The River Severn is Britain’s longest, rising in a Welsh peat bog and arcing east through the Midlands until it turns south, swelling into Bristol Channel and the Atlantic. Much of its course lies in Shropshire, where, about a third of the way, it loops through Shrewsbury, a market town since medieval times.
As a boy, Charles Darwin learned as much along the banks of the Severn as he did at Shrewsbury School. His family’s garden path led down to the river, where he walked before breakfast, returning with beetles he’d collect. He encountered birds no longer seen here, such as corncrakes and nightingales, and others that still are, such as Britain’s three species of swan: mute, Bewick’s, and whooper.
Nearly every geologic period in Earthly history appears in outcroppings along the Severn’s Shropshire drainage; some of the remnant corals, limestone, marine fossils, and quartzite date to half a billion years ago, when the Midlands were on the opposite side of today’s equator—apt inspiration for young Darwin, who, at age twenty-two, was headed there himself. Upon his return in 1836 from the epic five-year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, his first night was spent back in Shrewsbury, where he dined at the Lion, a sixteenth-century inn.
One hundred and seventy-five years later, Simon Darby sits in the Lion, frowning over his shepherd’s pie. In his mid-forties, he has pale blue eyes and thick flat eyebrows, with tightly cropped black hair that feathers into a thinning widow’s peak. Darby was also raised in the Midlands, just outside industrial Birmingham. In 1709, his ancestor Abraham Darby invented the coke-fueled blast furnace that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Darby cast-iron foundries changed the future of England, and of the planet. The world’s first iron bridge still spans the Severn. The first iron-framed building, a flax mill on Shrewsbury’s outskirts, is the ancestor of today’s skyscrapers. The Darby company also built the world’s first steam locomotive.
Both the Industrial Revolution and the family fortune had vanished into history by the time Simon Darby was born. Like Darwin, he studied biology and chemistry, but he never used his degree. He got into computers, and then into postindustrial Midlands politics, ending up as deputy chairman of the far-right British National Party. He often stands in for the BNP chairman, Cambridge-educated Nick Griffin, who has been charged more than once for inciting hatred toward Jews and Muslims. In 1998, Griffin was convicted for a series of articles that mocked the Holocaust. Yet by 2009, he and Darby had recast their fringe party’s former skinhead-and-leather image with neat haircuts and neckties, and Griffin was elected to the European Parliament, representing North West England. The British National Party polled nearly a million votes nationwide.
As party spokesman, Darby has earned his own notoriety, most famously for a reply to the Archbishop of York, a Ugandan native, who’d criticized a BNP demand that black and Asian Britons be described as “racial foreigners.”
“He said everyone who wanted to be English could be English,” Darby explains in the Lion’s restaurant. “But what about the real and proper English? That’s my heritage. It cheapens my own identity, you see.” Even as his color rises, his voice remains a soft tenor. “So I said that if I went to a Uganda village and told them that they were all genetic mongrels and that anyone could be Ugandan, I’d still be picking spears out of myself.”
He shrugs. “It was a perfectly rational thing to say about a nation whose coat of arms has spears on it.” He sets his fork down. “Look: We’ve got an increasing generation of people who don’t really belong to the island. They don’t have a common history here. They don’t feel that it’s their heritage, and they don’t look after it. I mean, why would they?
“There’s an Oxford demographer,” he continues, “who is debunking this mongrel Briton kind of assumption. He says that 90-odd percent of everyone with a maternal grandparent born in this country can trace their ancestry back ten thousand years. Right to the Ice Age. I put it to the test: I used genetic mapping on both my maternal and paternal DNA. And sure enough, I’m what was referred to in the database as a native son of Europe. Which is good enough for me.”
A waitress appears, wide-cheeked, with blond hair pulled behind her ears. “Excuse me,” she says. “Are you finished?”
Darby stabs a final bit of shepherd’s pie. “Yeah.” He stares at her as he chews, until their blue eyes lock. Her prim smile turns puzzled.
“Everything was… fine?” she asks.
“Yeah.” He leans forward and squints. “Are you from Poland, actually?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I just noticed the accent.”
“My accent. Yes.”
“There’s a program on the BBC called Lead Balloon. Have you heard of it? A girl on there called Magda who plays a Polish girl.”
