In his teens, Theodore Roosevelt read Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species and decided to become a wildlife biologist. At Harvard, his career in natural science gave way to political science, but Roosevelt would eventually have an impact on biology that, at least quantitatively, approached Darwin’s epic qualitative contribution. Between 1903 and 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt created 150 national forests in the United States, including 93 in a single day, preserving an area roughly equal to France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg combined. He also doubled the number of American national parks (to 10; there are now 59).
By doing so, he helped expand the concept of wildlife biology to include an applied field, which Darwin might have termed an oxymoron: wildlife management. The idea that something can be both wild and managed epitomizes our complicated human identity—suspended, as French philosopher Blaise Pascal described us, somewhere between angels and animals. Nevertheless, the fate of many species beyond our own now depends on the skills of human stewards to finesse a delicate equilibrium among prey, predators, plants, and ourselves.
This is not easy. Consider one of the most famous episodes in the annals of wildlife management, the mule deer of Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau, north of the Grand Canyon. In 1906, President Roosevelt created the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve to protect deer that browse on the Kaibab Plateau’s spruce, aspen, oak, ponderosa pine, piñon, and juniper. At the time, there were an estimated four thousand deer there. The new game preserve enhanced their survival by banishing the sheep and cattle that competed for their forage, and by offering bounties on the mountain lions, wolves, bobcats, and coyotes that preyed on them. Over the ensuing decades, thousands of predators were killed—so many that the wolves were effectively exterminated.
In 1913, when Roosevelt arrived there to hunt lions, there were so many deer that he wondered if hunting should be permitted to control their numbers. But he was no longer president, and laws he’d created prohibited harvesting the species they were designed to protect. By 1922, between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand mule deer were gobbling all the available berries, acorns, seedlings, and forage, and Forest Service personnel feared that their population was headed for a crash. Biologists and wildlife managers met to discuss taking action. Among the options were relocating some deer elsewhere, culling the herd by legalizing hunting, or doing nothing.
But science was complicated by politics. The Kaibab Plateau was divided between two federal jurisdictions: the national game preserve, and the newly created Grand Canyon National Park. Each had different management goals—as did the young state of Arizona, which declared that keeping tourists from the Grand Canyon’s North Rim just so men with noisy guns could slaughter big-antlered tourist attractions was not going to happen.
The surging deer population had been helped by a dozen exceptionally wet winters before 1918, which had produced bumper crops of succulents and nutritious forage like deer vetch and cliffrose that allowed does to produce plenty of milk for their fawns. Some years of normal rainfall followed—until 1924, which was particularly dry. Spring forage was way down, and low-hanging tree branches that does could reach were quickly overbrowsed.
That autumn, defying both the National Park Service and the state of Arizona, Forest Service wildlife managers enlisted horseback cowboys in an attempt to herd thousands of mule deer off the North Rim, down into the Grand Canyon, and up the other side. Except for providing bestseller material for western writer Zane Grey, who participated, the great Grand Canyon deer drive was a grand fiasco. All it accomplished was to confirm that wild creatures do not behave like docile, domesticated cattle. Next, the Forest Service opened the game preserve to hunters, several of whom Arizona arrested. That was followed by a severe winter, and the crash that everyone feared commenced. An estimated 70 percent of Kaibab Plateau mule deer starved to death in the North Rim snows.
Two of the twentieth century’s foremost ecologists, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, would later cite the tragedy of Kaibab Plateau mule deer as an object lesson in why predators are necessary to nature’s plan. Without such a natural check, a species is doomed to overpopulate its range until it eats itself out of its natural home.
Biologist David Brown, professor of wildlife management at Arizona State University, does not disagree—except, he adds, “To say it’s just predators is an oversimplification. The controls that kept lions in check didn’t so much reduce them as prevent them from expanding with the deer during the wet years. When deer declined after 1924, that’s when we started moving toward population stability. There was enough food to maintain a population, but not enough nutritional forage for it to increase.”
