countdown book proposal ch.ger - weisman · weisman/book proposal: countdown/ p. 3 1. introduction:...

Countdown

-- a book proposal by Alan Weisman

© 2009 by Alan Weisman

c/o Nicholas Ellison

Nicholas Ellison, Inc. 55 Fifth Avenue

New York NY 10003 212-206-6050

Weisman/book proposal: Countdown/ p. 2

This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number.

-- Revelation 13:18

New Testament, New International Version

"When wisdom dictates that you do not need more children,

a vasectomy is permissible."

-- the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei


1. Introduction: A riddle

If you’re reading this proposal, you likely also read my last book, The World

Without Us. Now in thirty-three languages, with Latvian forthcoming, it appears to have

tweaked some common nerves – as well as a couple I wasn’t aiming for.

I frequently hear from people who, it turns out, didn’t actually read it, but who

saw or heard me being interviewed or who wandered to the book’s entertaining, slightly

garish website, in whose design I played no part. They write either to let me know that

they, too, have long sensed that the world would be a better off without humans, or to

berate me for being some species of eco-misanthrope.

My reply to both is that I didn’t write TWWU because I’d prefer a world without

humans, but because I want one with us in it – only in harmony, not in mortal combat,

with the rest of nature. After all, I myself happen to be a Homo sapiens; I’m married to

one; several of my best friends are humans, and so forth. As mammals ourselves, I

believe we have as much right to be here as any other species.

I also believe, despite a recent upswell of panicky, apocalyptic murmurs, that we

can continue being here. (If I didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this – because, trust me, I

wouldn’t be bothering to write it: I’d be diving toward the bottom of a bottle of brandy

and about to open another.) But human survival isn’t going to be as simple as it’s been up

until now, because it’s pretty clear that our presence has become so overwhelming that

we’ve substantially skewed the natural order of things. We now go farther, dig deeper,

and harvest more than anything else alive. More adaptable even than coyotes, we can live

practically anywhere from the poles to the equator. We’ve slashed, burned, plowed,

paved, and sprawled so far across the face of the planet that we’ve already pushed several


thousand of our fellow creatures right off it, and one of these days we’re apt to push off

one too many – something on whose presence we hadn’t realized how much our own

depended, until too late.

Growing numbers of alarmed, eminently knowledgeable people now call for us to

shrink our collective footprint so we don’t stomp any more vital species out of existence.

They also implore us to stop overloading the atmosphere with our exhaust, lest meltwater

from missing icecaps drowns the world’s coastlines and revives ancient inland seas,

whose fossil shells, once curiosities encountered throughout the heartlands, lately evoke

uneasy foreboding.

These are well-founded warnings, which no one save a shrinking clutch of

blinkered diehards challenges anymore. The trouble is, we’re doing a miserable job of

heeding them. Despite much effort and expense in the name of conservation, the species

slaughter heightens: Lately, we’ve been watching pollinators crucial to our food supply

collapse – first bees, now bats. The gloomy news that few nations seem able to meet

modest Kyoto carbon reduction goals (and the two most egregious offenders, China and

the United States, have never even tried) has obscured the worst part: that Kyoto was a

flop from the start, a neutered, diluted agreement whose full compliance would barely

make a dent in alleviating the mess we’ve made of the atmosphere.

This December, the nations of the world will gather in Copenhagen to try to forge

course corrections, but the prospects for controlling enough carbon emissions to reverse

climate change don’t look encouraging. NASA’s Jim Hansen, who presciently warned

Congress back in 1988 that the greenhouse effect was real, dangerous, and growing,

increasingly sounds like Cassandra in mourning, backed by a chorus bemoaning twenty

lost years during which we failed to heed his predictions – which have proven to be not

merely true, but understated. And now, China and India have started their engines. Even

though they, too, know better, they’re simply not going to shut them off, anymore than

we Americans are.

Bill McKibben, who kindly contributed a most generous cover endorsement to

The World Without Us1, has, by his own admission, “crossed to the other side” – trading

1 This is one of the grandest thought experiments of our time, a tremendous feat of imaginative reporting!


the objective mantle of journalism for the battle colors of activism. Recognizing that his

book The End of Nature, the first to spread the message about climate change to the

wider world, never spread it far enough to change a critical majority of minds, Bill has

spent the past year circling the globe to promote 350.org, the global campaign he co-

founded with Hansen’s encouragement. Its name refers to the number of parts per

million of atmospheric CO2 that Hansen and a growing consensus of scientists agree we

must retreat to and never again exceed, in order to stabilize the planet’s surface

temperatures. (Pre-Industrial Revolution levels were 275 ppm; we’re at 390 today, adding

two to three more parts per million annually; the best hopes for Kyoto goals, around 450

ppm, are now considered reckless, given what’s already transpiring at the poles.) Yet the

way we’re going, and growing, we don’t stand a chance of even stopping there. At this

rate, maintaining business as usual, we’ll be somewhere between 600 to 975 by the end

of the century.

So, if efforts aren’t working – or at least not well enough – to slow the rate that

humans, our tools, and our toys are collectively emanating carbon dioxide, we’ll need to

come up with something else if we still want to keep the planet hospitable to human

civilization.

Which brings us to this rather big riddle: Like what, for God’s sake?

2. Given the dearth of multiple choice answers:

In Countdown, I will examine – probe as a journalist, not preach as an activist –

one possible, loaded option: reducing, gradually and non-violently, the number of

humans on the planet whose activities, industries, and lifestyles are expelling all that CO2,

until our numbers reach an optimum level.

Defining what an optimum human population is for the Earth, let alone attempting

to achieve one, is an explosive notion, one that for this book I’ll have to consider from

many cultural, moral, religious, and economic perspectives, but, above all, from an

ecological perspective. For now, think of it as the number of Homo sapiens whose wastes

and excesses the land, seas, and air can re-absorb without growing poisoned,

supersaturated, or just plain out of control.


Or, another way to look at it, one I especially intend to explore: What is the true

carrying capacity of the Earth? How many of us can it hold without losing a critical

number of other species, or without fatally screwing up the atmosphere, oceans, soils, or

all three?

A slew of questions, objections, and visceral reactions are likely clamoring for

your attention all at once. Among them: What’s the likelihood that we could actually do

such a thing? Or would ever want to? You mean do what China did – make it illegal to

have more than one kid? Come on: Like every other species on this planet, nature

designed us to make copies of ourselves. The urge to procreate is literally human nature:

it’s the nature part of being human. So isn’t denying it unnatural? As for the human part

of that equation: Multiple copies of us mean brothers, sisters, children, and big, warm

families. Small wonder we recoil at the thought of being forced to set limits on

reproduction. It’s the oldest form of human expression.

Right. Yet, what else are we going to do?

The two most common prescriptions for setting the environment straight are:

1) reducing consumption; and 2) switching to “sustainable” or “green” energy. My

response to both is: Terrific ideas. We should try as hard as we can. But – and I wish it

weren’t so – they’re far easier said than done, and their potential may be more limited

than we realize, because even if they were wildly successful, by themselves they

wouldn’t make enough of a difference to restore planetary equilibrium.

Before we proceed to why lowering our numbers may be necessary, and why –

unlikely as it first might seem – it may be easier to address world population than to

accomplish either of these two, and even more practical, I’ll quickly consider them here.

Lowering Consumption:

One sure way to achieve this is via economic collapse, which nobody

particularly wants (nor wants to read about), and which everyone is trying

mightily to avoid these days. So we’ll scratch that one.


The alternative to collapse most often advocated is raising public

awareness – that is, making people understand that too much consumption

devours too many resources, leaves horrible scars on the land, generates too much

trash, sends too much smoke up chimneys, and doesn’t really make us happier,

because multiple studies suggest that once minimal needs are met, wealth makes

us more anxious, not more secure.

But how do we communicate that effectively? And what are people

supposed to do once they know it? Even those of us who agree are still trapped by

lifestyles that demand, just in terms of electricity alone (such as to power this

laptop), more coal-fire than the planet can easily re-absorb.

One of the best chances to seize everyone’s attention occurred in

December, 1968, when humans first got far enough away from Earth to turn

around and take its picture. The photograph snapped by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill

Anders of our home rising over the moon’s horizon – so vibrant and sweetly alive

compared to anything for millions of miles around (or, for all we know, compared

to anything, period) – may be the most influential image ever made. The

following year, the United Nations declared the first Earth Day. By 1970, Earth

Day was a worldwide mass movement. Environmental studies programs

blossomed in colleges and universities, and science units in elementary schools

metamorphosed into timely, exciting environmental education. Soon thereafter

came the publication of a report commissioned by an international think tank, the

Club of Rome, which predicted that swelling world population and massive

harvesting of resources to feed, fuel, and otherwise supply it were on a

catastrophic collision course.