On the program, the character Magda, an eastern European housekeeper, is regularly perplexed by the ways of the British. “She has the exact same accent as you.”
“Exactly the same?”
“Exactly.”
“What’s the program of this? Red Balloon?” she asks, gathering plates.
“Lead Balloon. L-e-a-d.”
“Okay. Thank you.” She retreats.
He leans back. “Nice lady. Does her job. But how do our people feel when they need a job and she’ll work for a lot less than they do? I quite like Polish people. But I’ve asked them, how would you feel if the Polish government told you, ‘We’re going to import millions of Vietnamese, who will undercut your wages and work for next to nothing’?”
He swirls his empty glass, clinking the ice cubes. “They wouldn’t put up with it, would they? There would be riots in Poland.”
But the European Union–sanctioned labor mobility that allows thousands of hardworking Poles to seek employment in the UK is merely an irritant to Simon Darby’s British National Party, compared to what they and their counterparts in other western European nations see as a far deeper threat.
“There is now a war on Western civilization—a cultural war on white society. Muslims in this country have six children as an average, whereas we don’t even maintain our own population. Muslims believe that the more kids they have, the more power they’ll have. This country’s population is headed to 70 million. That is simply not sustainable.”
Currently, there are nearly 63 million Britons. “Right,” he says, standing. “And we’ve got all the overpopulation problems: transport, stress levels, the violence when people live on top of one another. It’s bad enough in a monocultural society. In a multicultural society, it’s destabilizing.”
Outside the Lion Hotel, Shrewsbury seems a postcard of stability. Some cobbled streets have given way to asphalt, but their configuration hasn’t changed since medieval English was spoken here. The palette of the pedestrians is richer than in Darwin’s monochromatic era, but there is no overwhelming Muslim presence—although the next parish to the east, Telford, near the famous Iron Bridge, has thirteen mosques and is one of the UK’s fastest-growing towns.
“And Bradford in Yorkshire is an Islamic town now. They run it. In much of Birmingham, we people don’t show up anymore. In London now, only 17 percent of the kids are like me.”
It is June; the sun has pushed morning’s clouds to the green horizon. In shirtsleeves, Simon Darby heads toward the English Bridge, where steps lead down to the river. Two girls in hijabs and blue jeans exit an herbal shop and pass without a glance, intent on their mobile phones.
Darby shakes his head. “They’ll push us out.”
It’s a fear that oozes through much of western Europe, giving rise to quasi-fascist political movements in previously welcoming, liberal places like Denmark and the Netherlands. This fear is often summed up with a vivid neologism: Eurabia. A virtual epidemiology of lurid Internet videos mutate around a theme of Europe becoming a vast Islamic nation by mid-century. Among their claims:
None is remotely true. The high range of projections suggests that Europe’s 20 million Muslims—about 5 percent of the population in 2011—will increase to 8 percent by 2025. What is real, however, is Islamophobia. At the English Bridge’s stone arch, Simon Darby gestures at riverbank strollers and anglers casting for pike below, all who appear to be Caucasian.
“Those people have mortgages. They’ve got kids and pets and pay council taxes. But a third-world immigrant can live in a flat for twenty-five pounds a week. He’s got no overhead, so he can afford lower wages. So our guy loses his house. My people have rights, too. Japanese do what they want in their own country. We feel we should remain dominant in this country. Because it’s ours.”
He pauses on the steps. “If I went to Iran, I wouldn’t expect churches. But if I do the same in this country, then I’m a racist villain.”
But below, where huge old riverbank willows droop over the water, Simon Darby is not a villain, but a boy again. The petulant ultranationalist fades, and the naturalist reemerges. He delights in swallows and martins dipping above the river’s surface. “And those swifts—beautiful little birds. All the way from Africa!” He spies a brood of cygnets following a mute swan hen. “This is our biggest British bird. We have three swans in Britain: these resident mutes, and the wintering whooper and Bewick’s swans, which come from Russia and that area. Some like it so much they’ve settled here,” he says proudly.
“But it’s not the same. People trap and eat them now. Eastern Europeans. Very unfortunate.” He points at a big mute swan probing the bank with its yellow bill. “They see something like that as a free lunch. They aren’t rooted in the ecology, the nature of this island.”
