Man As A Pest

Demographics: Advocates of population stabilization -- a euphemism for population reduction -- are highly skilled at gaining attention for their cause. They're not so good, though, at dealing with the facts.

From the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which favors a global population of less than 1 billion, to a former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, who said the goal is "stabilization of world population at the lowest possible level, within the shortest period of time," to an ostensibly mainstream group such as the Sierra Club, whose founder John Muir said, "Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape," there are a lot of folks who simply don't like people and contend there's a need for policies that ensure there are fewer of us.

A demographic researcher for the American Enterprise Institute, however, has destroyed that argument.

In "Too Many People?," a short study that actually employs evidence rather than jaw-flapping opinion, Nicholas Eberstadt shows that a population crisis does not exist and a growing population is nothing to fear.

With fear as their backdrop, the misanthropes argue that overpopulation is the cause behind hunger, disease and squalid living conditions. It will eventually lead to humanity calamitously outstripping its resources, they allege.

But armed with data, Eberstadt points out that poverty, not population, is the cause of those blights; nations with the large populations and rapid growth detested by the crisis-mongers are not necessarily doomed. Belgium, the Netherlands and Monaco have denser populations than that of Rwanda, Haiti and Bangladesh. Yet no one would say those European nations are worse off.

As for fears of resource exhaustion, Eberstadt notes that as the human population exploded in the 20th century, the demand for natural resources "has also rocketed upward."

Despite this added pressure, "the relative prices of virtually all primary commodities have fallen over the course of the 20th century -- for many of them, quite substantially."

As any middle school economics class student knows, low commodity prices indicate there is ample supply -- not scarcity.

Exposing these errors likely won't silence those who want to stabilize the human population. The lie is deeply entrenched in the public mind and carried on by too many in important positions -- Eberstadt mentions Al Gore, Bill Gates, Ted Turner and Warren Buffett, as just a few. The establishment media and a number of prominent charitable foundations are also along for the ride.

Maybe the sorcerers' spell would be broken if the public knew that professor and author Jared Diamond's support of China's repressive policies to "restrict the traditional freedom of individual reproductive choice" is how population stabilizers view the world.

Or that John Davis, editor of the journal Earth First!, thinks "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs."

It's not about making the Earth better for people -- it's about making it better without them.