Titled Limits to Growth, it sold millions of copies worldwide, but its

wakeup call was soon drowned by the roar of engines fired by the backlash it

triggered: If the world was running out of resources, harvesters figured, better

grab them while they’re still there to get. The ensuing splurge, abetted by

reflexive mass denial that the good life might actually be subject to limitations,

resulted in a gloriously stocked global marketplace – the bills for which,

unfortunately, appear now to be coming due.


The recent economic collapse may be an opportunity to focus attention

again. Yet convincing everyone – let alone providing safer, cleaner alternatives

for them – still will take more time than we may have. If the best hope for

humanity’s survival is mass consciousness-raising about the eco-errors of our

ways, we’re likely doomed, because the planet as we know it could be demolished

long before we’ve persuaded a majority.

As for finding a cheap, abundant, truly clean source of energy to run the world:

It’s clear even to the most delirious advocates of solar and wind power that

those technologies are a long way from being mature enough to run all our

industries and vehicles, let alone our Indias and Chinas. The truth is, they may

never be. After decades of trying, solar panels and wind turbines still only work

when the sun shines or the wind blows. Because both are intermittent, and

because solar energy is also so diffuse, they bump into physical limitations –

possibly even some laws of physics – that appear to preclude them from

delivering the massive amounts of energy that today’s 6.7 billion humans (let

alone tomorrow’s 9.3 billion) dream of getting cost-free.

I don’t intend to dwell much on what doesn’t work in this book. But to

anticipate objections and to support the book’s rationale, I’ll include, via select

scenes in places such as Iceland, Germany, the U.S., and Israel, more detailed

explanations of why we can’t bet our entire future on solar or wind power – nor

on nuclear, hydrogen, cold fusion, heat from the Earth’s core, energy unlocked

from molecular bonds, or lasers beamed down from mirrors on the moon or hung

in space. (Likewise, I’ll describe the formidable logistical problems – such as

cost, sheer feasibility, and low likelihood of success – in proposals to mitigate

global warming by, e.g., suspending 1,000-km diameter disks between the Earth

and the sun to block solar rays, or salting the atmosphere with pollutant particles

to deflect them, or spiking the seas with iron filings to absorb more CO2.)

As for producing bio-fuels from substances such as algae that can be endlessly

replenished and that don’t compete with food crops or replace natural habitats:


These have languished in the research stage for decades. I’ll welcome them if they

ever mature, but we don’t have time to wait for them. For now, suffice it to say

that if we could do – or could afford – any of these things on the immense scale to

meet the world’s energy demands, we’d be rushing to do them, with petroleum

companies leading the charge.

[Note: Unlike some others I list here, nuclear energy isn’t theoretical, because we have 440+ functioning nuclear plants worldwide, and, aside from considerable carbon expended in their construction and constant maintenance, its proponents argue that atomic energy is clean, because the exhaust of nuclear fission is carbon-free. The main reasons, however, why nuclear energy won’t meet world energy demands are: a) it’s prohibitively expensive to build enough nuclear plants; b) there’s still no permanent place to dispose of the nuclear wastes of the current 440+ plants, let alone of the thousands that we’d need; and c) there wouldn’t be enough available uranium to fuel them all. There’s an alternative to using uranium: plutonium reactors, which not only breed their own fuel, but produce a surplus. But, as surplus plutonium is the stuff of nuclear weapons, building breeder reactors violates non-proliferation treaties. Of course, if we get desperate for energy, we might do that, but rising probabilities of nuclear annihilation would then undermine the goal of assuring human survival.]

*

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t pursue every alternative to the utmost, even if

none portends to be the fabled silver bullet that alone will slay whatever evil it is that

won’t let us have our planet and eat it too. We should try everything we can. We have

multiple emergencies to confront, and beating them back will require a combination of

the best substitutes we can muster for the multiple problematic ways we are currently

running things. Yet without doing something about the relentlessly growing number of

people who currently do all the things that humans do, nothing we do to change how we

live may ultimately be enough.

Even more to the point: Should we fail to take control of our population, sooner or

later nature will do that for us. Inevitably, it always does, whenever a species reaches the

limits of its resources.


Which we have. We Homo sapiens may have found some ingenious ways of

stretching those resources, but everything that stretches eventually reaches a breaking

point. Until we act, we are quickly and inexorably approaching ours.

Sound hysterical? Turn to the news, and scan through the crises of the day. How

many of them would exist if there weren’t so many people on the planet? E.g., the oil

war in Iraq, China’s incinerators coating the globe with soot, blue fin tuna nearly gone,

frogs and polar bears going, turf battles everywhere over land and waterways, 42 million

displaced refugees wandering the world, climate chaos on all continents, rising seas,

rising unemployment…

…unemployment is an overpopulation issue?

Remember, during last fall’s presidential campaign, so many Americans

prayerfully comparing Barack Obama to FDR? Now, as Obama struggles to resurrect the

New Deal, how many of his critics and discouraged supporters stop to think that he has

nearly triple the number of citizens to employ, feed, and medicate as FDR had?

My intention with Countdown isn’t to frighten or depress, neither you nor the

millions of readers we both want to reach. As I noted earlier, I wouldn’t be writing this if

I didn’t think there were a real chance that we can do something about our future –

something unprecedented and effective. The greatest portion of this book will be devoted

to examples, in different and often surprising settings, of how it might be done. I believe

it can instill hope: not irrational, but realistic hope. Applying the tools of journalism, I

propose to test the possibility that managing our numbers would be easier than

implementing massive renewable energy, et al – and also show how quickly it could

produce tangible results.

Wait a minute! Talk about easier said than done! How do you expect Catholics to accept that? And peasants in macho Mexico, and in India and all over the tropics, who multiply like mice? And Russia and governments across western Europe that are subsidizing – paying! bribing! – women to have more babies, lest there aren’t enough younger workers to tax in order to pay for welfare for all the graying baby boomers about to retire.

Or lest falling Caucasian populations are overrun by swarthy immigrants, and Europe becomes one giant Muslim country by 2050? And the Muslims – they’re not going to put up with birth control any more than the Catholics, or the Mormons – the Mormons!


And if you mean doing what China did, wouldn’t a world filled with single children be psychologically twisted, on a mass scale? Imagine no big brothers or little sisters!

And who’s going to pay for Social Security here in the U.S. if we stop growing? And who’s going to do all the work if the labor force shrinks? And besides, didn’t every disaster that Paul Ehrlich predicted, and Thomas

Malthus before him, turn out to be false alarms?

Hang on. I’m getting there.

3. Original sin

At the very end of The World Without Us, I set off a little bomb – that is, I broach

a new subject that readers aren’t expecting, one that blows everything preceding it onto a

new level. Originally, I hadn’t planned to do that, and it came as a surprise to me, too.

The idea for it started to jell after I interviewed the founder of something called

the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Les Knight turned out to be an articulate,

thoughtful human being – a schoolteacher, in fact – but one already in mourning for our

species. The way he saw it, humans were a good idea for a while, but sometime in the

twentieth century our numbers reached a point where we had essentially redefined the

concept of original sin. From the instant we’re born, we compound the world’s mounting

problems by generating diapers and other wastes, by needing ever-scarcer resources, and

by requiring food that needs to be fertilized, fumigated, processed, packaged, and shipped

– in aggregate, by literally and figuratively exhaling all this CO2 and crowding other

species off the face of the Earth.2

At this point, Knight figured, with human existence so disastrous to everything

else, the only responsible thing is for us to admit that our planetary presence clearly isn’t

2 A 2008 study by Oregon State University scientists estimates that “under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.” [“Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals.” Murtaugh, Paul A.; Schlax, Michael G. Global Environmental Change Vol. 19 (2009) pp. 14–20.]


working anymore, stop procreating, and fade away gracefully. “Think of it,” he said to

me. “Each decade, with fewer human beings left, the world would become wilder and

more beautiful. The last ones left would see it being restored to the Garden of Eden.”

This was a pretty disturbing thought, especially since it echoed the premise of The

World Without Us. Except I wasn’t writing that book because I thought that the world

would be better off without us, but in hopes that by theoretically removing us, readers

would see how quickly and gorgeously nature could heal wounds and replenish empty

niches, if given the chance – and thus be inspired to figure out how to add ourselves back

to that picture of a healthy, restored Earth.

So I decided to see if there was some compromise between Les Knight’s chilling

call for no more babies and the way we were currently growing. That ultimately led to

ending the book with one more thought experiment, by speculating what would happen in

a world not without humans, but a world with us still present – except henceforth every

family, everywhere, in fact did restrict itself to one child.

Sometime after it was released, I appeared on an Indiana AM radio conservative

talk show. “This book is great,” the host told his listeners, “because this isn’t some damn

environmentalist preaching to you. This guy just takes you interesting places and shows

you interesting facts and lets you decide for yourself. But,” he added, now addressing me,

“had I known you were going to bring up that stuff you raise at the end of the book, I

would’ve never read it. Except, given everything that comes before, it’s just so obvious.

