Adam Werbach's inaptly titled essay "The End of the Population Movement" might have been worth reading three decades ago. He struggles at length with the superfluous task of rejecting the long outmoded concept of "population control." Werbach might just as well mount a campaign against disco music or urge the pullout of U.S. troops from Vietnam while he's at it. Werbach's population reading list seems not to have included anything written after Richard Nixon resigned.
The progressive population movement consigned "population control" to the scrapheap of discredited notions decades ago. Stemming rapid population growth isn't about population control. It's about empowering women and couples so that they can plan the timing, spacing, and number of their children. It's about promoting women's education and creating economic opportunities and improving maternal and child health -- and has been for decades. It is Werbach and any others who are similarly trapped in the past that need to catch up with the population movement, not the other way around.
Adam Werbach's pronouncement of the end of the population movement calls forth that dodgy image of a flight-suited George Bush striding theatrically across the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Message: "Mission Accomplished." Not so.
When Dr. Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, the world's population was growing by 74 million people annually. This year it will grow by that same number.
Today, one billion people live in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. Twenty thousand children die each day from easily preventable causes directly related to overpopulation. Women in famine-stricken Niger still have an average of eight children each. The impacts of human population growth fall ever more heavily on our fragile planet each year through global warming and the loss of species.
In the United States, half of all pregnancies are unplanned. We still have disgracefully high teen birth rates. And addressing the very human challenges posed by the 170 million people on this planet who are today migrating in search of a better life can bring out the best -- or the worst -- in our nation.
Werbach unintentionally makes a point of sorts when he refers to the end of the population movement. If population stabilization were a symphony, the first movement could be said to have begun with the 1968 publication of The Population Bomb. The second reached its crescendo in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo, where representatives from virtually every nation on earth concurred that the full empowerment of women is central to population stabilization. Werbach has arrived at least 11 years late to conclusions that are now commonplace.
If the lofty goals of Cairo had been realized, it might be time to draw the final curtain on the population movement. In fact, many things have taken a decided turn for the worse since then. Here in the United States, we've gone from the Clinton administration, which strongly supported reproductive health and rights, to one led by George W. Bush with his odious Global Gag Rule and thwarting of over-the-counter availability of emergency contraception.
Residents of sub-Saharan Africa are burdened by crises ranging from extreme poverty to pandemic disease to the decline of basic living standards that were already the worst in the world.
We are now in the midst of a third population movement. This one recognizes that knowing what to do isn't enough. We actually have to make it happen. The great organizer Saul Alinsky famously urged "revolution, not revelation." We've had plenty of revelation. What's still needed, however, is some large measure of revolution, especially in the lives of women around the world.
Decreeing the "end" or "death" of one progressive movement or another has become something of a cottage industry lately. The declarations seem especially ill-timed when the rest of a decidedly not-dead movement is fighting battles on so many social, political, and environmental fronts.
Visionaries from John Muir to Rachel Carson to Paul Ehrlich inspire us. We can always use such singular thinkers. But too many writers of late, Werbach included, are taken with the simplistic notion that the solution to every single policy problem is always to reframe the debate.
Reframing can be useful as long as it doesn't distract us or weaken our resolve. When it comes to population, reframing happened a generation ago and was firmly cemented into place at Cairo in 1994. What upsets -- even enrages -- our opponents is our success at reframing the population message, not any failure on our part to do so. They've reacted by redoubling their efforts. Now we must redouble ours, not to change our message, but to translate it into action.
Progressives are challenged to advance a modern population agenda in the face of relentless opposition at home and around the world. We recognize that zero population growth still matters. We do so because we're serious about improving people's lives and protecting this fragile planet.
There is always a need for heavy thinking. Right now all of us must do some heavy lifting. We must organize to make the population connection in these treacherous times. That's what today's progressive population movement is all about.
John Seager is the president of Population Connection.
In last month's American Prospect I wrote that it was time to cast away the population language and framework as a means of thinking about the problems associated with poverty and the lack of rights for women globally. I called for self-defined population activists to cast off the word "population" and instead describe their work as a pro-woman, anti-poverty movement.
Contrary to Mr. Seager's contention that most of my data comes from books that were written before I was born, I'll provide a more recent example. His organization's former unfortunate name, Zero Population Growth, has since been replaced by a new unfortunate name, Population Connection. What is the connection between women in Niger who have eight children and girls in the United States who get pregnant at the age of 16? They're poor and they're women. That's the connection. To demand that both of their situations be reduced to a “population problem” -- an issue description that wealthy westerners can understand -- appears to me to be paternalistic, and, more importantly, ineffective.
My experience with today's population movement is that the work looks great on paper, but is still indelibly tied to the word “population,” which, as I argued in my original piece, is necessarily bound to offensive connotations ranging from eugenics to garden-variety sexism. A perfect example of the problem was the muted response of the population movement to the Chinese government's one-child policy. Historians will look back at the one-child policy -- which severely penalizes the poor for having more than one child and has resulted in the forced abandonment of hundreds of thousands of Chinese girls -- as one of the most inhumane pieces of social engineering the world has ever seen. We can only imagine the pain for mothers who are forced to give up their daughters, and the trauma that the lucky daughters who are adopted will have to work through.
There is no doubt that the one-child policy is an effective way of controlling the population of China, but it is unconscionable, and any person who self-defines themselves as a population activist is logically tied to it.
There are thousands of wonderful activists caught up in this rationality; my hope is that they'll see past the demands of those like Mr. Seager who require the use of the word “population” and build their own woman-centered anti-poverty movement.
Adam Werbach formerly served as the national president of the Sierra Club and is currently launching a new progressive film club.