Darby’s party frequently plays the environmental card, calling for halts to fracking and bans on shale gas exploration, claiming agreement with its political opposite, the Green Party. They embrace the tenets of an organization of distinguished British doctors, activists, and scientists, the Optimum Population Trust.1 Although the embrace is not returned, some of their concerns do coincide: This is an island ecosystem, its limits starkly delineated by its shores. The 70 million that Darby cites are expected by 2030. That will be the equivalent of adding another London, the biggest city in Europe, to this increasingly crowded British isle.
More than two-thirds of that increase will come from foreign immigrants and their offspring. As an EU member, Britain must welcome job seekers from any other EU country, on top of its custom of accepting subjects from its former empire (via a system that has segued over the years from unlimited entry to work permits, then to selective, points-based immigration). Back when that mainly meant Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, nobody much noticed. Later, the unexpected arrivals of citizens from so-called “New Commonwealth” countries—the Nigerias, Pakistans, Jamaicas, and Bangladeshes—gave rise to nationalists like Simon Darby.
There is environmental justification, he says, for his party’s goal of stopping immigration and “deporting all the illegal immigrants.” As this presumably would take time, the BNP also advocates financial penalties for “communities that continue to have excessively large families.”
The ideal number of United Kingdom citizens they propose is 40 million. Leaving aside the environmental and economic implications of such an implosion, census figures show that more than 50 million Britons are white. Evicting every person of color from Great Britain would still leave more than 10 million extra Caucasians.
Of UK nonwhites, just 2.7 million are estimated to be Muslim. Yet what Simon Darby sees is the Britain he thought he inherited disappearing under an unfamiliar sea of sepia, where one of six Britons no longer looks like his image of the English, Welsh, or Scottish.
“It’s sad. The idea that we’re now a rich rainbow of cultures is nonsense. Go to Birmingham, where I was born. See the Islamo-Marxist liberals who hide their own inadequacies by destroying the very system that makes them inadequate. They drag it all down.”
He walks back into the old streets of Shrewsbury. “This city produced Charles Darwin. My ancestors invented industry. We Brits were clever and strong. We were wealthy. We had pride. We used to build the Concorde. Now our aircraft industry can’t make anything but the wings for the Airbus. Jaguar is owned by an Indian company. British Land Rover is gone, MG is gone. No steel industry, no coal, no shipping, our fishing industry barely clinging.”
He turns his palms up helplessly. “All that, in my lifetime.”
Birmingham, England’s second largest city, is where Simon Darby’s forebears cast iron, forged steel, and mounted their great Industrial Revolution. The original Anglo-Saxon hamlet here was just south of today’s city center, in an area now called Highgate. It is characterized mainly by its lack of character: a succession of blank high-and low-rises, built atop World War II Birmingham Blitz rubble. The striking architectural exception in Highgate is the Birmingham Central Mosque, one of the largest in western Europe.
The rectilinear red masonry exterior of its first two stories recalls the factories of Birmingham’s past. It then rises into the postindustrial, multicultural present with a dramatic white dome—and twice the height of that, a single minaret topped by a crescent, its points heavenward.
Three to four thousand fill its green-carpeted prayer hall and women’s galleries every Friday. On festival days, twenty thousand may appear. Birmingham also has 290 smaller mosques, serving a Muslim population of about two hundred fifty thousand, around one-fourth of the city’s total. The assorted mosques reflect an immigrant tendency to congregate with fellow nationals: Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian. Although most are Sunnis—as were the Islamic lands once ruled by the British Empire—the Central Mosque is nondenominational—“to promote thinking, not religious laws,” says its Indian-born founder, Dr. Mohammad Naseem.
A slight man in his eighties in a high-button black pin-striped suit, Naseem has seen the number of Muslims here quadruple, a growth now slowing as immigration tightens. Also, he notes, as succeeding Muslim generations whose language is English spread beyond the nationality enclaves of their parents, they don’t have eight children like their Bangladeshi or Pakistani mothers. There is no injunction in the Qur’an against contraception—there is even discussion of the seventh-century version, coitus interruptus, in the Hadith commentaries. It’s common today to see women in headscarves in the waiting rooms of local family-planning clinics.
“But the damage was already done,” says Naseem, a medical doctor. “Their parents arrived with a history of centuries of children dying, of always needing more hands to do the work. A new passport doesn’t instantly change that.”