You really had no choice.”

He was right – the research had unavoidably led me to it. What he referred to is

the fact that, about every four days, there are a million more people on the planet.

Even to a conservative radio host, that plainly is not a sustainable figure. At the

beginning of the twentieth century, there were 1.8 billion people on earth. During the

next hundred years, for reasons I’ll explain presently, human population doubled, and

nearly doubled again, bringing us to today’s 6.7 billion. Although our population growth

rate has slowed – for reasons this book will discuss in detail, the increase is no longer

geometric but linear – there are already so many of us here that slowing doesn’t mean no

longer dangerously growing: By 2050 – just 41 years from now – we’re projected to be at

least 9.3 billion.


Meanwhile, we still only have one planet, and it hasn’t gotten any bigger. In order

for there to be that many people, we have to feed them. That means scraping away more

of the tropics to turn forests into cropland, which deprives multiple assorted species of

their habitats, especially migratory species who need places to rest and feed themselves

as they pass between the hemispheres. (Have you noticed that there are fewer songbirds

around each year? Fewer pollinators?)

Besides mowing down trees, it also means force-feeding laboratory-bred crops in

the newly cleared fields with energy-intensive chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuel,

because without that extra artificial boost there wouldn’t be enough food to support as

many people as live on Earth. (By the mid-20th century, we’d passed the point that

sunlight and soil alone could grow enough plants to sustain our numbers.) And, because

these new high-yield laboratory breeds didn’t evolve in nature, they lacked defenses to

survive outdoors by themselves, so we protect them with more chemicals: poisons that, in

theory, supposedly only kill insects, selective weeds, and various fungi.

Lately, of course, all this chemistry is coming back to bite us, in ways ranging

from dying ocean estuaries to the hermaphroditic gender-bending now found in species

from salmon to polar bears, to plummeting human male fertility.

Then there’s all the water to grow all the crops, siphoned from rivers and sucked

from aquifers, causing worldwide freshwater shortages. One example I recently wrote

about: China is now trying what amounts to a giant aquatic shell game by channeling the

equivalent of another Yellow River 1,150 kilometers north from the Yangtze Delta to one

its most populous and thirstiest regions – the coastal area just west of its capital, Beijing.

An even longer canal will divert a third of the water in the Han River, a Yangtze tributary,

to the 17.4 million people in Beijing proper. Both canals will actually tunnel under the

Yellow River itself, and water for each will have to be pumped uphill over more than half

their distance: in essence, tilting Asia to make rivers flow the opposite way.

The project has alarmed hydrologists in Shanghai (which, at 19 million, is even

bigger than Beijing) since the Yangtze Delta holds its water supply. The government’s

solution to that – replenishing the Han with water pumped 150 miles north from Three

Gorges Reservoir, the world’s biggest hydro project, which is also on the Yangtze – only


worries them further, because as more freshwater is pumped out of the Yangtze, more salt

water will seep in.

Speaking of China: If the value of an experiment is measured not only by

whether it succeeds, but also by what it reveals, the Chinese one-child-per-family

experiment, often described by westerners as horrifying, has actually been eminently

successful. Without it, China, today at 1.3 billion people, would have nearly half a

billion more. But it also revealed potential pitfalls of population control, such as the

danger of gender imbalance. China now has 37 million more males than females, a

skewing that nature ultimately won't tolerate, the result of tragic, even fatal

discrimination against female fetuses and infants.

This tragedy, however, has prompted a solution that may prove helpful in a world

that one day concludes that human populations must be managed. Witness the beautiful

sprinkling of Chinese girls in the newest generation of North Americans, Europeans, and

Australians, adopted and adored by couples who can't give birth themselves – or who

want their natural children to have siblings without adding more of their own to the

population.

In Countdown, I will recount the history of China’s one-child policy, and its

cultural, moral, social, and environmental implications. But for The World Without Us, I

simply focused on the math. To learn what would happened if the entire world followed

China’s example, I first tried to contact the Zero Population Growth movement. But ZPG,

which became prominent following the 1970s publication of bestsellers such as Limits to

Growth and The Population Bomb by ZPG co-founder Paul Ehrlich, was nowhere to be

found. The reason, I learned, was because by the mid-1980s, population control had

become a target for left- and right-wing alike.3

To the left, population control policies were a threat to women’s right to control

their own bodies, as well as a conspiracy by rich, developed nations to undermine the one

strength of poor, developing nations – that is, strength in their numbers.

3 Zero Population Growth, I eventually discovered, is still around, but after taking so

much flak from both directions the organization was renamed to something bland and non-threatening (The Population Connection), condemning itself to safe obscurity.


The right wing also had two objections. Both were articulated at the 1984 World

Population Conference in Mexico City, where U.S. representative James Buckley

(brother of William F.) announced that the United States no longer supported family

planning programs. For one, they abetted abortion, of which the Reagan administration

did not approve. But also, he suggested, with more people on the planet, there would be

more consumers for the products of capitalism.

His pronouncements in particular stunned the host country, Mexico, then the

fastest-growing nation on Earth. In my 1986 book La Frontera, I described how Catholic

Mexico, realizing that its 3.2% annual growth rate (at which population doubles in about

23 years) was rushing the country toward calamity, defied papal objections and in 1975

instituted nationwide planificación. Birth control products were distributed to clinics

established throughout the country, some in remote nooks reachable only by mule.

Women soon learned that those insulated Styrofoam saddlebags were also packed with

vaccines against diseases such as polio and diphtheria that would protect their living

children, eliminating the need to have extra babies to insure that at least some survived.

Within a decade, Mexico’s reproductive rate dropped to 2.9%. Even so, by then so many

Mexicans had already been born that, with more than half the population yet to reach

their breeding years, unless rates continued to drop drastically, I calculated that by A.D.

2100 there would be a billion Mexicans.

Fortunately, rates have kept falling, and have now reached 2%. Yet that means

Mexico is still growing, each year falling farther behind in creating jobs and housing for

its population (the shortfall for each is roughly a million annually). Among all the futile

schemes dreamed up in Washington to stem the encroaching tide at our southern border,

from stationing troops to building steel walls, the only one that might work – funds for

family planning – is never mentioned. No surprise: population control continues to be

politically taboo, and not just among strident Pro-Lifers. “Population,” Orion Magazine

editor Hal Clifford recently told me, “is the third rail of environmentalism. Nobody

wants to touch it.”

Eventually, I found the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy

of Sciences, which agreed to run the numbers for global participation in the Chinese


experiment through their computers. Oddly, their president admitted, the question had

never previously occurred to them.

The results astonished us both. If fertile women worldwide tomorrow began to

limit themselves to one child, by the end of this century, an Earth that is currently headed

to at least 9.3 billion inhabitants by 2050 would be back to 1.8 billion. That’s the same

number of humans alive in 1900 – just before enormous advances in medical and

agricultural technology led to our explosive doubling and near-redoubling.

That figure, 1.8 billion, would be fewer than one-third the number of us currently

stripping landscape and tipping atmospheric chemistry into uncharted realms. It would

more than triple the space available for other species – untold numbers of species, which

not only add beauty and richness to the world, but upon whose existence a functioning

ecosystem, including our place in it, depends. Think of those pollinators.

4. The Chances

It’s a bit amazing to consider that so quickly – less than a century – we could

appreciably restore the balance between Homo expandus and the rest of nature, and do so

without drastic lifestyle changes or technological breakthroughs: just by holding to one

child per family.

Amazing, but also damned uncomfortable. I, for one, am the second child in my

family. Many of us have siblings we love. And, even if we personally agreed with the

rationale, or only wanted one child, most of us still don’t want to live in a country that

inflicts draconian edicts on its populace. Big families are considered beautiful practically

everywhere. The edict to be fruitful and multiply is sanctified by various religions. So

what chance is there that the human race would, or could, actually decide to do this?

Since the human race is a great, varied polyculture, research for this book will

take me to several representative countries and regions whose histories or current realities

portray distinct attitudes toward population management. I’ve already learned, however,

that presumptions are often false, and that surprises abound:


After The World Without Us was released, I braced myself for attacks that never

materialized. (A rare exception was the Washington Post’s reviewer who blasted the one-

child thought experiment as “…a terrible idea… our problem is overconsumption, not

overpopulation.”) The fact that it apparently hadn’t occurred to him that the two might

be related didn’t escape several other Washington journalists, who promptly contacted

me, including some from his own paper, on whose bestseller list the book stayed for

many subsequent weeks.

