1 Planet
Another matter of life and death
There are (roughly) two kinds of theatre. One re-writes life to help you face it, put up with, get you through it. The other, tries to tell you what’s there, to open it up, explore it, as it really is.
But there’s the thing itself. Without water, without grub, without shelter you die. So if your life is a ‘play’ with our planet as a setting and the planet starts to fail you (collapse about your ears} – you have to think about it.
Going off (slightly) at a tangent (‘real-life’ drama, though)… here’s a letter that went off the other day to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
Dear Colin Butfield,
Re: Taking the self-deception out of One Planet Living.
I am a long-standing member. I have donated substantial (for me) amounts to the W.W.F. I see that you are Head of Campaigns focusing on One Planet Living. All the changes in life-style you wish us to adopt are vital – but cannot possibly work without a key, missing ingredient; which is to help people understand that we must also reduce our own numbers. Omitting this is misleading the membership and everyone who uses your first class information.
This is my third attempt to engage executive and staff of W.W.F. with the vital responsibility of telling our membership that unless we all, steadily, reduce our own numbers on this planet, as well as accept the energy saving measures you propose, we are being dishonest and must fail.
I am not an uninformed punter who likes the idea of giving money to help glamorous, cuddly creatures survive. All the best and most up to date scientific evidence from EARTHWATCH, THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, U.N.E.P., THE BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY, W.W.F.’s own GET ON BOARD campaign, etc. etc. signals that if we do not include a steady reduction in our own numbers, the growing fight for sustainability will simply solve itself with bloodier and bloodier resource wars. They are happening in Africa now – where, in many districts, there are already too many people for the carrying capacity of a given area of land. In the struggle to subsist, local people kill each other over the shrinking parcels of land each expanding family has left. No one has time to think of the rest of the biosphere when you are fighting to stay alive?
The two bland replies from W.W.F., I’ve had so far make me wonder whether you are scared of your own staff. Afraid that your own staff cannot cope, emotionally, with explaining to local people that if they limit family size they will be better off. What is the point of emerging from the womb to die young? Very few of us in the cushioned West are present when a child dies of hunger; it’s a very painful way to die.
On page 10 of your June magazine you state; “If we, as individuals, do everything we can to reduce our ecological footprint, we can probably reduce our impact by about a third or ‘one planet’.” But if the population of the U.K. goes up by ten million (as predicted) and world population by three thousand million (the minimum) then how can that extra number, even making the savings and sacrifices you urge, possibly limit itself to One Planet living? Surely it’s cheating the membership to suggest it? We all agree that every child should be a wanted child. If you included that idea with all W.W.F.’s campaigns you would satisfy an immense thirst, world-wide, for family limitation – and we would have a realistic chance of preserving significant parts of our planet for other life forms.
Here’s something Peter Scott said, quoted by Professor Short, with whom he was working on elephant populations in Zambia. “You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF’s money on buying condoms.” He was right, and human overpopulation is ultimately the greatest threat to wildlife.
But…the sums as you present them cannot add up and people are intelligent enough to know that. Given the enormous respect we all feel for W.W.F…. were you to explain the sums carefully, and point out the economic benefits of voluntary family limitation, then we would realistically have some chance of saving tigers, or orangs, or slow the melting of the ice, instead of making gratifying but futile gestures towards sustainability.
Those delegated to reply to members writing awkward letters clearly don’t bother to read them. One of the key points I made was that we in the U.K. must work to bring our own population down, because of our profligate use of energy and global resources. To become sustainable we must, over time, bring U.K. population down to at least a half and - more realistically - to one third of its present size.
This is perfectly possible, if we make it part of One Planet Living and, IF WE START NOW, it can be done without excessive pain or sacrifice. Wherever I go, these days – most recently talking to a volunteer at the Wetland Centre in Barnes - people are becoming aware that the thoughtless expansion of our own numbers must end in severe species extinction and habitat loss – and our own, human misery. If the government of Iran can implement a successful family planning programme surely the major ecological movements can find the will and energy to make an unanswerable case to do the same across the planet?
I’m aware that you pursue a very successful family planning policy wherever you believe it to be acceptable and unobtrusive. That’s much too low profile to get us anywhere.
Supposing you added another branch to your One Planet Living campaign by opening a debate on world over-population.
Why not start with another quotation from Peter Scott :
“ If the human population of the world continues to increase at its present rate, there will soon be no room for either wild life or wild places…. But I believe that sooner or later man will learn to limit his overpopulation. Then he will become much more widely concerned with optimum rather than maximum, quality rather than quantity, and will rediscover the need within himself for contact with wilderness and wild nature.”
Help our membership to understand that :
1) A city of 1.5 million people has to be built somewhere in the world EACH WEEK to accommodate the world’s excess births over deaths. But if we do that, how can we avoid destroying ever more forests and wetlands and all other habitats for wildlife?
2) However little a poor country consumes, a slum of half-starved people can still sprawl across an enormous amount of countryside. (I’ve witnessed it myself in Peru.)
3) In the U.K., if we build accommodation on demand for every new family unit then we must build on flood plains and encroach on open country. The demand for flood protection will also drive up energy use. However… if we agree, over time, to work to reduce U.K. population we can preserve habitat for other species, for local food production and reduce our energy consumption to help limit climate change.
4) It is consumers who consume. That’s us. It is cheating ourselves to believe that we can grow our population unchecked and still limit our impact on the planet. No one wants to live a marginal existence. Least of all the marginalized. The Pill and the IUD and the Condom are icons of the environment, no less than our bicycles are!
5. Bringing young people into the U.K. to support the rising number of our old people is self-defeating. To have any effect, that increase must continue indefinitely – which is impossible and political nonsense. Those incoming young people become pensioners themselves, who have to be supported. W.W.F. could easily show that it is far better to allow European populations to decrease naturally – as is happening in Italy – and so reduce the number of high-level consumers.
6. There is an immigration crisis in the U.S.A., where the current 300 million population is expected to reach 420 million by 2050 - mostly from Mexico. But then, very soon, each Mexican living in the U.S. multiplies his/her consumption 4 times. It also introduces to the U.S.A. a more than average number of children - who will all be high-level consumers. Mexico is merely exporting its population problem, and the US is multiplying it! Let W.W.F. help Mexico directly by talking to and persuading Mexicans. It does not make sense for vast numbers of people there to try to live below sea level. People are trying to live on marginal land everywhere, as in Bangladesh, from sheer desperation, and walking into ecological disaster.
Human over-population is now a threat to humans, too. However, there are strong signs that the Conservative and Labour parties are both quietly admitting this; but each is too frightened of the other to proclaim it aloud, in case it loses electoral clout. W.W.F. could help the major political parties to frame the over-population problem in a sensitive and convincing way.
If tigers in India weren’t on their last legs; if the Chinese weren’t moving into the Antarctic to suck it dry, like the rest of us, I wouldn’t be writing to you in this anxious tone.
But if you at W.W.F. don’t help us, right now, to make the case for limiting human numbers on this one planet we have, then I look ahead, with rising fear, to watching my fellow humans fight over water, oil, food and a warm place to shelter – always grateful that I’m lucky enough to live in the U.K., where the battle for survival may overwhelm me and my friends and family later than many less fortunate places on earth. But that’s only a minor consolation; I’d rather you helped us avoid this outcome.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Gillespie
For further information, please visit: www.optimumpopulation.org