control, the Pope opposed it. Now, it turns out, the Pope was right. You don’t hear of overpopulation anymore. Today’s sociologists are worried about population decline. Europe’s population is diminishing.”

  Not exactly yet, although population growth on the European continent has, in fact, slowed to the point that decline could one day set in. In few places is that truer than Catholic Italy, where the birth rate is below 1.4 children per fertile woman.

  “This a big concern,” says Sánchez Sorondo, rocking in his leather chair. “It’s more than just being a Catholic country: Italy’s tradition was the family.” He touches his fingertips together. “We bishops are very alarmed.”