Besides being warmly received on conservative talk shows and in the business

press4, The World Without Us has been featured in Jewish journals, Buddhist magazines,

and, for a congenial hour, on the New York Archdiocese’s Sirius Radio program, The

Catholic Channel. Even on Southern Baptist programs: It was during an interview on

one of these, a San Antonio AM station, that a caller admonished me for forgetting that in

Genesis, God commands man to fill the Earth.

“I agree,” I replied. “I was raised on Genesis myself. God does say that. And,

that’s one we’ve obeyed. My concern is that now we’re overfilling it.”

Then, before he could respond, something else occurred to me, and I added, “In

fact, just a couple of chapters later in that same book, God gets so upset at our excesses

that He decides to flood the place and start all over with one righteous man. But

remember what He tells Noah: along with his family, he also has to save all the birds and

beasts of the land. The animals are also precious to God. We can’t have a world without

them.”

“Oh – right,” said the caller. “Thanks.”

That little exchange left me thinking. I hadn’t tried to change the caller’s mind

about his beliefs. Instead, I showed how his evangelical creed might embrace the need

for population balance. Could that work for others?

A month later, I had a chance to find out when I was invited to speak at Sundance,

and my speakers bureau also scheduled me at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah,

two hours north. The audience would be mainly working-class Mormons, who have the

4 “…a refreshing, and oddly hopeful, look at the fate of the environment” – Business Week “…a summer beach book with brains” – Bloomberg


highest fertility rate in the country. So I did some research, and discovered something

interesting to mention when the population issue arose.

“As you all know,” I told the gathering of 250, about half townspeople, “like early

Israelites, some early Mormons had multiple wives. It was a strategy to have many

children so the tribe would grow quickly. But to conform to U.S. law, by the end of the

19th century Mormons abandoned polygamy. Still, they kept having a lot of children,

and soon a crisis developed: a marked increase in the numbers of Mormon women dying

in childbirth. With only one wife to keep the birth rate up, mothers were getting pregnant

too quickly after their last pregnancy.

“In a culture as family-centered as Mormons, motherless families are more than a

tragedy: they’re a disaster to the society. Fortunately, your community has also always

emphasized education, and by that time there was a generation of Mormon doctors who

realized they had to counsel women to space their pregnancies, lest the Mormon way of

life be threatened.

“So, it occurs to me that a culture that has already made a successful adjustment

to practicing birth control for the sake of not only the mother’s health, but for the well-

being of its entire society, might be especially able to understand the need to control

reproduction in order to save Mother Nature. Besides,” I concluded, “as people who

venerate latter-day saints, you may have an advantage over the rest of us who are still tied

to liturgies thousands of years old. You were flexible enough to form a new Christian

church in modern times. Flexibility is exactly what we’ll need to respond to the

environmental crises we all now face.”

I signed more than 200 books that night. Several months later, I spoke at the

University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Same thing.

And Catholics? As it turns out, I don’t need to convince them, because they’re

doing it themselves. I often invite people to consider the example of Italy, not a country

that readily leaps to mind when we think of population control. Yet Catholic Italy’s

growth rate vies with Catholic Spain’s for the lowest on the planet. Despite subsidies

offered by their governments to encourage women to have more, Italian and Spanish

women are barely averaging more than one child apiece: about 1.21 per family.


Why would Italian and Spanish Catholic women practice birth control so

rigorously, despite political and religious authority figures who call them unpatriotic and

sinful?

One reason is that modern medical technology has eliminated the need to have

many children, to assure that at least some survive former high rates of infant mortality.

But the most important factor is simply because Italy and Spain educate their women.

Italy has one of, if not the, highest per capita number of female Ph.D.s in the

world. An educated woman defers child-bearing until her studies are through, and then

doesn’t have so many kids that she can’t exercise the interesting and useful profession

she’s trained for. And, because her work inevitably contributes something meaningful to

her society in addition to her offspring, everyone benefits from her self-interest.

In fact, Italy’s not a bad model for the world to emulate. Like anyplace, it’s got

problems – e.g., its current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi – but it’s a country so

charming the rest of us pay to visit it. With a manageable number of mouths to feed per

family, there’s plenty of bread and olives and truffles to go around, and Italians are

generally healthy, and arguably pretty happy.

Programs to educate girls in certain provinces of India such as Kerala, and in

Brazil, and even in parts of Afghanistan, are proving that it works in poor countries, too.

Families there are reproducing at far lower rates than in neighboring Pakistan, a country

with one of the fastest growing populations on earth – a fact with frightening implications.

In Countdown, I will take readers to these places, so they can judge the results by the

experiences of people who are living them. What I hope to confirm – but will let the facts

I discover dictate – is whether one of the most powerful tools to bring ourselves into a

sustainable balance with the rest of nature is also one of the most logical, humane, and

just: educating women.

*

To intentionally define a limit to population may seem – and may be – unnatural.

But the field of wildlife biology now encompasses what years ago would have been an

oxymoron: wildlife management, in which stewards of nature preserves, such as national


parks, actively manage wildlife populations to maintain a sustainable balance between

prey and predator, so they don't outstrip resources.

To apply such concepts to the human race, as if we were some form of livestock,

strikes us as terrifying on multiple levels – moral, religious, and philosophical, not to

mention legal. Yet history shows us that to ignore what’s obvious is never a good idea.

As the ecologists I’ll accompany into the field for this book will explain, every species in

the history of biology that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash – a crash

sometimes fatal to the entire species. Today, in a world now stretched to the brink, we all

live in a parkland, and either we must learn to manage our own numbers, or nature will

do it for us in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, collapsed ecosystems,

opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources.

Resource battles over water, energy, soil, and food are already underway; I’ll

have a growing selection from which to choose the ones I’ll show in this book. The most

obvious are in Africa and the Middle East, but simmering tensions in the Americas and

Europe may overheat sooner than we think. So often – and so sadly – they occur in what

have been among the most beautiful places on Earth. For millions of years, nature has

operated within limits that, at a pace of a million more of us every four days, we have

now obviously breached. To ever hope to be sustainable, we must go back to them.

4. The Cost

When I share these thoughts with audiences – I gave 45 talks in 10 countries in

2008 – we inevitably discuss not just ecological, but economic sustainability. Both

socialism and capitalism seem to depend on population growth in order to function, so

wouldn’t limiting population undercut prosperity? I will deal with economic issues in

more detail in the book’s chapter outline that follows, but for now:

I hear socialist concerns most often in Europe, mainly about who’s going to

replenish the welfare coffers that aging pensioners live on if the number of workers

declines. It’s a legitimate preoccupation – but one that will last only a generation,

because in subsequent generations, the numbers of retirees and younger members of the

work force will again be in balance.


To finance the transition may require reapportioning budget resources for twenty

years or so, I reply. “I can easily think of expenditures by my own government that I’d

gladly sacrifice so that the money would be spent on caring for the elderly. Possibly

that’s true here as well.” Apparently it is, because I always see a roomful of nodding

heads, and the discussion moves on.

It’s noteworthy that I hear the capitalist argument a lot less these days, owing to

current economic implosions. These suggest that belief in incessant growth as a

sacrosanct measure of economic health may be a delusion akin to chain letters or Ponzi

schemes. Both inevitably collapse, because both depend on new people always feeding

into the system, and eventually the supply runs out.

In the recent crash, even though the supply of consumers seemed to keep growing

– the United States will soon have 1/3 billion inhabitants – the supply of viable ones was

exhausted, but given the breathless way that riches kept soaring, we pretended that wasn’t

so. At a point when there wasn’t enough real wealth to slake insatiable global financiers,

they created virtual wealth based on a fantasy that people who couldn’t afford mortgages

would somehow be able to, ten years hence – and at ballooned rates, to boot.

“And yet,” I often tell my audiences in closing, “if you own a corporation and hire

as a consultant one of those same economists who obsess about annual growth as the

measure of a company’s viability – a mantra they’ve come to believe after repeating it

enough times – you know what he’s going to tell you to do to make your corporation

healthy? ‘You need to get lean. You’ve gotta cut out the fat.’

“So when everybody shows up to work the following Monday, 25% find pink

slips waiting for them. Rather brutally, the corporation has just cut itself down to a

healthier size. That is, unless it’s a humane corporation. Instead of killing off a quarter

of its personnel as if it were culling excess deer, it uses a gentler, more natural method:

attrition. Each year, as some employees retire, or move on, or pass away, it simply

recruits fewer to take their places. The ones who remain learn new technologies to

efficiently do the work that it previously took many more to do, and gradually the

company reaches sustainable proportions.”

By this point, they already see the analogy. “This planet can’t sustain our current

numbers, and, one way or another, those numbers must inevitably come down. I don’t


want to cull anybody alive today. I wish every human currently on the planet a long and

healthy life. But either we take control, and humanely bring our numbers down by

literally recruiting fewer new members of the human race to take our place, or nature’s

going to hand out a bunch of pink slips. When you see survival of the fittest portrayed on

the National Geographic Channel, it’s entertaining. When it happens to your own species,

it’s not very pretty.”