By 1940, the Kaibab Plateau’s mule deer population finally stabilized around an estimated ten thousand, where it has since been maintained by both predators and controlled hunting. “The lesson,” says Brown, “was to harvest enough so that the population wouldn’t crash again in the future.”
But to maintain stability, at times wildlife managers also boost populations, by seeding plots with a species’ favorite kinds of vegetation, or with nutritional plant mixes of fats, carbohydrates, and protein. Sometimes they artificially fertilize existing forage, or remove competing plants with herbicide or controlled burns. If they’re managing a game species, in the spring they count nibbled twigs on winter forage plants to determine how many hunting permits to issue in the fall. In low rainfall, they provide access to water with troughs or tanks, or they dam creeks or even pump to create ponds.
David Brown, whose ruddy complexion reveals a man who’s spent more than four decades helping U.S. Fish and Wildlife manage bighorn sheep, elk, and pronghorns, disapproves of such water management, because, he maintains, desert-adapted ungulates handle drought much better than their predators. What concerns him more are diseases for which wild animals never evolved defenses. “It’s like Indians who didn’t have antibodies against European smallpox. Trophy hunters don’t extinguish bighorn sheep: domestic sheep diseases do.” The solution is to keep livestock away from wildlife, which has never been simple. “We don’t even know all the vectors: Prairie dogs die of plague that probably didn’t show up in this country until the 1930s. Ferrets die of canine distemper. It’s probably more of a factor than we realize.”
With trade and transport now erasing ocean barriers that once separated human populations, we may be even more susceptible than wildlife. Nervously, epidemiologists try to stay a step ahead of the latest Ebola, SARS, and bird flu virus mutations, lest they leap continents as easily as they jump from animal species to our own. Are there lessons from wildlife management that might help humans plan our own future?
“Absolutely none,” says Brown. “The reason we can do it with animals is that we have the massive superiority of one species managing another. That does not apply to managing ourselves. We’ve proven ourselves to be fully incapable of that.”
He remembers being in eighth grade, seeing 1940 census figures in a textbook. “There were 120 million Americans then. It was a good number. Economists weren’t happy—we were still in the tail end of the Depression—but we had zero population growth without any battle with religion. Economics did it. It was basically a comfortable situation: few immigrants, because there were no jobs for them, and limited average family size.”
Then came World War II. “Like with deer management, there’s always something to upset the applecart. The war ended, and the first thing we did was try to repopulate. And we didn’t want just a sustaining economy: we wanted growth. It’s in our DNA to want to grow. That’s true with Kaibab mule deer herds, or with wolves in Yellowstone. It’s part of the biological process. It would be nice to get to just the right carrying capacity of humans and maintain that number. But who’s going to do that?”
In 1924, he says, Kaibab deer were down to skin and bones. Fawns were dying or stillborn, or does weren’t conceiving. It was tragic, but they had to die to restore a livable balance. Imagine, though, if we tried that with people.
“It’s totally counterintuitive if you want to manage people. If you go to Darfur and see people starving, you bring them food, and their reproductive rate goes back up. Haiti has an earthquake, you bring in food and relief, and their reproduction rebounds.” He shakes his head at the irony: by replenishing the population, the suffering inevitably recurs.
“This has been understood for a hundred years, but do we change our behavior? No. Because you can’t say screw Haiti, the place is a basket case, so we’re going to block efforts to bring them food because it’s against their better interest. Our tendency in a critical situation is to provide food. That’s what we do.”
The notion of husbanding the human race as though we were game or livestock horrifies on multiple levels—moral, religious, and philosophical, not to mention legal. To suggest applying principles of wildlife management to our own species conjures abominations such as humans being culled like deer. Although we famously aren’t good at remembering history, attempts at thinning our ranks—otherwise known as genocide—are among our most indelible historical memories.
Yet although we strive for the heavens, as Pascal noted, we are still mammals who, like all other Earthly creatures, require food and water—resources that we are now outstripping. Our seafood is down to dregs scraped from the ocean floor; our soils on chemical life support; our rivers fouled and drained. We squeeze and shatter rocks, mine frigid seas, and split atoms in risky places because easily harvested fuels are nearly gone. Like Kaibab deer, every species in the history of biology that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash—a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species. In a world now stretched to the brink, today we all live in a parkland, not a boundless wilderness. To survive and continue the legacy of our species, we must adjust accordingly.
