THE MOST OVER-POPULATED COUNTRY
Norman Myers
When it comes to over-population, one tends to think of developing countries. Consider, for instance, Bangladesh. Its population growth rate is 2.0% per year, which generates an additional 2.6 million people. By contrast, my own country, Britain, has a growth rate only one twentieth as much, and it produces only 60,000 extra people per year. But each new Briton consumes 50 times as much fossil fuels as each new Bangladeshi, meaning that population growth in Britain causes at least as much global warming as does the 45 times larger population increase in Bangladesh. Yet Britain has no population policy at all. We have never asked ourselves how many people are good for Britain, let alone how many Britons are good for the world. Ironically we could get down to zero population growth by simply eliminating half of our unwanted births, making for a win-win outcome.
These considerations apply even more to the United States. Its growth rate of 1.24% is far and away the highest among developed countries, which average 0.1%. It is even higher than China's. Only around half is made up of births, the rest being due to immigration. All the same, American women produce an average of 2.1 children, by contrast with 1.5 for most developed countries; the U.S.'s year 2000 birth rate was the highest since 1971. Of U.S. births today, 26% rank as unplanned and 50% of those are unwanted, both proportions putting the country in a league of its own among developed countries. In France, by contrast, the amounts are 15% and 25%, roughly mirroring those of other developed countries. During the 1990s the U.S. population grew by 13% —the largest 10-year population increase ever. Can the country consider itself a truly developed nation with such a large proportion of its population growth being “accidental?”
Yet like Britain, the United States has no population policy, nor has it any thought of producing one. It even supplies munificent cash payments for a third child. Meantime its growth rate means that, if it persists, the U.S. population (already the fourth biggest in the world) will soar to well over twice its present 285 million by the time today's child becomes a grandparent. Is this prospect what the future grandchildren would want? Or even today's Americans? According to a Roper public opinion survey, 72% of Americans worry that overpopulation will become “a serious problem,” and 59% think the U.S. population is too big already. In addition, most Americans say they would like the present immigration flood cut by nine tenths, while one American in five says he or she would like to see an end to immigration altogether. How about reducing the 4.3 million births each year? Yet an overall population policy remains an absolute no-no.
Consider too the United States' position among the family of nations. With only 4.6% of the world's population, it produces a whopping 25% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions which contribute half of global warming processes. Put another way, an average American consumes six times more fossil fuels, with all the pollution they cause, than the global average. He or she consumes at least 50 times more goods and services than an average Bangladeshi, including water, grain, wood, steel and coal. Of course the first four of these can be used indefinitely through recycling and other renewability technologies; regrettably they generally aren't. In any case, America's agriculture, proclaimed the most bountiful in the world and sufficient to supply surplus food to over 100 nations, is not nearly so productive as it might seem. To grow one calorie of grain takes 10 calories of fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, machinery fuel and the like. Truly, American agriculture is a case of “eating oil,” and it is anything but sustainable in the long run, partly because of its over-loading of croplands and partly because over half of America's oil now comes from other countries, many of them less than friendly to the United States.
All in all, the United States causes more damage to the world's environments than China and India with their combined populations of 2.3 billion—eight times as many people.
Few people in Bangladesh—or in Cambodia, Madagascar, Bolivia and a good number of other countries for that matter—drive gas-guzzling cars, jet around the world, consume lots of grain-raised meat every day, enjoy food that has travelled an average of over 1,000 miles to reach meal tables, sport several TVs with standby switches left on permanently, accumulate piles of plastic junk, and generate waste that loads landfills to bursting point. Few countries have desertified so much of their territory as has the western United States through overgrazing by livestock. Yet all these activities are called “growth.”
Key question: Can the United States—and the world—afford so many Americans?
Norman Myers is a Fellow of Oxford University. He was a Senior Advisor to the World Conference on Population and Development, and is to the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development. He has worked on population issues with USAID, the World Bank, the Population Council and Population Action International among other bodies, both governmental and non-governmental.