*

To live in a parkland with boundaries such as those we now are forced to

acknowledge as our Earthly limits smacks of a life sentence confined to a terrarium. In

fact, we always have been in one. But a terrarium with its resident organisms in

equilibrium is a beautifully functioning world. If we set ourselves on a course to do that,

our world won’t feel confining – it will feel like there’s plenty of space for everyone and

everything. Like it used to.

And that, I’ve learned, is a subtle but powerful reason why my last book, The

World Without Us, resonated so deeply -- and why, when I present the obvious fact of our

runaway numbers, no audience or interviewer fails to get it. Because no matter where a

person is from, or what age, or what politics, everybody remembers a place where they

used to be able to go – a place to escape the noise and congestion of their lives. A place

not too far away, where they could hike, or picnic, or ride a dirt bike. Where they could

watch birds – or, if they like to hunt, kill birds. Where they could hug trees, or cut them

for firewood, or just fall asleep under one of them. Whatever: but now that favorite place

is gone – vanished beneath strip malls, or industrial parks, or condominia.

Mormons who grew up in large families now describe to me the continuous glop

of urbanity that today covers valleys and mountainsides for 100 miles south from Ogden

past Salt Lake, all the way down to Provo, as appalling. Everyone remembers a world

that was better. Less crowded. Lovelier. Freer. And when they think of population

management as a way to return to that, heads begin nodding.


I don’t intend to minimize how tangled the reality is behind such a simple vision:

Think how often you’ve heard the number of last month’s housing starts – that is, even

more sprawl – expressed as a barometric reading of how well things are going. To

consider proactively bringing ourselves down to sustainable size is to redefine wellness in

a way that means that economies, over a couple of generations, must readjust to a

trimmer version of our previous expansive trajectory, which, as can happen to any

organism, at some point passed from robust growth to unhealthy bloat. Any hint of

economic readjustment makes us nervous, yet hundreds of readers have thanked me for

resurrecting this subject, which for the past 25 years has been largely pushed off the table.

Constantly, I’m asked to write as a logical outgrowth of The World Without Us a book on

how we might actually implement population management in this fractious world, so that

there might be a chance for a world with us.

Inevitably, this has to be part of the discussion in forging a viable future for what

is steadily becoming not a terrarium, but a howling pressure cooker. In the pages that

follow, I’ll outline how I intend to approach that task. As in any journalistic undertaking,

this outline, at best, will be a research guide and a beginning, but also a departure point.

Discoveries and surprises in the field regularly supplant earlier preconceptions, and I

must remain open to them, especially those that challenge the initial premise I’m setting

out to test. By the response to The World Without Us, I know that the bonus thought

experiment in its epilogue has already persuaded thousands of readers that a smaller,

stable, more sustainable population is desirable. My job in Countdown is to show

whether that’s true, and if such a thing is actually viable.

I’m aware of the difficulties. Although it is immensely appealing, even seductive,

to believe that the most powerful tool to stabilize population isn’t Orwellian imposition

but, simply, equal education and opportunity for women, the truth is that simply imposing

that is still a huge struggle. Yet the advancement of women’s equality has been one of

the most promising successes of that otherwise problematic 20th century, one whose

continued progress I look forward to documenting from some unlikely, unsuspected

places for this book. (It’s also a tool that even traditional economists increasingly

recognize is the most effective to turn misery to stability: As Nick Kristof and Sheryl

WuDunn recently documented in New York Times Magazine [August 23, 2009], a


growing contingent that includes the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, Goldman Sachs,

and the U.S. military’s joint chiefs of staff concurs that the fastest – and cheapest – way

to transform societies is by educating girls and women.)

Before proceeding to the chapter outline and to a discussion of how this book

would differ from books past and recent that address population, and to my proposed

time-frame for research and writing, there’s one last point to address – one that ignites

growing concerns and deep emotion in much of my potential readership:

Fears are lately mounting that during this century a tsunami of overly fertile

Muslims will swamp the Judeo-Christian western world. Thinly-disguised racist

literature purporting that all Europe will be a giant Muslim country by mid-century

proliferates on that continent. Similar froth, based on statistics that are only partly

cooked, fill airways and blogs emanating across America, Australia, and even Japan:

anywhere in the developed world where population growth has stabilized, largely due to

equal opportunity for co-education. Stabilized, that is, except for immigrant populations.

As the chapter outline further describes, in Countdown I will parse the realities

and fantasies of the world’s demographic prospects. For now, though, here’s a one-word

reply to the anxieties that western demagogues are whipping into anti-Muslim hysteria:

Iran.

One of the richer surprises I anticipate springing in this book is how responsibly

this Shi’ite member of the so-called axis of evil has controlled its population. In 1979,

the advent of his Islamic republic, the Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini originally exhorted

his minions to be fruitful and build a mighty nation. Within a decade, at an annual

growth rate that topped even Mexico’s highest, Iran’s population was well on its way to

doubling from the 34 million Iranians alive when the Shah was toppled.

Khomeini died in 1989, and subsequent governments under his successor, the

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, realizing that this growth was unhealthy and unsustainable,

have done everything to reverse that. In Muslim Iran, birth control – condoms, pills,

IUDs, vasectomies – is encouraged and is free. The annual growth rate has dropped from

a frightening 3.9% to 1.41 % -- one to two children per family. (In fact, although

participation is voluntary, not mandatory as in China, Iran’s program reached

replacement level reproduction – 2.1 children per family – in just six years, a year faster


than China did.) Iran, cast so often as the future’s nightmare, may in fact herald our

awakening. In the pressurized world of the 21st century, dreams such as the famous

American one won’t count as much as reality, which will be simply unavoidable.

With luck, it will be an inspirational reality. We may have to dispense with easy,

self-deceiving catch-phrases such as sustainable development – another oxymoron,

because development always implies growth: once again, wishful dreaming that we can

somehow have our planet and eat it too. But we may be able to make sustainability a

reality: doing all that we do in ways that mimic nature, which turns every waste product

into something useful, over and over again.

And if we get real – as we must, or suffer the consequences – we’ll discover some

new beauties about being not in battle, but in balance with the rest of nature, and recover

some old ones. Such as, more normally-sized families. Because even choosing the most

radical path by emulating China wouldn’t mean staying at one child per household

forever. Once humans reached an optimum number in accordance with the carrying

capacity of the Earth, they could resume having two children per family – 2.1, really,

which is the steady-state replacement rate of a stabilized population.

And what might that optimum population and carrying capacity be?

That’s what I’m about to try to determine.

*


Contents and Chapter Outline

Notes & caveats:

• Although this proposal is written in first-person, my usual predilection is not to write books that way. I prefer leaving myself out of the picture, and letting facts, protagonists, antagonists, and action speak for themselves. The material I discover during reporting will probably suggest the most appropriate voice, but this decision is open to editorial discussion.

• Charts and graphs will be kept to a very sparing minimum – meaning, hardly any. Same for statistics, which will mainly be woven into the narrative. Whatever arguments that emerge will also be made by narrative, not by a lot of numbers. Experts and other personalities will be presented in scenes and stories, rarely by disembodied quotes. As it was with The World Without Us, my goal is to make this book intensely readable, with each character-driven example leading to the next.

• This outline is at best, a plan of attack. Some of the points herein include possible

settings and examples, such as in the introduction that immediately follows, but stronger ones may well emerge – or just plain ambush me – during the research. The order of the chapters I list here will likely get reshuffled, and some of these subjects – religion, for example – may end up working better in a story line that interweaves them, rather than as discrete chapters. It’s too early to tell.

• I suspect my preliminary conclusions as described above are on target, but what I

discover in the field will ultimately determine their final shape.

A table of contents follows, followed by an outline that elaborates on points that

haven’t been discussed previously, some at greater length than others. Again: this

structure mainly indicates what, at this stage, I think needs to be included in the book.

When the research is completed, I’ll know a lot more, and I’ll be most grateful for

suggestions.

*


Table of Contents

Introduction: A Holy City, Overloaded. Chapter 1: A World Bursting Its Seams Chapter 2: How We Got Into This Mess, or: How Things Double Chapter 3: The Maddening Paradox, or: Why More Food Creates More Hunger Chapter 4: But Wasn’t Malthus Debunked? And Paul Ehrlich After Him? Chapter 5: The Carrying Capacity of the Earth. Chapter 6: Water of Life Chapter 7: The Energy Ceiling Chapter 8: China’s Experiment Chapter 9: Prosperity Without Growth? Chapter 10: The Future As It Currently Unravels Chapter 11: Medical Technology vs. Nature’s House-Cleaning Chapter 12: Educated Women Chapter 13: The Religion Key Chapter 14: The Demons of Demography Chapter 15: The Interesting Islamic Republic of Iran Chapter 16: The World With Fewer of Us


Introduction: A Holy City, Overloaded

It’s hard to imagine a more educated people than the Israelis. Yet among looming

environmental disasters in this century, there is Jerusalem, a city sacred to three of the

world’s great religions and cherished by their adherents – and even by the lapsed, so

powerful is Jerusalem in our histories. But the Jerusalem of our liturgical texts had no

more than 2,000 inhabitants during the reign of King David. Twenty-seven generations

later, when Jesus arrived, it perhaps had 50,000, and it wasn’t much bigger half a

millennium later in Muhammad’s time.