Inevitably—and, we must hope, humanely and nonviolently—that means gradually bringing our numbers down. The alternative is letting nature—the new nature we’ve inadvertently created in our own image—do that for us.
How might nature do so? Probably in a number of cascading ways, as one loss ignites another. The fish we eat are no longer threatened simply because we crave them to the point of disappearance: Because we’ve dug up and burned millions of years’ worth of excess carbon buried by nature in less than three centuries, the waters they dwell in now grow warmer than some of them may be able to bear. Decreased oxygen levels and increased metabolic rates in warming waters are already decreasing body sizes of North Atlantic cod and haddock faster than models had predicted.
As oceans absorb our excess carbon dioxide, they become less alkaline. And although our seawater is not yet so acidic that it’s turned into salty Perrier, higher levels of dissolved CO2 corrode developing shells of young mollusks and crustaceans. Warm waters expand, melting ice adds more volume, and the specter of rising seas becomes a certainty as it grows likely that Earth’s average surface temperature is headed beyond the 2°C (3.6°F) increase over preindustrial levels proposed as the threshold we dare not pass.1
At our present rising rate of greenhouse gas emissions, however, we will eclipse a 2°C increase in the next two to three decades. With two-thirds of the world’s population living within two hundred miles of a seacoast, and with most of the world’s economy concentrated in coastal cities, the potential swamping of civilization as we know it, should these places flood, overwhelms our ability to fathom. Current budgetary traumas will seem trivial next to the prospect of erecting dikes to protect, in order of population, the likes of Tokyo, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Karachi, Mumbai, Manila, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, Tunis, Jakarta, New York, Los Angeles–Long Beach, London, Lagos, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Miami, Singapore, Barcelona, Sydney, Melbourne, Alexandria (and the entire Nile Delta), Athens, Tel Aviv, Lisbon, Naples, Tripoli, Casablanca, Durban, San Juan, Dubai, Havana, Houston, Beirut, Perth, Marseilles, Stockholm, Odessa, Doha, Boston, Vancouver, Oslo, Macau, Copenhagen, Abu Dhabi, and Honolulu, as well as hundreds more cities the size of New Orleans and smaller, but no less precious to those who live and work there.
We were far fewer, and living far less densely and intensely, when the Black Death killed approximately one-fourth of all humans in the mid-fourteenth century, and also when the 1918–20 Spanish influenza knocked our species, then numbering less than 2 billion, back by an estimated 50 million. In today’s tightly bound 7-billion-and-growing world, our antibiotic armor is being breached by mutating, resistant strains of infections from gonorrhea to streptococcus. Like every other monoculture that replaces a diverse ecological mix, the one known as Homo sapiens is more vulnerable to opportunistic pandemic than ever.
Unintentionally, we have also spawned our own micro-threats, for which neither we nor anything alive have defenses. The crisis in Tel Aviv’s biggest sperm bank—just one man in one hundred now qualifies to be a donor—warns that Israel’s transformation of deserts into gardens may have depended too heavily on pesticides. The damaged semen may be due to endocrine disruptors found not just in agro-chemistry, but in pharmaceuticals, household cleaners, detergents, plastics, and even cosmetics and sunscreens. Mounting evidence links them to rising rates of breast and prostate cancer, autism, ovarian cysts, attention-deficit disorder, heart disease, autoimmune deficiency, obesity, diabetes, learning disabilities, and—if that weren’t alarming enough—scrambled sexuality in fauna, ranging from fish to frogs to alligators, polar bears, and humans. In some cases, this means sex ratios skewed far beyond than those perpetrated by ultrasound in India or China: In the Saskatchewan River basin, up to 90 percent of a common minnow are now female. Many more fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals are being born as hermaphrodites, with intersexual mixtures of male and female genitalia that bode darkly for reproduction.
