ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604230030
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDWIN FEULNER
IN THE LAST five years alone, U.S. newspapers and magazines have published more than 7,200 articles about the global population explosion, a favorite theme of the ``sky is falling'' wing of the environmental movement.
Now, apparently, these same folks are planning to switch gears - because the latest rave in environmental circles is a new book claiming a devastating drop in male fertility over the past half-century, threatening our very ability to reproduce.
OK, so which is it? Are we about to overpopulate ourselves to death, or die out as a species?
As most Americans realize, environmentalists are constantly sounding the alarm about something or other. One year the danger is nuclear power or depletion of the ozone layer. The next year it's breast implants, tainted apples, hazardous waste dumps, or genetically engineered tomatoes. One outfit has a fixation with food, and warns against eating sweet and sour pork, lasagna, pepperoni pizza, tacos, pancakes and even popcorn. Apparently, we're all doomed unless we stick to diets of tree bark and sprouts.
Fortunately, most Americans know instinctively that a healthy dose of skepticism is in order - that the doomsday stories are a bunch of baloney (itself alleged to be a health hazard, because of the chemical preservatives in the meat).
Virtually all of the stories involve highly complex scientific issues that a nonscientist can't possibly understand. Which is why it's so important to put things in perspective.
The newest danger on the horizon involves a somewhat racy subject: sperm. According to a new book, already causing much heavy breathing in media circles, various chemicals in our diets and environment are wrecking havoc with our genetic material, lowering global sperm counts to dangerously low levels and threatening the future of life itself - man and animal alike.
Helping promote the book, provocatively titled ``Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival?,'' is the same Washington public relations firm, Fenton Communications, that ginned up the false 1989 Alar scare.
According to the overheated publicity materials being sent out by the New York publisher, a division of Penguin Books, studies have documented ``as much as a 50 percent drop in human sperm counts over the last 50 years.'' Oh really?
Predictably, supporting the book's claims (here's where perspective is important) are some of the same people who have been hollering the loudest about global overpopulation, urging the United States to support United Nations and Planned Parenthood birth-control efforts. Now, instead of financing condoms for Chile and Chad, America is supposed to do something about the fertility deficit in Fiji and France.
This is precisely the kind of contradictory flip-flop confusion that raises skepticism about the entire environmental movement.
Of course, the agenda of environmental alarmists is the same as it has always been: Convince the American people that modern chemicals are deadly and evil, and stampede the government into spending more money on more programs that will further restrict our choices and freedom.
Interestingly, as ``Our Stolen Future'' was hitting book stores around the country, Congress was once again doing battle with the administration over U.S. funding of ``family planning'' efforts around the world. As The Washington Post noted in a March 12 editorial, ``The United States contributes about 17 percent of all public funds spent on family planning in the developing world outside China.''
Much of the impetus for America's involvement in such activities comes from the environmental movement's longstanding contention - spelled out in environmentalist guru Paul Ehrlich's 1990 book, ``The Population Explosion'' - that the world's resources can't keep up with the explosive growth of population. This might be true were it not for all the advances in technology, which have increased crop yields and provided us with alternative products of all sorts.
The bottom line, of course, is that environmentalists can't have it both ways. We can't have a global population explosion and a fertility crisis at the same time. As Mr. Spock of ``Star Trek'' might put it, ``It doesn't compute.''
Edwin Feulner is president of the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
LENGTH: Medium: 83 linesby CNB