Only time does, he says. The present generation might have far fewer children, and Muslim girls might now prepare at Oxford and Cambridge for careers, but it is a much larger generation, so for a while their swathe in the tapestry of British society will continue to widen. In the meantime, a new growth spurt in the Muslim community is due neither to procreation nor immigration.
“Converts are increasing. West Indians, even indigenous white Britons,” he says, as a white-robed, bearded Caucasian British acolyte appears with a tray of tea.
“The majority,” interjects the acolyte, “are women.”
Why are Englishwomen converting to Islam?
“Because of the protection that Islam offers them. They say they feel more secure covered by a hijab or wrapped in a chador. Safer.”
“Fifty countries, and one-fifth of the planet’s people are Muslim,” says Haji Fazlun Khalid. “Some fear that. I see it as an opportunity. The Qu’ran tells us to remember Allah’s blessings and to not defile the Earth. If Muslims heed that, we can make a big difference.”
Khalid, founder of the Birmingham-based Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Science, sits on the café terrace of the public library in Burton-Upon-Trent a half-hour north, drinking lemonade. The view overlooks the Trent Washlands, a chain of river meadows dotted with old pollarded willows and marsh marigolds. Khalid, a tall, bald man in wire-rimmed glasses with a trim beard, often comes here to think.
An immigrant from Ceylon (today Sri Lanka), after serving in the Royal Air Force and then for years as Midlands director of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, he resigned the civil service to take a graduate degree in Islamic theology. Having watched the jungles of his boyhood razed for tea plantations and then seen the Midlands countryside where he hiked fill with houses, he was curious to know if Islam offered guidance about the besieged environment.
Early in the Qur’an, in a surah that describes how Ibrahim embraces monotheism, he found that the Prophet Muhammad appointed Muslims as khalifas, guardians of the Earth, and warned against excessive exploitation. In the Sunnah—collected sayings and acts of the Prophet that, with the Qur’an, form the basis of shariah law—Khalid read that Allah is the sole owner of the Earth and everything in it. He loans the world to humans to use, but not to abuse.
His nonprofit group has published Green Guides for Muslim households and mobilized urban Muslims into “Clean Medina” campaigns. They’ve held conferences on whether genetically modified food is permissible halal and on the Qur’anic grounds for recycling. They’ve helped establish a shariah-based conservation zone in the Zanzibar archipelago to save Indian Ocean coral reefs, and given workshops there to dissuade fishing with dynamite. In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population and one of its richest ecosystems, they convinced Sumatran religious scholars to issue the world’s first environmental fatwas, warning that illegal logging, mining, and burning forests are haram: forbidden under divine law.
The 2007 Live Earth Initiative named Fazlun Khalid one of the world’s fifteen green religious leaders, along with the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope. “Many of the world’s nearly 1.5 billion Muslims are from poor countries that use far less fossil fuel than the rich,” he says. “But many also live in fabulously wealthy nations that produce oil. We are equally culpable. Rich petroleum states by their sheer wealth, and the rest of Muslims by our sheer numbers.”
In the Qur’an, Khalid says, the Prophet counsels people to have no more children than they can provide for. Countries awash in oil, he adds, also have a sacred responsibility for the consequences of their industry. “The Maldives are now destined to vanish under the sea. That means the first country to disappear from the face of the Earth due to climate change will be a Muslim nation.”
He has advised the Secretary General of the United Nations, and consults to Prince Charles. But he’s not sure how well they’ve listened.
“At the root of the environmental crisis is our financial system. Banks charge interest, and create money out of nothing.” In four different surahs, the Qur’an prohibits riba, or usury, as one of Islam’s most heinous sins. But he considers Islamic banking, which avoids charging interest through machinations that still earn banks profits from borrowers, to be an oxymoron.
“If we continue to create money infinitely and then apply it to resources Allah created as finite, the only long-term scenario is environmental destruction. Money is a virus. If we cure it, we will heal our environment. Population and consumerism will take care of themselves.”