From animals to us, fertility is dropping not by choice, but by exposure to molecules that never existed before. The term we’ve invented to describe them, gender-benders, is precisely accurate, but unfortunately too snappy to be taken as seriously as it truly is. This is a tragedy—and it is also nature rejecting an unnatural act, making life inhospitable for the actors.
It’s too early to know how seriously toxic our environment already is, because we are all part of the experiment to find out. Although every embryo on Earth—all species, not just our own—is now exposed to pervasive gender-bending molecules, thus far not every child is born autistic or gonadally challenged. If we stop depending on organochlorides, organochlorines, organophosphates, and the like, with luck we can purge them from our system—although this may be the definitive case of an evil genie escaping the bottle, as many appear indestructible. But there are other, simpler ways that nature will halt our unimpeded growth if we don’t take the reins ourselves. The most basic is the world’s oldest: cutting off our sustenance. The bottom line of the twenty-first century is that we will have less food—not more as we did, only briefly, during the Green Revolution.
That is what an odds maker would bet on: We will not be able to grow, hunt, or harvest enough for the 7 billion we already are, let alone the 10.9 billion we’re racing toward. With weather now nearly impossible to predict, crop disasters are annual events on at least one continent per year. Hopes that a warmer world would actually enhance harvests are dashed by the reality of thresholds—averages of 84°F for corn; 86°F for soybeans—beyond which yields drop, as farmers from the United States to India are learning only too well.
Likewise, cheerful assurances that farming would expand poleward, turning northern Canada and Siberia into breadbaskets, failed to consider that acidic, conifer-covered taiga soils would take many millennia to adapt to the loamy demands of grains. Our remaining topsoils—those not scoured away by winds and floods or turned to dust by drought—are overworked, overfertilized, overfumigated, and no longer yield what they did fifty years ago.
Further predictions that, in lieu of exhausted land, we’ll reap limitless tons of algae from the seas, which we’ll fashion into acceptable simulacra of foods we favor, smack of extreme technofix fantasies. As anyone who loves sushi knows, seaweed has many tasty, nutritious uses, and doubtless there are more to discover. However, the logistics of growing, harvesting, processing, and distributing enough to provide mainstay nourishment for billions defy reality, beginning with energy costs—let alone retraining 10.9 billion palates to accept seaweed-based food substitutes. And the same acidification dissolving the shells of oyster larvae will disrupt the chemistry that until now has allowed wakame, nori, kelp, agar-agar, et al., to thrive along our shores.
An animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, once offered a million dollars to whoever could invent and bring artificial meat to market. Although the award was a publicity spoof, scientists at both Oxford and Amsterdam University, among others, are dutifully trying. The idea of in vitro steak may appall some but appeal to others, if no animals are harmed and no forests are felled. But before firing up our barbecues, it’s best to recall that lab-grown nutrients won’t be conjured from thin air: even synthetic food requires a feedstock. The Oxford group hopes to grow muscle tissue from Cyanobacteria hydrolysate, a primitive algae; their Dutch counterparts, with substantial government backing, are trying pig stem cells—and Japanese researchers claim to have alchemized meat from proteins in human waste. Ick factors aside, producing ground beef artificially anytime soon would cost thousands of dollars a pound, and food scientists suspect that commercial production is at least three decades away.
By then, assuming no catastrophes, we’ll be well past 9 billion, headed to 10 billion and more. Despite the reassurance of agro-biotechnology giant Monsanto—whose genetic modifications are already being outsmarted by microbes’ and insects’ evolutionary talents—being able to feed that many Homo sapiens is highly unlikely. We can’t feed the 7 billion we already are: a billion of us are chronically malnourished, and 16,000 of our children starve to death daily. Whether we could feed everyone if only we distributed food equitably, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and others insist, is moot in a world where food is mostly produced to profit from people, not to nourish them.
