
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, July 6, 1990                   TAG: 9007060636
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

POPULATION

"NO MAN is an island," said John Donne. When he wrote that, early in the 17th century, the English clergyman-poet was not referring to physical isolation. The whole world held a little over 700 million people, so there was ample room for most of them to spread out - to find "islands" for themselves. What Donne meant was that people and their actions cannot be divorced from their consequences on each other.

Two hundred years later, the naturalist John Muir put a broader perspective on the matter, saying: "When you try to pick up one thing, you find it is connected to everything else." Some 250 million Americans live on their own continent, but they are not isolated from the multitude of human beings elsewhere on this planet, or vice versa.

Some Americans may think so. Several years ago, the United States effectively attained zero population growth: The fertility rate fell from 3.4 children per woman of child-bearing age in the early 1960s to 1.8 in the 1980s; it is 2 today, the level at which population replaces itself, but doesn't grow. Perhaps in part because of this, people in this country seem to have lost interest in population issues.

But globally, growth has continued. From 3 billion in 1960, world population is projected to increase to 6 billion by the turn of the century. Fertility rates also are declining in other countries, but at the present pace, world population would double again by 2040. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that before that population stabilizes late in the 21st century, it will reach 14 billion.

Numbers like those hold frightening implications. How many human lives can the planet support, and at what standards? The World Health Organization says that more than 14 million children under age 5 die each year. That is a tiny fraction of world population, but for so many young and helpless to perish is perhaps the strongest indicator that the Earth already is struggling to sustain the human life it has. Other signs abound, including the rapid deforestation of underdeveloped areas where people depend on wood for heat and cooking.

Less visible, but no less significant, are the drain on natural resources and the ecological damage caused by stable populations in industrial countries. For instance, the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population, but produces more than 17 percent of the gases that contribute to global warming.

Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist and author of "The Population Explosion," writes: "The birth of an American child is hundreds of times more of a disaster for Earth's life-support systems than the birth of a baby in a desperately poor nation."

Few Americans care to think of the birth of one's own child as a disaster. But Ehrlich's point remains valid, that people in developed nations consume much more of resources and produce much more wastes than do people of poor countries. We even ship some of our most toxic wastes abroad because disposing of them on our own shores is so difficult and expensive.

The population issue isn't easy. In many other cultures, large families are important for a blood line to survive - because so many die young. Other countries don't always look kindly on advice to set population bounds; coming from rich nations, they see such counsel as a threat. The industrial nations cannot mandate population sizes for others.

At the very least, however, the developed countries should give all help possible to those that perceive the dangers of overpopulation. For ideological reasons, the Reagan administration belittled those dangers and cut off population-control funds to programs and nations thought to have supported abortion. The Bush administration has continued the policy.

That's a terrible error, as is the notion that Americans are somehow immune from the ravages wreaked by overpopulation elsewhere in the world. No one can remain aloof from the most pervasive and pressing global issue of these times.

by CNB