From the Countries

Green people haters, new implants

The environmental movement’s longstanding misanthropy was at least temporarily suppressed recently when the membership of the Sierra Club voted down a proposal which would have blamed environmental problems in the United States on the number of poor developing world immigrants. The measure, called Alternative A in the organization-wide plebiscite, would have declared all immigration, legal or illegal, as an environmental ill. In the eyes of measure supporters, peoples’ deeds are not the source of environmental degradation, people themselves are the source.

Opponents solidly defeated the measure. By a margin of some 60–40 supporters of Alternative B voted to keep the organization, whose 1996 tax free income was over $57 million and whose assets reported that year approached $30 million, neutral on the immigration question. Alternative A supporters say they will try again, and say they will, if they want to scapegoat poorer people for environmental ills.

Although this measure dealt specifically with immigration, not population, its presence on the ballot of an organization like the Sierra Club provided a sign that the environmental movement’s long simmering internal divisions may, at last, be rising to the surface, bringing with them an unusual number of political oddities.

For example, misanthropy really must make strange bedfellows. Not only did Alternative A supporters include such “right wing” zealots as Dan Stein of the notorious Federation for American Immigrant Reform (FAIR), but also long-standing green activists like Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earthday, Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace and David Forman, founder of Earthfirst! A nearly uniform conviction that population, not activity, is the world’s largest environmental problem is the glue that makes such alliances possible, but renders its adhesive from faulty premises.

The fact is that the poor in the developing world, and in the United States, do not so much cause environmental problems as suffer through them. How reasonable is it, for example to suppose people who live in the developing world willfully choose to base their economies solely on extracting natural resources? Likewise, in the United States, poor immigrants are for more likely to live in areas of poor environmental quality not because they made them poor, but because those were the only places they could afford.1 Eventually, both the environmental and developmental movements must come to understand that true “sustainable development” not only marshals and conserves economic and natural resources, but human resources as well.

Indonesian Implanon

Indonesian authorities have introduced Implanon, a new subdermal, Norplant-like contraceptive which has been shown in trials to suppress ovulation for up to three years. Like Norplant, Implanon uses a progestin -only compound to suppress the body’s normal fertility cycle but the actual compound differs slightly in its formulation. Implanon’s chief selling point appears to be its ease of insertion and removal. According to the manufacturer, the Dutch firm N.V. Organon, Implanon can be inserted with one shot of a large needle and can be removed in about three minutes.

Significantly, women studied with the device reported more bleeding than women using Norplant. This is a serious drawback in the developing world, where the lack of medical and other facilities make the bleeding problems associated with Norplant particularly dangerous. What is more or less controllable problem in the first world can be a socially stigmatizing and deadly one in the developing world. Ten percent of the women in one small study who were given the device reported asking for removal for the usual list of progestin only side effects.

Mexican Eugenics?

Roman Catholic and human rights workers in Mexico have begun to denounce the Mexican Government’s sterilization campaign in the strife-tom region of Chiapas.

During a recent press conference, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera of Mexico City denounced a massive sterilization campaign launched by the government among the Indian population in the southern state, “taking advantage of the tension and violence that currently reigns in the region.”

According to Cardinal Rivera, in the recent weeks several health workers have begun to convince large groups of poor women in the Indian region of Chiapas to be sterilized. The Cardinal said these actions were “the climax of a process started in early 1997, when the Mexican government launched a national campaign to reduce the poor population through the massive distribution of contraceptive methods and recently free sterilization surgeries.”

Chiapas has been gripped by violence since 1994 when Zapatista rebels, mainly drawn from Indian villages, took up arms against the government.

“It is regrettable that in the context of Chiapas, where so many things are dramatically needed, the government has a sterilization campaign as its official response to the native people,” the Cardinal said. “It is easier to sterilize native people than to propose a development and educational program,” he said, adding: “The government must launch new developments and peace strategies instead of fighting the poor as if they were the disease and not the reason for government.”