Today, its population passes three-quarters of a million, and anyone who’s visited

lately knows that the fabled land of milk and honey that surrounds it is mostly a sandbox,

one too small for all its children to play in. Nevertheless, ultra-Orthodox Jews, known as

Haredim, are trying to bear as many children as possible to remain a majority – often 10

or more to a family – lest they be engulfed by waves of equally fecund, extreme Muslim

Palestinians, who are rumored to have a fatwa to out-breed the Jews. (Currently,

Jerusalem’s Jews, with birth rates even higher than the Muslim pace, are said to be

winning.)

Given the sandbox’s precarious water situation (a key reason why Israel clings to

West Bank settlements is that they’re perched atop wells), this contest among the pious to

out-populate each other is a race to hell. Nowhere is this insane procreation war more

evident than in the ancient city claimed by both, where teeming ultra-orthodox Jewish

enclaves like Mea Shearim bang up against Arab East Jerusalem. Should Jerusalem

begin to collapse under its own weight, I expect it will get the world’s attention.

I’ll begin by showing Jerusalem through the eyes of both Arab and Jewish

ecologists, first with alternating scenes, then possibly with them together. A few years

ago, I spoke at international conference in Hannover, Germany on water as a source of

conflict in the 21st century. The most compelling moment was a joint presentation by

Zach Tagar, an Israeli coordinator for Friends of the Earth-Middle East, and Fadil

Kawash, Deputy Head of the Palestinian Water Authority. No matter how incandescent

the tension between their two peoples, every week for the previous five years they had


found a way to speak to each other, because the urgency of preserving the resource

transcended nationality. Listening to these brave men, many of us in a roomful of

Americans, Europeans, Russians, and Africans were weeping.)

Walking through Jerusalem with ecologists such as these, we’d look at the impact

of all the people: the tons of food that has to feed them, where it comes from, and how

much energy it takes to ship it in. We’d consider the sewage system of the city –

contrasted with the tunnels under the Second Temple, which I’ll see with archaeologists,

who will contrast today’s population to the number that dwelled there when Herod built it.

We’d hear opinions of rabbis and imams about population and the water – water for the

city, under the West Bank, and in a Gaza Strip crammed with so many people that they’re

forced to pump septic fields for drinking water.

We’ll hear from wildlife biologists about what species shared the land with

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus – and what’s left now. This vignette would end with

discussion of what would be an optimum human carrying capacity for the land, so it

might return to being a land of milk and honey.

[Other possible sources whom I’ve previously interviewed: Eilon Schwartz,

founder-director of Israel’s Abraham Joshua Heschel Center for Environmental Study

and Leadership; Palestinian solar energy expert Hanna Hallak, Dean of the Physics

department at Bethlehem University.]

Chapter 1: A World Bursting Its Seams.

A. The issue described: At a rate of million more people every 4.2 days (a billion

more every 12 years), the number of humans alive today are too many for the

planet to contain without leading to inevitable environmental chaos and loss,

which will ultimately reduce human population by famine, disease, floods, fires,

and internecine and international warfare.

B. There is, however, an alternative that would be relatively non-disruptive of

current human activity: controlled population decrease. (Here I will reprise the


subject raised at the end of The World Without Us: The Chinese experiment writ

worldwide, and show how population would return to pre-1900 levels if everyone

participated.)

C. There are many deterrents to controlled population decrease, but there are even

more, and probably more intransigent, obstacles to finding clean substitutes for

inefficient polluting aspects of human activity. And, largely due to issues

involving food supply and ecosystem health, even if it were possible on a massive

scale, clean energy alone would not alleviate growing threats to humanity.

D. Controlled population decrease need not imply draconian edicts, and may be

more culturally acceptable than we might think

Chapter 2: How we got into this mess

The human race’s population growth was gradual over most of human history – it

took nearly 200,000 years since Homo sapiens first appeared for our population

worldwide to reach one billion, around 1815. Then, for three reasons, it began to surge

rapidly.

The first reason involves how things double. I once heard University of Colorado

physicist Albert Bartlett neatly explain how it works in a talk at Cape Canaveral:

“Imagine,” Bartlett said, “a species of bacteria that reproduces by dividing in two.

Those two become four, the four become eight, and so forth. Let's say we place one

bacterium in a bottle at 11 A.M, and at noon we observe the bottle to be full. At what

point was it half full?”

The answer, it turns out, is 11:59 AM.

"Now, if you were a bacterium in that bottle, at what point would you realize you

were running out of space? At 11:55 AM, when the bottle is only 1/32 full, and 97% is

open space, yearning for development?” Everyone giggled. “Now suppose, “ he

continued, “that with a minute to spare, the bacteria discover three new bottles to inhabit.

They sigh with relief: They have three times more bottles than had ever been known,

quadrupling their space resource. Surely this makes them self-sufficient in space. Right?"


Except, of course, it doesn't. Bartlett's point was that in exactly two more minutes,

all four bottles will be full.

World population is no longer doubling, as it nearly did twice in the 20th century,

effectively filling up our bottle. In 1950, two-thirds of humans lived rurally, and there

were only a handful of cities with populations over one million, London being the biggest.

Today, more than half of all human beings live in cities. Urban dwellers, needing fewer

farm hands and being closer to medical care, tend to have fewer children.

But to say that urbanization has solved the population problem overlooks the fact

that, as in the case of Mexico described earlier, the barn door was closed after the horses

had already escaped. Population may not be growing exponentially any more, but it’s

still growing arithmetically. By the middle of this century, barring major disaster we’ll

add nearly half as many people as we already have, increasing to 9.3 million, all requiring

food, fuel (fuel consumption, incidentally, is still doubling or more by the decade, and

has been since 1970), space to live, support services – and all of them eliminating wastes

and producing carbon dioxide.

In the meantime, there are now nearly 500 cities with a million or more people.

Twenty-seven have more than 10 million, and eight of those have more than 20 million.

(London, with 12 million, now ranks 24th. Greater Tokyo, the biggest urban area, has 33

million) At current rates, world population growth is expected to level off in the next

century, to somewhere around 12 billion. That’s twice as many of us as now, and it’s

probably a fanciful statistic, because, as I’ll describe herein, natural forces altered by our

very numerical presence will likely combine to keep that from happening.

Albert Bartlett has been a valuable source to me previously, and I may be calling

on him again for this book. In the meantime, the other two reasons we got into this mess

are a bit counter-intuitive, because we consider them inherently beneficial, not

detrimental. These involve food and medical advances. To suggest that either might be

anything but purely good will be controversial at the very least, and to many, infuriating.

Therefore, they get their own chapters:


Chapter 3: The Maddening Paradox, or: Why More Food Creates More Hunger

This, as noted, will be among the most contentious discussions in this book. (Lest

I’ve just shocked somebody, the chapter on medical advances will be far less so: As it

turns out, for a stabilized lower world population there’s no need to sacrifice health care,

and good reason to keep improving it.)

As for food: Although humans, of the class Mammalia, are subject to the same

principles of nature as any other species, routinely we pretend otherwise – until

something forces us to remember who and what we are. Life on this planet was designed

– no matter by what or Whom – to run on energy derived mainly from sunlight hitting its

surface. Certain plants such as legumes could use that energy to draw nitrogen from the

atmosphere and, via some helpful bacteria, convert it in the soil to food for plants.

Plants, in turn, became food for animals (including carnivores, which mostly eat

animals that eat plants.) Until the 20th century, the number of living things on Earth was

limited by the natural rate at which bacteria can process nitrogen to fuel this food-chain

reaction. Then, in the 1920s, we discovered how to force-feed soil with a new,

concentrated nitrogen source – or actually, an old one. We learned we could pry it from

ancient plant matter compressed beneath the ground into what we call fossil fuel. Doing

this took a lot of energy – which requires more fossil fuel – but the results were

sensational. One of the few things that scientists, ecologists, agriculturalists, and

agribusinesses agree on is that perhaps 40% of humans on Earth would not be alive if we

didn’t use artificially produced nitrogen fertilizer.

