Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 6, 1990 TAG: 9004060076
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PITTSBURGH LENGTH: Medium
"The most serious population problem in the world is right here in the United States," said Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University professor of population studies.
"The most common misperception of the population problem is that it's a problem of poor Indians who don't know how to use condoms," he said. "Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people."
Ehrlich and other environmentalists spoke to about 1,200 students, teachers, garden-club members and corporate executives at a conference on solving global environmental problems.
He said the current world population of 5.3 billion is 1.8 billion more than in 1968 when he first prophesied the problems of overpopulation in his book "The Population Bomb."
He and his wife, Anne Howland Ehrlich, who co-wrote the current book, "The Population Explosion," say this decade will be the turning point for global environmental problems.
"If we don't see some real action in this decade, it will probably be too late to avert some very serious problems" including inadequate food production, global warming, species extinction and deforestation, said Anne Howland Ehrlich, associate director for the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford.
Ehrlich railed against highly developed nations like the United States that he claims consume too much of the world's resources.
"The birth of a baby in the United States is something on the order of 20 to 100 times more disastrous for the life support systems of the planet as the birth of a baby in poor countries like Bangladesh or Venezuela," he said.
Most developing countries fall within the range, with Bangladesh among the poorest and Venezuela among the richest Third World countries, Anne Howland Ehrlich said.
She said she and her husband based the figures on 1987 statistics compiled by the United Nations on per capita commercial energy consumption, an index used by environmentalists to measure damage to the Earth.
"If it's a (rich) baby, it could be a thousand times more," Erlich said. "Actually, the problem in the world is that there is much too many rich people. ... It's not how many people you have but how those people behave."
People who drive gas-guzzling luxury cars, air-condition their homes and live from what Ehrlich calls "high-intensity-the-hell-with-tomorrow agriculture" do far more environmental damage than subsistence farmers, he said.
But he was not promoting the idea that Americans should adopt a peasant lifestyle.
In highly affluent Sweden, the average person uses about 60 percent as much energy as consumed by the average American, Ehrlich said.
"We are super consumers and very unselective, and we're extraordinarily incompetent and sloppy with our technologies," he said.
by CNB