Good News/Bad News
The Good News: a nine-year international study, funded by the Agency for International Development (AID) and executed by Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) of Columbia, MD, joyfully reported that fertility in the developing world has declined sharply in the past two decades. The 5 August report indicated that fertility rates in the developing world have declined by about one-third since the late 1960s, and by nearly two-thirds in the 14 largest developing countries, including China and India.
The Bad News: the fertility decline just isn’t good enough, according to “population experts” at DHS’s World Conference in Washington, DC. Although the reductions in population growth were termed “dramatic” and “almost unprecedented, “the progress was said to be “roughly only half way toward stopping the world’s [allegedly] rapid population growth.”
One pessimist, Duff G. Gillespie, director of AID’s Population Bureau, said that because of the “tremendously large number of young people in prime child bearing age …there will be twice as many people on Earth in about 30 years as there are today. ” For a refutation of the “world population doubling in 30 years” ploy, see “Popcorn,” PRI Review, Vol. 1, No. 6, Nov./Dec. 1991. (Quotes: Aug. 6, Washington Post, p. A7, emphasis added).
Yew-Hooing
Remember the snail darter, the pupfish, and the louse wart’? They were past cause celebres of the U.S. ecology/population-control crowd, which alleged that those species were at the brink of extinction due to the rapaciousness of America’s human population. Investigation proved those species existed in much larger numbers, and thus had a much better chance of survival, than the ecology alarmists claimed.
Now it’s the Pacific yew tree which is allegedly headed for extinction. The yew tree, considered a non-commercial nuisance by loggers, suddenly made news when yew bark was found to be a source of the drug taxol, which appears to be a promising treatment for ovarian and other cancers. In short order, yew bark rustlers began stripping yew trees and tried to peddle their ill-gotten hauls to drug manufacturers.
Next came the ecology-overpopulation propagandists, who seized upon the yew tree’s alleged scarcity to beef up their campaigns to save the spotted owl and the Pacific northwest’s “old growth forests,” the yew’s habitat. Naturally, the news media hastened to report yet another man-made ecological disaster in the making.
Ernest B. Furgurson, the “associate editor of The [Baltimore] Sun,” claimed in his 27 October column that “… because industrial loggers have trashed so much of it as worthless, there isn’t a lot of Pacific yew left.” Furgurson described the yew’s alleged “scarcity” and said “logging made it rare.”
According to People magazine (12 Aug. 1991, p. 61), “some environmentalists fear that if the drug [taxol] proves effective and becomes widely used, yew trees could become an endangered species .…” Indeed, the Environmental Defense Fund and the American Cancer Society both filed petitions with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) asking that the yew be classified as a threatened species.
N.Y. Times columnists William Safire (16 May) and Sallie Tisdale (Oct. 26) argued against the harvesting of yew trees even though some cancer patients’ lives might be saved! Fittingly, Safire’s column was titled, “To Hell With Yew“?”
Relax, everyone. Reports of the yew’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated, according to a recently released FWS study. Not only is the yew “not rare,” but the U.S. Forest Service estimated that “130 million yew trees exist on national forest lands in the Cascades range of the Pacific northwest.” (Science, 6 Sept. 1991, p. 1091, emphasis added).
The Big Lie Continues
Paul and Anne Ehrlich, the husband-wife team of over-population propagandists, in their latest work, “Healing The Planet,” (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1991), repeat anew their claim that “At least 200 million people have died of hunger and hunger-related diseases since the [Population] Bomb was written [1968] .…” (p. 5).
This hunger/starvation claim was thoroughly examined and refuted in previous editions of the PRI Review : see Vol. 1, Nos. 1 and 2.
Everyone Starves To Death
Dan Chiras, a “visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he teaches environmental science, and an adjunct professor at the University of Denver, where he teaches courses on sustainable policy … and action to solve global environmental problems,” has managed to top the Ehrlichs with an utterly ridiculous starvation death claim.1
According to Chiras, “Today, more than 40 million people die from starvation and diseases worsened by hunger and malnutrition each year .”2
The UN and WHO both agree that an “estimated 50 million deaths occur in the world each year” from all causes. (WHO’s Global Estimates for Health assessment and Projections -1990, p. 15). Of those 50 million global deaths yearly, some 10 million occur in North America, Europe, the USSR, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, and South Africa. For all practical purposes, no one starves to death in those countries. Ergo, subtracting 10 million from 50 million, if Dr. Chiras is to be believed, everyone who dies in the rest of the world starves to death!