Even granting markets their commodities, protest vegetarians, every human would have plenty of food if only the photosynthesis responsible for everything we eat (except salt) were not diverted into wasteful production of meat. Seventy percent of the grain grown in the United States, they claim, and 98 percent of the soy meal, goes to feed livestock,2 not people (as do 80 percent of the antibiotics sold). Nearly one-third of the planet’s ice-free landmass is used for either grazing or for growing animal feed. It takes about six pounds of grain (and roughly 2,400 gallons of water) to produce one pound of beef.3 Pork is a bit better, as pigs have only one stomach chamber versus cattle’s inefficient four. Their conversion rate of grain to edible flesh is 4:1; poultry conversion is half that.
Factoring in energy costs and fertilizer, producing animal protein burns about eight times as much fuel as plant protein. But meat’s climatic contribution doesn’t stop there, or even with bovine belching and farting. An exhaustively comprehensive 2009 study by World Bank environmental specialists Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang measured feed, flatulence, forest-to-field loss, packaging, cooking temperature, waste production, fluorocarbons used in meat refrigeration, carbon-intensive medical treatment of livestock and of meat eaters who suffer from heart disease, cancers, diabetes, high blood pressure, and strokes, and even the cumulative CO2 exhaled by the world’s 19 billion chickens, 1.6 billion cattle and water buffalo, 1 billion pigs, and 2 billion sheep and goats.
Their conclusion was that livestock and their by-products account for at least 51 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse emissions.
Yet the vexation of vegan crusaders who in one stroke would cut global warming in half and eliminate world hunger by feeding grain directly to people is that most people aren’t interested. Beef demand continues to rise even faster than population, because as more people move to cities, they seek the satisfactions of modern life, including the beef-laden Western diet. By a maddening, market-driven paradox, if rich nations did choose to eat less meat, the price of meat will fall and poor nations would probably eat even more.
A 2011 study published in Environmental Research Letters concluded that the Brazilian Amazon had 79 million head of cattle. “Fifteen years ago,” noted Kansas State University geographer and coauthor Marcellus Caldas, “it had less than 10 million.” In the previous five years alone, the portion of Brazil converted to soybean production to feed them nearly equaled the size of Switzerland. The warming of the climate abetted by all that hamburger is dramatically shrinking Andean and African glaciers that water crops in some of the world’s most populous regions. Himalayan glaciers, frozen as solid as the mountains they cover, will take longer to melt, but as global temperatures rise 2°C beyond the twentieth-century average, and keep going toward 5° and 6°C, meltwater flows to the Ganges and the Indus will increase over the next two decades—and then peak. Before 2100, at a time when Pakistan’s population is projected to top half a billion, the Indus could be going dry—two facts in stark contradiction with each other. Either millions of Pakistanis will die, or they will be at war with their neighbors India, Afghanistan, and Iran, which will be suffering similar disasters.
Australia has no glaciers, and has fewer than 23 million people in an area roughly the size of the contiguous lower forty-eight of the United States, which hold 315 million. Yet it has grown so desiccated that it is locked in national debate over whether to cap its population by halting immigration. Even the notion of banning beef, practically a national sacrilege, has been broached. In the meantime, Australian coastal cities are investing US$13 billion in desalinization plants that will require enormous amounts of fuel to work around the clock. To economize, Australia almost certainly will use its own plentiful resource, black coal, further exacerbating climbing temperatures and altered climate that Australians no longer doubt.
During the parched Texas summer, the third biggest U.S. city, Houston, is already mostly drinking effluent from Dallas and Fort Worth, whose wastewater discharges constitute nearly the entire downstream flow of the Trinity River, Houston’s principal source. The American West’s main artery, the Colorado River, hasn’t reached its delta since 1984. After two decades of reduced snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers report, there is an even chance that by 2017 levels in Lake Mead, the Colorado’s main reservoir, will no longer cover the Hoover Dam’s turbines. By 2021, the lake could essentially be gone, outflows having fatally exceeded the inflows that replenish it. In 2010, Lake Mead was already 100 feet lower than in 2000, nearly down to where one of two intakes supplies water to Las Vegas. With the second intake not far below, Las Vegas began racing to dig a 20-foot-high tunnel three miles under the lake, in order to install a third intake 140 feet lower, lest it go dry.
