Page 18 RAIN April 1980 Is Population a Problem? Dear RAIN editors, There's no denying that people are precious, wonderful inventions, as Tom Bender and Lane deMoll wrote in the January RAIN . Still, we people can create problems when we come into an ecological system, or a social system, faster than it can provide for us. As Oregonians, you RAIN people know what it's like to reject population growth. It's not the people, exactly, that Oregonians want to stay away; it's their unending needs, for bigger and big&er metropolitan an-as, cars, fueL highways, supermarkets and power plants. . True, people don't have to live that way. Their needs can be smaller and their selfsufficiency greater. But, among Americans in 1980, they're generally not. In response to threatened p.opulation growth, Oregon and other communities haven't been giving newcomers crash {'ourses on appropriate technology or vegetarian living. Instead, they've grasped the immediate mt'ans to reduce the impact of people, by trying to slow in-migrationoften by limiting home construction. rowth-conscious communities found they couldn't get to the root of the problem~the great demands of people's lifestyle- so they attacked the problem where they (Quid. Thus, "population control" is often the answer when people can't find (or agree on I ;lnY other answer. It has been adopted by governments on the far right as well as the far Il'ft, including the People's Repubhc of China. In China, needless to say, the problem of people is more serious than in Oregon. Its population of 975 million people grows each year by more than four times regan's whole population. It has less than half the arable acreage of the United States, with four times the people. It sounds likely, as the RAIN article sa id , that Mao Tse-Tung once proclaimed that people are China's greatest resource. A very political thing to say . People like to hear it. And it's true, besides. But while Mao was still alive, his government recognized that people are Q/so a major problem for China. It began to extol the virtues of having only two children. Now it's urging families to have only one. Vice Premier Chen Muhua, the woman who heads China's Birth Planning Leading Group, has written: "We must squarely face the fact that rapid population increase obstructs economic development." Popula· tion growth outpaces China's accumulation of capital for agnculture and industry and tht' expansion of its schools and " unfavorably affects our efforts to bring about the four modernizations," Muhua says. The response to our Population piece in the . January issue was well-thought out and appreciated. It made us see where we left important things unsaid and some ofwhat needed to be said more clearly. Let's continue the dialogue. It's understandable that RAIN's writers would question the motives and means of population control when there have been so many instan('cs of coerced steri!izatLOn, both here and abroad. But we were surprised to see RAIN adopting the favorite argument of the anti-abortionists: that more people means more Bccthovens. Actually, more people abo means more Nixons. I see no net bt'nefit. Greetings and good wishes, Steve Behrens Publications Editor Zero Population Growth, Inc. To RAIN: Tom Bender and Lane deMoll haw erred on the side of exaggeration to overstate their point. They pmnt out correctly the simple value in indivirlual human lives, They also point out correctly something that every Amencan should consciously live with daily: curporate mal-appropriation of prime Third World land for production of export products has vast consequences in affecting food shortages in these many countries. The problem of our excesslw purchasing power, and, hence, impenalism of these lands has forced people into hunger in Central America, the Caribbean, South Amenca, Oceania, and Asia. But Bender and deMoll go far beyond these facts In theIr suggestion that our population control policies are an "unconSCIOUS" policy to eliminate people via birth control, that is, genocide; althuugh they avoided the use of this loaded word, they expressed the concept quite lood and dear. This is absurd, Every coUege course or lecture circuit speaker or commonly available text or book on population problems includes dIscussions of our excessive demands on the world's energy and food relative to our own population. A sample of the people who affirm birth control 3s51Stance would, I am sure, affirm my faith that these p('Ople assume a responsible position on voluntary simplicity at a personal level, as an example to our SOciety to diminish its greed, Th fact is that most consumer-oriented ArnE'Tians aren't touched by either world population stress or ArnE'rican overconsumption and ignore calls to conscience on E'ither side. Bender and deMoll also ignore the rE'lationship between overpopulation and diseasc. The authors practically wish for the horsemen of the Apocalypse to ride in on the wake (1f technological failure and to pull off a neat elimination of population around the world. Leave our American population "without change left," in their words, due to our low populatIon ranks. In fact, contagIous disease spreads most rapidly where population is most dense, where health ISalready poor dut' to malnutrition , where water is unclean, where human wastes are not treated, where housing is ineffective to prevent insects and rodents from carrymg contagion. In other words, the major cities of the Third World and our own inner cities would be hardest-hIt. Is this an unconscious wish for genOCide, or what? I think it is ignorance. The Four Horsemen- famine, disease, There is arrogance in a view that advocates breeding people into every corner ofthe globe, without regard for the consequences to other species. war and death- dre already at large in areas of the world where no land expropriation by the west has taken place- where, in facl, twentieth-century population growth (partly spurred by modern medicine's impact on infant survival) have forced people into utter mISery. The northern half of Africa. large parts of the Middle East, aTe areas of marginal capability to support use, Hnd have turned to desert. The land itseth!' also a fata li ty .
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