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Maybe baby-It's time to talk about
population
As a mid-stream baby boomer I’ve watched
the world add between 4 and 5 billion more people
to its surface since my birth.
Along with awakening to the cumulative impact we
have on air, water, soil, forests, oceans, climate
and all living things and systems, some also
recognize that the more people you have in one
place, the more conflict there is over resources of
all kinds. Increasing human numbers make conflict
inevitable. How conflicts are resolved are not.
We’ve chosen both peaceful and violent
means….and we still do on a daily basis. The
fact remains, more of us are not making things any
easier.
Twenty years ago the Dalai Lama said this:
“The population problem is a
serious reality. In India, some people were
reluctant to accept birth control because of
religious traditions. So I thought, from the
Buddhist viewpoint, there is a possibility of
flexibility on this problem. I thought it might
be good to speak out and eventually create more
open space for leaders in other religious
traditions to discuss the issue.”
How much speaking out is there these days?
It’s been 50 years since scientist Paul
Ehrlich got us to recognize that the
“population bomb” is ticking. I find that
the discussions about this underlying cause of so
much planetary stress are rarely a table topic
these days. Have people just become jaded and given
up in the face of what seems inevitable, the net
addition (after subtracting deaths) of 34 million
more people just since the beginning of this year?
It does seem daunting. And it could be worse.
Full disclosure is that I was once a Director of
Education for a Planned Parenthood affiliate. The
non-profit is one of the largest and most effective
voluntary family planning education and service
delivery organizations in history. It and other
efforts have helped people for many decades to
decide when to have children and how many, rather
than rely on roulette as the primary way of
bringing healthy children into the world. And it is
one of the ways that people with lower income have
gained access to primary health care, in some cases
saving lives. In effect, our population would be
far greater (and sicker) at this point without
policies and funding that provide people choices.
And where these services are available, there is
less human suffering and more prosperity.
When I was hired at Planned Parenthood, it was
in large part due to the fact that I had
established a center for men that provided
information and education about reproductive health
and responsibility. It was understood that until we
more fully address the needs and psychology of men
in the realm of reproductive choices,
responsibility would continue to largely fall on
women's shoulders. Now, a new test for fertility is
coming to market that will help men immediately
discover whether they are fertile or not. I am
curious if this will lead to greater awareness on
the part of men, not just those desperate to have
their own biological offspring, but an overall
recognition of the role men play in bringing more
of us into an overpopulated world, one decision,
one person, one couple, one family at a time.
Back to the Dalai Llama talking about religious
beliefs in India 20 years ago, (a country now
straining under an incredible 1.2 billion humans),
it still remains that belief systems control
behavior. Whether it’s religious conviction,
nationalism, a sense of ethnic preservation or
other social ideology justifying why we should
continue to “be fruitful and multiply,”
at root is usually an entitled sense of male
dominance and control at worst, male pride at best
that too often spirals our numbers beyond carrying
capacity all over the world. That, and the notion
that technology solves all problems and will solve
this one by finding more Earths to populate. It
hasn’t and it won’t.
It’s time again to talk about how to keep
our numbers in check instead of relying on war,
famine, disease and now climate change to do the
job. We need to consider those people who have been
at this effort for a long time and give them our
support in the form of time or money or both.
One of those efforts I have supported over the
years is the United Nations Fund for Population
Activities. http://www.unfpa.org All over the
world it has delivered services where least
available and difficult to access. A few dollars go
a long way.
And what about making population a table or
bedroom topic again? Very intelligent and educated
people need to consider right now their decisions
about how many children they have in the larger
context the Dalai Lama and other leaders have
spoken about. And those less educated need access
to information and services as part of a
comprehensive health and wellness approach. We need
to see this topic reintroduced in the mass media
and consistently framed as a fundamental problem
that can be addressed in a humane way that elevates
human freedoms and liberty instead of being
perceived as taking them away.
©2014, Randy
Crutcher
* * *
Randy
Crutcher has over three decades of experience as a
teacher, counselor, and community
organizer/builder. He is a personal and
professional development coach, facilitator, and
consultant to both large institutions and small
organizations in the public, private, and
non-profit sectors. He has done extensive work with
men and boys to become all they can be having
opened one of the first state grant funded
men’s counseling center’s in America. He
developed programs to assist men in learning
alternatives to violence, father and son workshops
and gatherings.
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