But the global financial system is now as intrinsic to civilization as the atmosphere. Can it be changed? Gazing at the River Trent, golden in the afternoon sun, Khalid quotes from the Qur’an, Surah 30:41: “ ‘Corruption has spread far and wide over the land and sea, due to the actions of humankind. Allah will make them taste of their own actions as a means to find a way back to Him.’ It means that God will make us feel the error of our ways, then give us a second chance. We must seize the chance God gives us,” he says. “In our race to grow to infinity, we put too much pressure on this Earthly space. If pressure is instead placed on our population, universally and fairly, that may be a good step.”
The 1993 World Optimum Population Conference in Cambridge, where the Ehrlichs and Gretchen Daily presented their calculation that the Earth could safely handle a population of 2 billion humans, was organized by the Optimum Population Trust. An environmental think tank, OPT had been founded a year earlier by David Willey, an Oxford classics scholar who started language schools throughout Europe. A world traveler, he’d lately noticed how crowded the planet had grown, and wondered what might be done.
OPT’s mission was to promote research that might determine the optimum, sustainable human population for given regions, as well as for the entire world. Although its goals were grand and it attracted illustrious patrons—esteemed naturalist and BBC broadcaster Sir David Attenborough; primate biologist Dame Jane Goodall; and former UK representative to the UN Security Council Sir Crispin Tickell—its research resources were limited. Its chief focus became its campaign to lower the population of the United Kingdom.
It was a campaign that inevitably risked accusation of encouraging racial politics that spawn the likes of the British National Party. OPT’s members and patrons would respond that in 1973, long before Europe’s current wave of xenophobia, a UK government population panel had concluded that the Britain must accept that its “population cannot go on increasing indefinitely.” As nothing had been done since to enact the panel’s recommendations, the Optimum Population Trust formed to urge government to integrate population policy into its decision making.
Nevertheless, being called bedfellows to racists hearkens uneasily to old associations of birth control with eugenics. Their reason for seeking to determine the optimum population for their island nation was based on environmental carrying capacity, not hatred or exclusionary politics, yet with two-thirds of Britain’s population increase due to immigration, it was a delicate job to convince others that to oppose more immigration didn’t mean opposing immigrants themselves.2
OPT had two further goals, neither apt to make it more popular. One was to “oppose the view held by many politicians and economists and those in the commercial world, that a perpetually expanding economy, alongside perpetual population growth, is desirable and possible.”
The other, ominously: “To make it widely understood that failure to reduce population is likely to lead to a population crash when fossil fuels, fresh water and other resources become scarce.”
June 2010: Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, finishes his afternoon tea in the bar of the Hotel Russell in Bloomsbury, central London, and heads up the street to the St. Pancras Church, where the debate will take place. A tall, thin, graying man, he wears a dark red tie and lightweight suit with a white pinstripe. His leather briefcase looks as though he’s carried it for years. He is a retired foreign officer who returned after years in Africa with an idea of what was going very wrong in the world, and he looks weary from knowing.
The debate is in conjunction with an art installation about overpopulation in the Crypt Gallery, a converted catacomb beneath the church. Like many such crypts in London, this one was dug in the early nineteenth century to answer a need for more burial space, as rising Industrial Revolution populations filled village graveyards to overflowing. After a few decades, church crypts were closed to further interments for health concerns, presumably because smallpox could linger in long-dead corpses, but the brick-lined tunnels here still hold the remains of 557 people.
The exhibit features fifty canvases by British painter and environmental architect Gregor Harvie. Each has a distinct palette, but all resemble swarms of proliferating cells as viewed under a microscope. Tightly hung under the cramped ceiling, the effect is of the swarms mutating from canvas to canvas, out of control. They are accompanied by fifty “elegies” on wall-mounted placards, by the painter’s wife, writer Alex Harvie. Each memorializes a past society in which rapid growth was followed by collapse. They start in the Pleistocene, when the first Australians and North Americans expunged the resident megafauna from their new homes. They range through the tragedy of Sumerians who turned Garden of Eden soils between the Tigris and Euphrates into sterile salt flats; the stripped, treeless hills that were the undoing of classical Greece; Peru’s vanished Nasca people and Mexico’s Olmec; the acidification of once-lush British moors by Bronze Age tin smelters; the hapless Viking farmers who perished in Greenland when the climate shifted.
