Overpopulation and the end of life as we know it
We have to stop making so many babies in order to save the planet, writes Susan Koswan
Overpopulation is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. If you want to have a look at a strangely fascinating and kind of horrifying website, check out Worldometers continually updated figures on world population. Then check out the numbers on deforestation, CO2 emissions, and hectares lost due to desertification from deforestation, drought or bad agriculture. Tick, tick, tick.
One largely overlooked aspect to the cancelled sex-ed curriculum is how educating girls and women has a huge, positive impact on climate change. Less people — fewer resources needed — lower greenhouse gas emissions. Girls and women need the knowledge and support that leads to reproductive health and self-determination, and access to high-quality family planning services because, best guess, the maximum population the planet can sustain tops out at about 10 billion people. We expect to reach that by 2050. We’re already at 7.6 billion. We have to stop making so many babies.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to hear Katherine Wilkinson, the senior writer of Drawdown at the Perimeter Institute. She was the keynote speaker for the opening session of the bi-annual summit of the Waterloo Global Science Initiative to, “collectively address some of the most pressing obstacles facing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in Canada and abroad.” The book, subtitled The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, edited by Paul Hawken, is the combined work of an international coalition of researchers, scientists, policy-makers and environmentalists to identify the 100 most realistic and measurable solutions to “draw down” carbon from Earth’s atmosphere and put it back into the earth.
Many of those solutions pivoted around family planning and educating girls. Lest we think undeveloped countries are “the problem,” nearly half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended. In 2017, an online survey of 3,200 Canadian women by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada (SOGC) found that 61 per cent of Canadian women had unintended pregnancies in their lifetimes — not necessarily unwanted, but not planned. Please, please share their website Sex & U with any young person — actually any person in their reproductive years — for the facts on everything from consent to the LGBTTQ+ community to using condoms.
We can’t leave boys and men out of this equation. Both genders of reproductive age need to know how babies are made, and how they are not made, and to have the knowledge and power to manage their reproductive lives. There are religious, militaristic and economic belief systems that support population growth, but they are all contributing to the end of human life on Earth. Do we really want disease, war or famine to cull the population or can we work together to prevent this looming disaster?
China’s one-child policy experiment comes quickly to mind when anyone talks about overpopulation. Project Drawdown, however, shares a number of different success stories. Iran, in the 1990s halved its population growth in a decade by involving religious leaders, educating people and giving free access to contraceptives. Bangladesh reduced average birth rates from six to two by having female health workers go door to door to provide basic care in the 1980s.
What does not work is abstinence-only programs, with often devastating effects on human health. Uganda had a model, evidence-based program that worked until it was replaced by American ideologues espousing abstinence-based programs funded by the U.S. government. The result was a backlash against the successful program and a significant rise in AIDS infections.
I repeat. There is a clear line of cause and effect here: a good sex education generally results in fewer and healthier children; smaller families mean fewer resources are needed to raise them, and greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.
Males need to own up to their responsibilities as sperm providers. The time for patriarchy and toxic masculinity must end as we continue to strive for gender equality. We ignore the dire warning of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at our peril. With 12 years left to make a difference, the war on climate change will be fought on many fronts. Quality, evidence-based sex education and widely available birth control play a critical role.
Susan Koswan is a University of Waterloo grad with a sustainable business management certificate from Conestoga College. She lives in Kitchener can be reached at greyandstillgreen@gmail.com