But that may only buy the city—America’s fastest growing until the 2008 real estate collapse—another decade or less, especially since Las Vegas is only one of eight cities over a million that depend on Colorado River water.4 If levels get so low that 25 million downstream voters in California demand what little Colorado River water remains, “The nation would have to seriously discuss a stair-step exchange,” said Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, in 2009. In that scenario, Nevada would take Denver’s Colorado River allotment, because Denver, in turn, would take Nebraska and Kansas’s share of the Platte River, because those states could recharge their depleted Ogallala Aquifer by siphoning water from the Mississippi, and so on ever eastward.
It should come as no shock that this grand scheme is probably doomed, if not from astronomically prohibitive engineering expenses, then by the fact that states bordering the Great Lakes, also now at historic low levels, have already passed laws forbidding any other drainage basin from trying to stick straws into Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, et al. In 2008, the state of Georgia was so desperate for water that it contemplated resurrecting a 150-year-old survey dispute that would have pushed its northwestern corner a mile farther north, to the banks of the Tennessee River. The state of Tennessee was not amused, nor charitably inclined.
The upshot is that in the twenty-first century, our species will be subjected to global water torture: alternately raising unaffordable dikes to hold it back, then desperately trying to coax it from any possible source. But like topsoil, there is no practical way to create more fresh water. Removing salt from seawater—the result of millions of years of rain and runoff dissolving rocks en route to the sea—is undercut by the cost of the energy required, and defeated by the distance that separates most arable land from the oceans. Desalination may be the most literal example of how the technological species that we’ve become stands in defiance of nature: As University of California–Santa Cruz Director of Integrated Water Research Brent Haddad told the Santa Cruz Sentinel after a seven-year study of the economic and ecological effects of desalination, “We are reversing the water cycle that has flowed in one direction since the beginning of Earth.”
Among the many tricks we will try to keep fitting ourselves onto this planet, there is one that we already know. The technology is cheaper than all the others by many orders of magnitude. It is reducing the numbers of bodies to feed by managing our reproduction, before nature steps in to do that for us.
It is not perfect technology: for a small percentage of women, the chemistry of contraception causes migraines or depression, although the copper-T IUD is a benign alternative, easily reversible as long as a trained medical practitioner is handy. Those chemical effects are not confined solely to women’s bodies, because while nearly half of estrogen is metabolized, the rest is excreted. Flushed away, a portion is removed in sewage treatment, but the rest finds its way into the ecosystem.
Some of the gender-bending estrogens feminizing not just minnows but trout, bass, and perch in lakes and rivers worldwide are identical to the ones in oral contraceptives. In every big river of North America except the Yukon, female egg cells are now common in two-thirds or more of male largemouth and smallmouth bass. In several studies in the United States, Canada, and England, however, research indicates that, compared to industrial and agrochemical sources, female contraceptives are a minuscule part of the artificial hormonal assault on the environment.
That doesn’t mean that current technology needn’t be improved; however we can minimize chemical exposure to women and to the ecosystem, the better. Among the most promising options is to counter conception through a far simpler pathway: by short-circuiting male sperm delivery.
Two possibilities are male versions of the Pill, which, unlike their female counterparts, don’t manipulate hormones. One, already tested at Kansas State University on rats, rabbits, and monkeys, uses a compound called H2-gamendazole that stops sperm from forming in men’s semen without reducing their sex drive, and is reversible within weeks. The other oral treatment uses a compound developed in the Bradner Laboratory at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute called JQ1, which targets a testis-specific protein to lower sperm numbers and retard their swimming capability. Again, test mice show no lowered libidos, and regain fertility when they stop taking it.