They conclude in recent memory: China’s Great Leap Forward, which overshot its capacity to produce food, starving 40 million; the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in bursting Rwanda; the calamitous shriveling of the Sahel; the horror of Haiti; Madagascar’s red soil bleeding away to sea. It is unsettling to read them in a crypt, alongside plaques commemorating those interred here.
The debate takes place aboveground, in the church’s main sanctuary. Yet again, the topic is what to do about rising population. Six people are on the panel, three associated with OPT, including Roger Martin. The others include a woman who heads a relief agency for urban African street children, a Cambridge University minister, and an environmental writer for New Scientist magazine. The host of a BBC Radio 4 science program is the moderator. The panelists sit at a long table in front of six marble-painted pillars in the church’s colonnaded, semicircular apse, facing an audience of about a hundred fifty in dark oak pews.
The first to speak, Dr. John Guillebaud, is professor emeritus of family planning and reproductive health at University College, London. Guillebaud, his dark suit punctuated by an orange daisy in his lapel, notes that every year the world adds the equivalent of another Germany or Egypt. He invites people to try to imagine where to fit another of either on the planet. He talks about the human gluttony behind the recent BP—née British Petroleum—outrage in the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of a bit more of the world’s remaining known oil.
“Resource shortages are mainly caused by ‘long-ages’ of people,” he says. “If the world were run by biologists and not economists, everyone would know that no species can go around multiplying indefinitely, humankind included, without eventually running out of vital resources like food, and ultimately ending with the collapse of numbers through deaths. Unremitting growth, folks, is the doctrine of the cancer cell.”
He speculates as to why something so logical has become such a taboo, concluding that it’s become inextricably tangled with our fear of being coerced. The phrase population control, he says, has become repellant.
“It suggests China; control by Big Brother. Please don’t say population control. It does damage.” He ends by explaining that even though worldwide birthrates are going down, “Due to a bulge of births from previous high birth rates, we are still in trouble. It’s called population momentum, and it’s the reason why we’re absolutely certain to get at least another two billion more people, because all of tomorrow’s parents are alive today.”
Next is the one whose presence qualifies this event as a debate, because he’s the only person on the panel expected to take a contrarian view. Fred Pearce, writer for New Scientist, recently published a book whose title in the UK, Peoplequake, is less to the point than its American title: The Coming Population Crash. “The truth,” he says, reiterating the book’s premise, “is that the world is now defusing population bombs.”
The world’s total fertility rate is down to 2.6 children per woman, he explains, when little more than a generation earlier it was at 5. Not just in wealthy countries, where career women don’t want to be tied to the house by too many children. “It’s being done by the world’s poorest and least educated women, who other people often see as villains in the population story.”
Even in Bangladesh, where women marry in their teens, the average is down to 3, he says. In the world’s biggest Catholic country, Brazil, “Most women have two children now. Nothing the priests say can stop millions of them from getting sterilized. What’s going on? Something very simple: Women are finally choosing to have smaller families, because for the first time, they can.”
Pearce, with sandy gray hair parted in the middle and a scruffy gray beard, says he wants to focus on the good news that the world is winning the population battle. By the stony silence, it’s not clear that this audience is convinced, let alone the other panelists. He explains that with modern medical advances, mothers no longer need six children so that enough survive to ensure a next generation.
“It took a while to realize that. While people were still having five or six and most reached adulthood, that’s when the population bomb happened. That’s why world population quadrupled in the twentieth century. But we’re reaching the end of that phase. Two or three is enough, we now realize. Rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslims or Catholics, secular or devout, tough government controls or not, small families are the new norm in most of the world.”
The trouble, he acknowledges, is that even at this new, decreased fertility rate, the world is likely to add another 2 billion people by mid-century before numbers begin to decline because of the population momentum that John Guillebaud described.
“But rising consumption today, in my view, is a far greater threat to the planet than a rising head-count. The richest 7 percent are responsible for 50 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. The poorest 50 percent are responsible for 7 percent of the emissions. There’s no way that halting population growth will do something about climate change. The population bomb is being defused. We haven’t begun to defuse the consumption problem.”
His book made the same points: population is already coming under control nicely, and to worry about it distracts from the real menace, consumption. It went further, saying that thanks to the Green Revolution “with one bound, the world was free of its Malthusian [and] Ehrlichian bonds.” And in a chapter titled “Winter in Europe,” he warned that “a birth dearth is about to plunge the continent into a tailspin of ever-declining numbers…. Demographically, Europe is living on borrowed time.”
