[The Center for Biological Diversity’s condom campaign, begun on college campuses last year, now includes video ads in Times Square and lobbying in Washington for more family planning services. It is an aggressive strategy even for the center, which is best known for barraging federal agencies with lawsuits intended to protect species and ecosystems.]
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Leah Nash for The New
York Times
Monica Drake
volunteered to hand out condoms last month in Portland,
Ore., as
part of a campaign by the Center for Biological Diversity.
|
Major American environmental groups have dodged the subject of population control
for decades, wary of getting caught up in the bruising politics of reproductive
health.
Yet, virtually alone,
the Center for Biological Diversity is
breaking the taboo by directly tying population growth to environmental
problems through efforts like giving away condoms in colorful
packages depicting endangered animals. The idea is to start a debate about how
overpopulation crowds out species and hastens climate change — just
when the world has welcomed Baby No.7 Billion.
“Wrap with care, save
the polar bear,” reads one of the packages. “Wear a condom now, save the
spotted owl,” says another.
Kierán Suckling,
executive director of the center, a membership-based nonprofit organization in
Tucson, said he had an aha moment a few years ago. “All the species that we
save from extinction will eventually be gobbled up if the human population
keeps growing,” he said.
In the United States,
the birth rate has fallen steadily since the baby boom, from 3.6 births per
woman in 1960 to 2.0 today, or just under the replacement level, at which a
population replaces itself from one generation to the next. Yet even at that
rate, demographers estimate that the country will grow from 311 million people
now to 478 million by the end of the century, because of both births and immigration.
The highest birth rates
— from five to more than six births per woman — are occurring in a handful of nations
in Africa and Asia, including Nigeria and Yemen. Yet among large economies, the
United States is second only to Australia in the amount of carbon dioxide it
emits per capita, according to the latest figures from the federal Energy
Information Administration.
“Every person you add to
the country makes all these tremendous demands on the environment,” said Joel
E. Cohen, chief of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and
Columbia University.
But experts are
reluctant to suggest an ideal birth rate. “There isn’t any magic number,” Dr.
Cohen said.
As recently as the
1970s, the subject of population control was less controversial, partly because
the baby boom years had given rise to concerns about scarcity of resources,
some population experts and environmentalists said. Then came China’s coercive
one-child policy and a rise in social conservatism in the United States,
combined with the country’s aversion to anything perceived as restricting
individual freedoms, be it the right to bear arms or children.
Some groups also fear
whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment and opposition to family planning.
Immigration now accounts for about one-third of the growth rate in the United
States.
“We see reluctance and
fear to deal with this issue,” said Jose Miguel Guzman, chief of the population
and development branch for the United Nations
Population Fund.
Groups contacted for
this article generally declined to discuss the issue or did not return phone
calls.
The Center for
Biological Diversity’s condom campaign, begun on college campuses last year,
now includes video ads in Times Square and lobbying in Washington for more
family planning services. It is an aggressive strategy even for the center,
which is best known for barraging federal agencies with lawsuits intended to
protect species and ecosystems.
The condom campaign is intended to raise
awareness and help reduce unintended pregnancies. “Reproduction is always going
to be a matter of free will,” said Randy Serraglio, the manager of the
campaign. “This is about getting people to make the connection.”
A study published
last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed how
slowing the country’s population growth rate to 1.5 births per woman from 2.0
could result in a 10 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury and
a 33 percent drop by the end of the century.
But the notion that
curbing births is an effective way to control emissions is not an easy sell.
When Oregon State
University released a study two years ago calculating the extra carbon dioxide
emissions a person helps generate by choosing to have children, the researchers
received hate mail labeling them “eugenicists” and “Nazis.”
The study, which also
calculated the impact of a birth beyond the child’s lifetime “should the
offspring reproduce,” said that each American child generated seven times as
much carbon dioxide over time as one child in China, and 169 times as much as
one in Bangladesh. Reducing car travel, recycling and making homes more energy
efficient would have just a fraction of the impact on cutting emissions that
reducing the birth rate would, it found.
“There are important
consequences to having children, and we tried to quantify them,” said Paul A.
Murtaugh, an associate professor of statistics and one of the study’s
co-authors. “It should be on the table. It needs to be.”
Some groups, like World
Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, said they worked on
population-related issues mostly internationally. The president of the
National Audubon Society declined an interview without explanation. The
chairwoman of the Green Group, a loose association of several dozen
environmental organizations, did not return calls or e-mails.
The Natural Resources
Defense Council president, Frances Beinecke, said her group focused on
addressing climate change through energy strategies and conservation efforts.
“Particularly in this economic environment, we’re not in a position to just
add, add, add,” Ms. Beinecke said of her group’s agenda.
Kevin Knobloch,
president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the research on reducing
emissions by cutting birth rates was not yet “robust” enough to make a
convincing case for a clear way forward.
A country’s carbon
footprint does not necessarily shrink when the birth rate drops, Mr. Knobloch
said. In India and China, he pointed out, smaller families have consumed more
as their incomes rose — a common trend in developing countries. “It gets
complex very quickly,” he said.
Carl Pope, the chairman
of the Sierra Club, said his organization now had one population officer on
staff who was working on international reproductive health services. In this
country, Mr. Pope said, there are reasons for keeping a low profile on the issue.
“Look at Planned
Parenthood,” he said, recalling the group’s bruising battle with Republican
lawmakers over federal financing last spring. “There’s a huge atmosphere of
intimidation. The moment you say ‘family planning,’ immediately somebody pulls
out abortion.”
The 2.0 fertility rate
in the United States is higher than the rates in other developed countries,
including Germany and Japan (1.3), Canada (1.6) and Britain (1.8), according to
figures from the United Nations.
John Seager, president
of the group Population Connection, said organizations had been more assertive
about lobbying the Obama administration for money to finance family planning
services overseas.
Unintended pregnancies
account for roughly half of all annual births in the United States, according
to studies by the Guttmacher Institute, which is based in New York and promotes
reproductive health worldwide.
By tackling unintended
pregnancies, the fertility rate could be brought down to about 1.9 births per
woman, slightly below replacement levels yet high enough to ease concerns about
economic stagnation and support for the elderly, said John Bongaarts, a
demographer with the Population Council, a research group in New York.
Dr. Bongaarts described
the inaction by environmental groups as a missed opportunity. “The global
warming community is staying away from anything having to do with population,”
he said, “and that’s frustrating.”
