The Carrying Capacity Network (CCN), in an article in its December 1992 Clearinghouse Bulletin, was remarkably frank in its assessment of the inability of contraception alone to “stop the population explosion.”
According to CCN, although “contraceptives are available in more countries than ever before, and fertility rates have dropped to…the lowest level ever recorded, [and] worldwide funding for family planning programs is at an all-time high…” world population continues to grow steadily. Citing the United Nations Population Fund statistics, CCN lamented the fact that “despite record high levels of family planning and…world population is projected to reach ten billion by 2050.”
CCN once had “hope…that by making contraceptives available and encouraging family planning, population would stabilize at a sustainable level.” The latest population projections, however, have dashed such “hope,” and CCN now feels that population stabilization “may well never come to pass.” Indeed, CCN now believes that “reliance on family planning aid alone to stop the population explosion must be reconsidered.”
CCN admitted that “increased [family planning] funding and access to contraception…will never by themselves allow us to achieve population stabilization or reduction, because population growth is not cruised by lack of access to birth control alone. The reason is that, even when provided with full access to contraception in scores of countries and in hundreds of cultures in the world, many couples desire and choose to have many more than the 2.1 children required to attain population stabilization.”
“The profound implication of this fact,” said CCN, “is that even if people in all of these countries and cultures have ‘perfect’ access to contraception, population growth…will continue at an alarming rate…[thus] we must ask ourselves whether some people will ever voluntarily limit family size.”
“What, then, is the solution,” CCN asks, “to take care of the excess population?” In addition to “increasing contraceptive availability,” CCN wants to “promote smaller family size through incentives and disincentives.”
Although some population planners advocate “increased emphasis on educating couples on the advantages of having fewer children…as the only humane method to ensure that fertility is reduced to a sustainable level,” CCN questions if “there [is enough] time to wait until people voluntarily choose to limit family size.” CCN argues that, “Considering the severity of the population crisis, the implementation of incentives and disincentives to limit family size…is absolutely essential.”
Proposed incentives might include access to housing, equipment or education, as well as tax advantages or even cash payments. Disincentives could include limitations on foreign aid, higher taxes for each additional child, migration restrictions, and limitations on access to housing, jobs, “and so forth” for parents of large families. Although such proposals will place parents and children in large families at a disadvantage, CCN says it would be nowhere as “great as the deprivations entailed by life in an overcrowded, destitute country.”
CCN feels that its proposed program of incentives and disincentives is just “a logical second step” in the direction of achieving population limitation, a step “utilizing a minimum degree of pressure [and one which allows] a considerable element of choice.”
“If incentives and disincentives for a two-child family are not instituted now,” CCN darkly warns, “the only policy option remaining would be a desperate last ditch use of coercive mandatory sterilization or other such programs.”
Up against the wall, Mother! You, too, Father. And wait’ll you see what we’ve got in store for you, Grandma and Grandpa. Man, it’ll kill yuh!
CAN’T SEE THE FOREST FOR THE TREES
Over-population propagandists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in CCN’s October Clearinghouse Bulletin, added one claim to their usual litany of “gigantic, overpopulated, overconsuming” America’s environmental sins: “we have destroyed most of Americas forest cover (replacing a small fraction of it with biologically impoverished tree farms) .…
“For the Ehrlichs information, there are some 730 million acres of forest in the United States — and more trees today than there were in 1920. About 70 percent of the original forested area when the Pilgrims arrived, is forested today, of which 242 million acres is given over to park lands, wilderness reserves, and other non-logged forests. And somehow those “biologically impoverished” tree farms manage to produce tens of millions of cubic feet of harvested growth year after year.1
Nevertheless, CCN, in its December Clearinghouse, claims that “Forest experts estimate that we now have only 260 million mature trees left growing on federal lands, or approximately one for every American citizen.” That number would also approximate just one and one-half trees per acre of federal forest land! A spokesman for the Native Forest Council, CCN’s alleged source, didn’t know where such a number came from and was unable to substantiate the claim.
Endnotes
1 Forests & Forestry in the U.S.A.,” The American Forestry Association, 1988.