It is his images of empty Sardinian villages and former East German towns now overrun by wolves that OPT chairman Roger Martin has in his mind as his turn arrives. His voice is calm, but color singes his pale cheeks. “It’s not either-or, either consumption or numbers. It’s obviously both. The total impact is one multiplied by the other.”
He quotes OPT patron Sir David Attenborough: “ ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, and utterly impossible if there were more.’
“We all agree that the solution is to empower women to control their own fertility. It doesn’t help, frankly, for people to say, ‘That’s happening anyway, don’t worry.’ This is not an automatic process that will happen if no one tries to make it happen. It needs priority in budgets to fund programs to make it happen.”
Martin turns to face Pearce. “This is not, Fred, us blaming the poor”—adding, as he turns back to the audience, “a phrase he likes to use about us. It is helping the poor to achieve what they want to get, which is stable populations.”
He acknowledges that the rich must emit vastly less carbon. But he also points out that to achieve some semblance of equity, the poor will have to emit more carbon. “And that figure will be much higher, the more we are. The sooner we cut our numbers, the more carbon we can emit and the better quality of life we can support.”
His candor causes a stir in the audience. Discussions of carbon emissions usually lead to calls for clean renewables to replace dirty fossil fuels immediately. Martin, however, has alluded to the growing understanding that this can’t happen anytime soon, if ever: renewable technologies potent enough to run all the world’s factories, vehicles, heating, and cooling simply don’t exist yet, even if the political will to switch tomorrow existed. And the amount of fossil fuel required to mine component metals and to build solar and wind power installations incurs an emissions debt that takes decades to environmentally amortize before their output can be considered truly carbon-free. In the meantime, he argues, the best hope to keep the planet livable is to reduce the number of us making all the demands.
“Otherwise,” Martin concludes, “every additional person simply ratchets down everyone else’s carbon ration.”
And with that, the fireworks are mostly over. The Street Children Africa director, a British-educated Belgian named Savina Geerinckx, poses the pertinent question Are street children the visible manifestation of overpopulation? and responds by noting the obvious: Most would not be on the streets if their parents had had access to family planning.
“If young people are targeted for sex education,” she warns, “street children should be a top priority. Sixty-three percent have a sexual encounter within their first week on the streets. And 90 percent of it will be unprotected.” Her organization, she adds, is now dealing with third-generation street babies.
Zoologist Aubrey Manning, OBE, the august, eighty-year-old presence on her left, swiftly summarizes the biology pertinent to the population matter: “Human beings are rapidly becoming a monoculture—a voracious monoculture. We suck resources in at the cost of the rest of life on the planet.” Every plan for the future, he says, “is totally anthropocentric: What can we do to make us better? Let us also recognize that by diminishing the planet’s resources, we are threatening our own existence. Because, like all other plant and animal species, we rely on a planet being able to renew clean air, clean water, and fertile soils to keep us alive.”
Like other biologists of his generation, he is confounded that his own kind is perpetrating an extinction the likes of which the planet has seen only five times previously over the past 4 billion years—and previously, always due to some monumental upheaval of geology, or a disaster of cosmology when an errant bit of creation collides with our own. “I am sickened by the destruction of so many of our fellow creatures. Our descendants will be diminished as human beings if they can’t share the planet with a rich biodiversity. We will have to reduce the strain on the Earth, reduce our carbon footprint, and stop having third children. Numbers count.”
There is an easy way to evaluate the population debate on moral grounds, suggests the Reverend Jeremy Caddick, whose Cambridge chapel was the first in Britain’s Anglican church to bless gay unions.
“In a traditional moral debate about say, abortion rights, usually somebody says, ‘Well, that’s your opinion. I think differently.’ But if you say, ‘Adolf Hitler believed that exterminating whole races of people was acceptable; that’s just his opinion,’ that’s less credible. If the issues in the population debate are connected to the very survival of our species and culture, then the notion that different views are just people’s opinion is frankly ridiculous.”
If the future of the human race indeed depends on tackling population increase head-on, it must be asked if it’s feasible—and if so, how quickly can or must it happen.