Two of the most imaginative approaches aren’t chemical, but mechanical interventions. Risug—reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance—is already offered in several cities in India, and as of 2012 was in FDA trials in the United States. It involves a fifteen-minute outpatient operation using local anesthetic via a tiny incision in the scrotum to reach the vas deferens tube, into which the doctor injects an inexpensive polymer gel. Within three days, the gel forms a lining that allows semen to pass normally, but electrolytically destroys sperm. The spermicidal effect lasts for ten years, but can be reversed by injecting a baking soda solution. The same Indian developer has been testing another method at the University of North Carolina that uses ultrasound to heat testes for fifteen minutes, resulting in six months of sterility in test animals.
Each of these techniques portends to be cheaper and safer both for humans and the environment than female chemical contraception. For a woman in a steady relationship with a willing partner, it could shift the stress of birth control from her uterus, conserving that organ for the sole use that nature intended. Reliance on male contraception would also, however, mean relinquishing control over her own reproduction, inserting a new test of trust into intergender dynamics. For men, it could mean liberation from the interruptive frustration of using condoms—although, outside of monogamy, there would be a loss of protection from sexually transmitted disease. As long as one epidemic that threatens human existence, HIV, is spread through seminal fluids, protection and contraception must remain related but separate issues.
For the world, simple, nontoxic male contraception would mean a powerful form of population restraint, one which would far more equitably share responsibility for planning families. The politicization of contraception, born of gender wars waged by extremist Catholic and evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, and ultra-Orthodox Jews, may be befuddled should anyone try prohibiting men from choosing whether to use it. Male pills and instantly reversible vasectomies will be interesting, welcome new elements in the complex mix of managing our future, even as we consummate our desires.
In 1971, Dr. Malcolm Potts traveled from London to California to meet an ex-convict named Harvey Karman. Potts, a Cambridge don, was an obstetrician and a PhD in embryology. Karman was an abortionist.
The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that would legalize abortion in the United States as a fundamental right was still two years away, although in some states such as California, abortions were permitted in cases of rape, or if the health of the mother was at stake. Since he was not a medical doctor, Karman could not legally perform those, but he was well known to California doctors who did. In the mid-1950s, while researching emotional aspects of therapeutic abortion as a psychology graduate student at UCLA, Karman learned that a fellow student had died from a botched illegal abortion. Another, finding herself pregnant, committed suicide. He began an underground service, taking women to Mexico for clandestine abortions. Dismayed by unhygienic conditions there and exorbitant fees, he began performing them himself in motel rooms, for which he eventually spent two and a half years in state prison.
Undaunted, he became a repeat offender and advocate, openly campaigning for abortion rights. He also invented something revolutionary: a manual syringe to conduct abortions by vacuum aspiration. Although machine-powered vacuum aspiration was already becoming preferred to scraping a woman’s uterine lining, Karman’s invention had prominent advantages. Being manual, it was so silent that a woman often wasn’t even aware that the procedure was taking place. Also, it required no costly electric pump, just a cheap reusable fifty-milliliter vacuum syringe. Most important, Karman had designed an attachment made of soft plastic tubing that replaced the conventional rigid metal curette. This flexible cannula, so thin that it avoided the need for dilation, was far more comfortable and far less traumatic, and minimized the chance of a perforated uterus.
By the time Roe v. Wade passed, Karman had trained doctors from throughout America in its use, as well as international physicians such as Malcolm Potts. Like Karman, Dr. Potts had become interested in abortion as a grad student during the 1950s. While doing twenty-four-hour obstetric duty at a Cambridge hospital, nearly every night he would be roused to perform a D&C. He wondered how many were spontaneous miscarriages, and how many were bungled induced abortions.
“Nearly all are intentionally induced,” an anesthetist told him.
“How do you know?”
Curious himself, the anesthetist had been asking women patients during the dreamy moments before they fell unconscious. Potts was impressed that this colleague refused to publish his findings on the grounds that he had obtained compromising information from defenseless subjects—and because it would implicate several colleagues in illegal moonlighting. But he was even more impressed by the apparent scope of the need.