The results became even more sensational mid-century when this chemical

fertilizer was applied in combination with crops genetically selected to produce far more

edible kernels per plant than ever before. These techniques became known as the Green

Revolution. Led by Nobel laureate agronomist Dr. Norman Borlaug, scientists in

Texcoco, Mexico were breeding disease-resistant wheat that could bear many more

grains per stalk (with shorter stalks to accommodate the added weight), and high-yield

corn with increased levels of nutritious amino acids.


By the 1960s, Green Revolution agricultural engineers were declaring that these

immensely higher yields would eliminate hunger on Earth. Unfortunately, this proved no

more accurate than predictions by the nuclear industry around the same time that

electricity would soon become too cheap to meter.

What happened instead involved a principle that ecologists know well: in nature,

populations always rise to meet available food supplies. Three countries where Green

Revolution scientists focused their efforts are prime examples. The inability of Mexico,

ground zero for Borlaug’s research, to house and employ its swollen populace was

discussed earlier. Green Revolution wheat was introduced in Pakistan and India in 1965.

In just five years, harvests nearly doubled. Today, Pakistan vies with Nigeria for the

world’s fastest growing population. By 2025, India will have surpassed China as the

most populous country on Earth.

Over the past two decades, we’ve started not merely selecting genes, but tinkering

with them and injecting favorable new ones. Plants are designed for ultimate

productivity, for pleasing or uniform appearance, for delivering everything from extra

vitamins to antibiotics to people or animals who eat them, and for resistance against

plagues (or against herbicides that kill anything else that might compete with them in the

soil, which are conveniently sold with their patent-protected seeds as a package).

As a result of all this, in the last century, human population doubled, then nearly

doubled again -- and we now easily have five times as many hungry people as before

modern agro-technology appeared.

This is a most slippery paradox to grasp: that the more people we can feed, the

more hunger we produce. Yet according to the latest U.N. estimates, the world now has

1.2 billion malnourished people. Hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases kill 25,000

people every day.

It’s often argued that this paradox could be resolved by more equitable

distribution of resources. That is, there’s plenty of food to go around, if we just do a fairer

job of sharing it. This sounds logical, but it misses two sticking points. The first is that

the main purpose that most food is grown is not to feed people, but to make money.


Mining all the fossil fuel to make all the fertilizer to grow all the corn and soy that have

replaced the great heartland prairie of North America (and lately, the pampas of

Argentina) is expensive. That simply wouldn’t have happened if the main goal was a

charitable imperative to insure that no one goes hungry.

But there are limits to how long that can keep happening. The second sticking

point is that the price of food isn’t its only cost. Ecosystem damage has mounted right

along with the population, a vicious cycle of stressed soils requiring more chemicals as

demand rises, and the leveling of more wildlife habitat. Especially in the tropics: As the

forests of Central America, Indonesia, and Africa become croplands, roosts for migrating

birds and butterflies are missing, replaced by fields routinely drenched in chemicals

banned in the United States and Europe.

Without synthetic fertilizer, there’s no way all this could have happened, but it’s

doubtful how long we can continue with synthetic fertilizer. From the Mediterranean to

California to the Yangtze Delta, fisheries are collapsing, in part due to fertilizer runoff

feeding algae blooms that choke estuaries where countless species breed or spawn. In

2008, salmon simply disappeared from the Sacramento River Delta. As for soils….

As you may be sensing, this portion will raise some volatile topics. Food is one

of the biggest commodities on Earth, and the food industry will attack population

management far more viciously than ever contemplated by insurance companies currently

fighting public health coverage.

My research sources will include agronomists and economists at companies such

as Cargill and Monsanto, and at one of the most powerful new world-builders on the

global scene: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of whose biggest programs has

been dubbed “Green Revolution 2.0” by worried ecologists.

I will also accompany scientists into the field, such as staff of the U.S.-based

Center for Biodiversity, which has an institute for overpopulation issues; Cornell

University ecologist David Pimentel, who has written on the link between food supply

and population; and ecologists in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, especially in

flyways for migratory species. Another key source will be food journalist Michael Pollan,

a friend and board member of my independent radio production collective, Homelands


Productions (currently in discussions with NPR for a major series titled The Hunger

Chronicles.)

*

Futurologist Peter Ward envisions our world in a thousand years with only

domesticated ecosytems: a giant planetary farmyard that supports numerous humans, its

few plant and animal species descended in genetically altered form from our current

crops, chickens, and cows, et al. Even if that were possible (few ecologists would agree)

there still wouldn’t be enough room to grow food for everyone. If today’s Chinese

consumed food like European and Americans, they alone would need two-thirds of the

world’s grain.

And where would that leave all the rest of us, starting with India?

Chapter 4: But wasn’t Malthus debunked? And Paul Ehrlich after him?

Recently, a Congregationalist minister remarked to me, “I’ve never read Malthus.

Most people haven’t. But we heard about what he said in high school and we all

remember it. Even as kids, we could sense that it’s true.”

Thomas Malthus, 1766-1834, was an economist and a clergyman. He is

remembered for a dour prediction that human nature would inevitably lead us to

overpopulate, which in turn would inevitably bring famine and population collapse.

His words were echoed and amplified by Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the 1968

bestseller, The Population Bomb. Among Ehrlich’s most famous – and most derided –

predictions was that worldwide famines starving hundreds of millions would begin in the

1970s. When that didn’t happen, Ehrlich was ridiculed as a “neo-Malthusian” – an epithet

I expect to earn with this book.

Ehrlich, and Malthus before him, hadn’t foreseen astonishing technologies that

would stretch food resources in the latter third of the 20th century. As an ecologist,

however, (his specialty is entomology) Ehrlich understood that technological solutions

have an unfortunate way of causing other problems, such as those now catching up with

us, and that at best technology temporarily postpones the inevitable. He continued


elaborating in subsequent writings co-authored with his wife, Anne – and with John

Holdren, who is now President Obama’s director of the White House Office of Science

and Technology Policy.

Malthus and Ehrlich may have gotten the timing wrong, but at a certain point no

more technological rabbits remain in the hat, or we run out of room to grow more food

without eliminating something that we wish we hadn’t. Countdown won’t resemble

Ehrlich’s books, which range from near-sensationalist to prescriptive, and I will give a

fair hearing to detractors, such scientists at CIMMYT, Norman Borlaug’s Maize and

Wheat Improvement Center in Texcoco, Mexico.

Proving Malthus correct has always been a challenge for scientists, because

there’s no opportunity for a controlled experiment (the fate of Easter Islanders, who

apparently overharvested themselves into extinction, is too remote in time and space, and

too small an example, to be a sufficiently convincing cautionary tale).

So we’re left with the uncontrolled experiment we’re all living. I look forward to

discussing it with President Obama’s science advisor, Dr. Holdren.

Chapter 5: The Carrying Capacity of the Earth.

Green Revolution founder Norman Borlaug once estimated that without artificial

fertilizer, the amount of available natural nitrogen could support 4 billion humans.

Ecologists, who factor in maintaining biodiversity – that is, halting any further extinction

of any other species – have yet to settle on a figure. I’ve seen estimates from 25 million

people to three billion. (Estimates with fertilizer have famously gone as high as 40 billion,

a figure that Catholic bishops once touted, but which is no longer taken seriously. Today,

given volatile environmental variables, a general growing reluctance among

demographers to estimate planetary carrying capacity is itself revealing.)

A principal issue to consider is: how many people can the Earth sustain in a

climate-changed world? James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory of how the Earth’s systems

function as in a giant organism is now accepted by evolutionary biologists worldwide,

fears that most of the planet may be uninhabitable by the end of the century, and

envisions maybe 500 million humans left, huddling near the poles.


The question of carrying capacity surprisingly hasn’t been widely discussed, and I

look forward to raising it with nearly everyone I interview for this book (meaning that

this chapter might be set practically anywhere). As a beginning, I will try to establish

how the world might function if human population stabilized at pre-1900 levels: around

1.8 billion. To what extent, for instance, could sufficient range for threatened species be

restored with fewer than one-third the number of today’s humans, compared to today?

Among the interviews I’ll specially seek for this chapter will be wildlife managers,

both in parks and in academia, to learn what lessons might possibly be applied to

managing ourselves, self-described wise Homo sapiens. I’ll also talk to biologists and

anthropologists about how some species and cultures respond to threats to their existence

by literally closing down biologically, stopping ovulation and ceasing procreation. (A

possible example with which I’m personally acquainted is the Seri Indians, a formerly

populous tribe of coastal Sonora, Mexico. Confined to a fraction of their former territory,

by the early 20th century their numbers dropped to near extinction level, but then

stabilized at around 500, where they remain today.)

Chapter 6: Water of Life

Rather than a separate chapter, water may be a theme that recurs throughout the

book, or one that mainly belongs in another chapter, such as in the opening vignette set in

Israel, or in the food paradox chapter.