“It probably will take care of itself, mostly,” offers Fred Pearce in the discussion afterward, but tonight he’s alone in that opinion. This is London, which has added more than five hundred thousand people since the millennium turned, and a million more are expected by 2020. Boroughs are warring over how many housing units developers can build, and how many the city can sustainably tolerate. With England feeling more mashed each year, its reservoirs strained, and 15 million more people projected by mid-century, it doesn’t feel like the problem is taking care of itself. The Office of National Statistics projects that thanks to health care, a third of UK babies will celebrate their hundredth birthday, and that by 2035 the number of centenarians will increase eightfold. By 2050, the United Kingdom will be the biggest country in western Europe.
“I think we pussyfoot around this word coercion,” says Aubrey Manning. “Let’s remember that for centuries, governments and churches have been coercing people into having more children. We have to give governments the courage to recognize that we’re overpopulated and the best thing that could possibly happen is population decline.” He’s applauded.
Even at today’s slowing growth rate, world population still will hit at least 10.9 billion by 2100, a figure that terrifies ecologists, who warn that the 7 billion we’re already at is stretching the world beyond its breaking point—and that 10.9 billion people likely will never happen, because 7 billion of us are already turning the atmosphere into something unlivable. The UK, however, is actually growing faster than at any time in the last two hundred years. By 2033, it is projected to reach 72 million (and the United States, the other developed nation that is still growing, will approach 400 million). With the UK adding the equivalent of ten more Birminghams by 2033, Optimum Population Trust’s own goal for a sustainable Britain is even more radical than the British National Party’s 30 million. Despite recently dropping the phrase optimum population for its new working name, Population Matters, publications on its website still advocate one for the UK: between 17 and 27 million.
The BBC moderator is upset that Manning invoked the c-word. “At what point does any kind of policy merit the term coercive?” he wants to know.
At no point, apparently. Their applause notwithstanding, everyone here abhors China’s one-child policy and the enforced sterilizations of India Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s regime. But since it’s unclear how to speed toward their goal otherwise, this question raises the objection that it should be a woman’s right, not a government’s, to decide for herself how many children she wants. Suddenly, the apparently united crowd divides over whether women will be victims or beneficiaries of hard decisions that protect nature from being crushed by human excess.
A male in the audience stands up. “When you promote family planning on the basis that too many children will doom the environment, you’re using the politics of fear and moral blackmail. You’re not giving people a choice; you’re giving them an ultimatum. This is naked moral coercion of women to make the right choices as defined by you, or they will single-handedly destroy the planet by daring to have too many children. I challenge the idea that family planning in the Third World is about female empowerment. Every Malthusian in history has been wrong. So has Paul Ehrlich.”
He gets applauded, too, demonstrating how truly emotionally confusing the thought of restraining our natural urge to procreate is.
“That’s the popular position of rich people in the world,” retorts Aubrey Manning. “The Earth is limitless. You just fiddle with technology, and increase food supplies. But we are now climbing a down escalator. It’s unimaginable how anybody can suppose that population growth could go on indefinitely. It’s the idea that we have some kind of right to go on the way we’re going. We are living in cloud-cuckoo-land if we believe that the Earth will go on providing. As for decisions, who’s going to speak for orangutans?”
Another ovation.
Strangely, two things go unmentioned. One is Europe’s aging demographics. A book currently selling in England, propounding the same crashing-population theme as Fred Pearce’s, is The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, by an American, Phillip Longman. It urges western Europeans to have more babies, lest their pensions and their economy collapse.
The other omission is apparent from the complexions of the evening’s attendees: Everyone present is white. A two-hour discussion on overpopulation has taken place in London without any reference to the politically touchy fact that the United Kingdom’s growth is mainly due to immigration. The missing elephant in the room is anyone resembling an immigrant.
This odd fact recalls a comment earlier in the evening by Fred Pearce that evoked no response: a large Muslim country, he said, with no coercion à la Mao Zedong or Indira Gandhi’s zealot son Sanjay, has managed to bring their once-high birth rate below replacement level.
“In the past twenty-five years, behind the veil,” Pearce said, “the number of children Iranian women are having has crashed, from eight to less than two—1.7, on average. Women in Tehran today have fewer children than their sisters in New York, believe it or not.”
Nobody seemed to have heard.