In 1966, Malcolm Potts visited Eastern Europe, where abortion had been legal and safe for over a decade, and where fertility rates were quite low, even though the most available contraceptive was coitus interruptus. Eventually he advised Parliament on what became the 1967 Abortion Act that legalized the procedure in the UK. He became the first male physician at London’s Marie Stopes Clinic. In 1968, he was named medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
It was in that capacity that he went to meet Harvey Karman. Immediately, he saw how important Karman’s invention would be in undeveloped countries, where death from mud-hut abortions was a principal cause of female mortality. To assure that it could be available in the poorest places on Earth, Karman agreed to coauthor a paper on the device so no one would be able to patent it. Even before their article was published in the British medical journal The Lancet, Potts took Karman and three other specialists at the invitation of Bangladesh’s government to aid girls and women raped during the 1971 war of liberation from Pakistan. Many of their fifteen hundred patients had been banished by their husbands and families; many more victims had committed suicide. To circumvent Bangladesh’s ban on abortion, they called the Karman cannula procedure “menstrual extraction”—a method of regulating a woman’s cycle, which, technically, it was. In every village they visited, they taught doctors, nurses, and midwives the simple, painless technique, which is still used there today.
“Like so much else we do as physicians, abortion is a healing process,” says Malcolm Potts, who today holds a chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability, and is married to international reproductive rights advocate Martha Campbell. “A five-minute operation on an unintentionally pregnant seventeen-year-old woman can change the trajectory of the next half-century of her life. Few other procedures in medicine have that power.”
As late as 1869, Potts says, the Vatican refused to comment on the subject of when life begins. Pope John Paul II’s 1983 assertion that it begins at conception has no medical basis, he adds, as many fertilized eggs never survive to advance from zygote to embryo to fetus to child.
“Religious assertions about when life begins are analogous to religious beliefs about life after death. They are both strongly held, but beyond the realm of science to prove or disprove. As an embryologist, I can no more tell you when life begins by looking down my microscope than an astronomer can tell you if heaven exists by scanning the constellations for the Pearly Gates.”
What he does know is that by 2025, 3 billion people will be short of water, and that countries with dwindling rivers such as Pakistan that have failed to control human fertility are more dangerous each year. In 1958, when there were fewer than 3 billion people, President Dwight Eisenhower identified population growth as a strategic security matter. The investigator he appointed, Major General William Draper, spent the rest of his life trying to convince world leaders to fund family planning. Half a century and more than double that number later, as Malcolm Potts reminds people, the 9/11 Commission Report warned that “a large, steadily increasing population of young men [is] a sure prescription for social turbulence.”
Over half the world’s 7 billion are under twenty-seven years old; over half of those are males; and over half of them are now jostling each other in cities, unmoored from the land-based traditions that defined most of human culture until only recently. Except for volcanic eruptions, every emergency on Earth is now either related to or aggravated by the presence of more people than conditions can bear. Malcolm Potts, who has worked worldwide—he gave Mechai Viravaidya his initial family-planning grant in Thailand—believes that contraception is the indispensible tool for bringing the planet and its people back to health.
He also understands that abortion, fraught as it is with ideology, is the safety net when contraception fails. “No country reaches replacement rate fertility without access to safe abortion,” says Potts. “They may be like Ireland, where you have to go to England, or Malta, where you go to Italy. But those two Catholic countries now have replacement fertility.”
He recently worked in Addis Ababa, capital of Muslim Ethiopia, the world’s most populous landlocked country, which legalized abortion in 2006. “Seventy percent of the hospital beds—orthopedics, neurology, everything—were occupied by botched abortions. In less than a year, we emptied them. The fertility rate there is now 1.8, because they’re offering responsible access to contraception and safe abortion. In fact,” he adds, “the most consistent users of contraception are women who’ve had an abortion.”
But outside Ethiopia’s capital, there are few trained abortion providers, and only 14 percent of women have any chance to get contraceptives, similar to Niger and other destitute countries. Estimates by the United Nations Population Fund and by the Guttmacher Institute, a premier source for reproductive health and population policy analysis,5 suggest that nearly a quarter of a billion women who would like to delay or stop having babies have no access to modern birth control.
What would it take to get it to them?