Along with genetics, artificial fertilizer, and poison (herbicides, pesticides, and

fungicides), the fourth component of modern agro-technology is irrigation via dams,

canals, and pumps. Among the most worrisome situations currently is India, whose

population since the Green Revolution has truly exploded. Unfortunately, its water tables

are dropping precipitously. As wells go dry, farmers dig more, or deeper, and water

tables drop even faster.

The United States faces a similar scenario, as a changing climate alters weather

patterns as we’ve always know them. Last year, in a suite of pieces I wrote for

VanityFair.com, I cited a 2008 journal entry in Water Resources Research, titled “When

Will Lake Mead Go Dry?”


Not if, but when. Its authors, marine physicist Tim Barnett and climate researcher

David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, described how snowpack in the

Rockies has dwindled over the past three decades. They concluded that there’s now an

even chance that by 2017 levels in Lake Mead will no longer reach the Hoover Dam

turbines – and by 2021, the lake could essentially be gone, its outflows having fatally

exceeded the inflows that replenish it.

I called Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority,

who oversees the Las Vegas Valley Water District. With Lake Mead already 100 feet

lower than in 2000, she said, they are nearing the point where one of two intakes that

supply water to Las Vegas (until recently, the U.S.’s fastest growing city) would cease to

function. “Our challenge is to do whatever we have to in order to keep Lake Mead above

1,000 feet,” the height of the second intake. They were racing against time to tunnel three

miles under the lake in order to install a third intake at 860 feet. Her guess was they had

to get there by 2012, to insure that the city continues to have drinking water.

With other states, Nevada is exploring ways to desalt ocean water. Yet, Mulroy

agreed, “Desalinization plants are hugely power intensive.” She knew all the objections,

such as to the dilemma of what does all that salt do when you dump it back into the ocean.

“You have to consider brine disposal, energy costs, and what the suction of pumps

bringing water into the desalter does to marine life.”

“So what happens to Vegas,” I asked her, “if levels get so low that 25 million

downstream voters in California demand what little Colorado River water remains?”

“The nation,” Mulroy replied, “would have to seriously discuss a stair-step

exchange.” In such a situation, Nevada would hope to take Denver’s Colorado River

allotment, because Denver, in turn, could 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 costs, then by the fact that Great Lakes

states have already passed laws forbidding any other drainage basin from trying to stick

straws into Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, et cetera. In 2008, Georgia was so

desperate for water that it contemplated resurrecting a 150 year-old survey dispute that


would have put its northwestern corner a mile farther north, to the banks of the Tennessee

River. The state of Tennessee was not amused, nor charitably inclined.

If the amount of available water continues to decline, humans will be forced to

adjust. Either demand and climate change will conspire to cause water supplies and

population to decline together – or managing population will become a way to effectively

conserve this resource. Through my contacts worldwide, beginning with the roster from

the Hannover conference I described earlier, I’ll have plenty of potential scenarios.

Chapter 7: The Energy Ceiling

Again, in this book I don’t intend to describe at length on what doesn’t work. As

in the instance of water, I don’t know yet if the question of energy limitations belongs in

a discrete chapter or if it will be sufficiently treated in various other parts of the book.

The same is true for carbon dioxide. While energy, as we currently produce it

today, is the chief emitter, total emissions are a function of the number of us using energy.

For now, I include an energy chapter to emphasize that there are limits to how much

man-made energy this planet can tolerate, lest we poison or broil ourselves.

After years of researching and writing about energy issues, I’ve unfortunately

concluded that there are also likely physical limits to how much non-polluting, non-

global-warming energy we’ll ever be able to produce.

In 2004, Harper’s Magazine asked me to contrast John Kerry’s energy policy

with George Bush’s. After studying each, my subsequent article described Bush’s as

outrageous and Kerry’s as hopelessly naive. As world population nearly quadrupled in

the last century, power consumption had increased sixteen-fold. With China and India

joining the industrialized feeding frenzy, by 2050 our current usage would at minimum

triple. And neither Bush nor Kerry nor renewable energy advocates had any idea how to

meet such demand.

The editor at Harper’s was not pleased with my analysis. What she’d wanted me

to write, I eventually gathered, was that if we got rid of Bush, Kerry would end the oil


war in Iraq and put all the money we were wasting there into renewables, and everything

would be solved.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wish it were true. But it’s not.”

Because sun and wind energy aren't constant, I’d explained in my piece, tapping

them on a massive scale not only would mean impractically huge arrays of solar panels

and turbines, but redesigned grids with vast new storage mechanisms. At one point I’d

spoken to the renowned atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, then of Lawrence Livermore

National Laboratory (and a colleague of current Energy Secretary Steven Chu). Caldeira

calculated that if we somehow were able to build a 900-megawatt, zero-emissions plant

every day for the next 50 years, we'd barely double our current output.

“The problem,” he told me, “is that we still don’t know how to build even one.”

The Harper’s editor wouldn’t budge, and I couldn’t, because facts wouldn’t let

me. I recast my story as a Sunday op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. (Soon thereafter , I

later learned, the editor in question was no longer at Harper’s.)

My point, which I’d happily relinquish if new facts could convince me otherwise,

is that believing that so-called green energy technologies are going to save all 6.7-going-

on-9.3 billion of us is dangerous. In 2000, I was funded by the John D. and Catherine T.

MacArthur Foundation to research what President Bush later promised us: that clean

hydrogen was going to replace fossil fuels. I spent two years in Iceland, Germany,

Canada, and the U.S., meeting and seeing everyone and everything in the international

hydrogen community. I’d already reported hopefully about hydrogen for the Los Angeles

Times Magazine and NPR, and now intended to write a hopeful book describing the

forthcoming world-saving hydrogen revolution.

After two years I concluded that hydrogen will never work. So tantalizing, yet

frustrating: Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe – there’s more than

everything else combined. Unfortunately, virtually all the hydrogen on Earth is locked up

with oxygen, carbon, or sulfur, and prying it loose takes more energy than we get from it.

That’s just the beginning of its problems. Fifteen years after I’d first seen the short-list of

obstacles to be bested before we all were driving pollution-free hydrogen fuel-cell cars,

the list hasn’t gotten any shorter, and the solutions are always five years away.


Another grandly touted miracle technology that also uses hydrogen, cold fusion

energy, is perpetually 40 years away. The hydrogen economy, it seems, never goes

further than funding hydrogen researchers, and it was saddening, but somewhat of a relief,

to see the Obama administration, via Secretary Chu, finally pull the plug on funding it.

(Seduced by the odor of pork, Congress, of course, promptly put it back.)

Suffice it to say here that I have a substantial number of scenes and characters to

portray hydrogen as a cautionary tale of why perpetually renewable energy may be

asking too much of the universe, should it prove useful for this book.

For eons, nature operated on the amount of energy the sun provided, and buried

whatever was left over. In a couple hundred years, we dug up millions of years’ worth of

the stuff nature didn’t need, shot it into the sky, and jet-propelled our civilization into this

21st century we’re now facing. It’s clear we can’t keep doing that – or, if we do, that

we’ll need a lot fewer of us doing it lest we bring on a new deluge, and then some.

Or, with fewer of us, the more modest possibilities of renewable energy just might

be sufficient. But one detail in the Oregon State study I cited earlier about the carbon

legacy a mother accrues through each of her children’s descendants, is perhaps the

starkest hint yet that today’s cleanest technologies fall far short of being able to undo

what yesterday’s technology has bequeathed us.

The authors, a statistician and an atmospheric scientist, calculate that if an

American woman increased her car’s fuel economy from 20 to 30 mpg; reduced her

driving miles by a third; replaced all her windows with energy-efficient double panes and

all her incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents; bought the most energy-efficient

refrigerator available; and recycled everything possible, her total carbon savings would

be only 1/40th of the eventual carbon emissions of two children.

In other words, barring some technological breakthrough bordering on the

magical, unless there are fewer of us we likely can’t rein in a steadily mounting

greenhouse condition on Earth that will lift oceans and parch some of our most

productive farmlands. It won’t do much good moving agriculture poleward, as the soils

of the tundra and taiga are nowhere as fertile as the ones we’ve known. In such a world,

our numbers would shrink the hard way.


Chapter 8: China’s experiment

Draconian as it may seem to westerners, China’s one-child policy was, according

to some of my Chinese acquaintances, probably culturally appropriate for a society

accustomed to 6,000 years of hierarchical rulers issuing edicts from on high.

In this chapter, my purpose isn’t to judge it. Through portraits of people who

experienced it, I will describe its inception, its gradual implementation, its successes

(considering what has been saved with a half-billion fewer Chinese), its excesses (gender

discrimination, and its unintended, unfortunate consequences; privileged exceptions to it)

and its subsequent adjustments (some rural families can try again if their first child is a

daughter) and its expectations for the future.

As The World Without Us was the second-bestselling book in China in 2008 and

the only translated work in the top ten, and winner of the National Library of China’s

Wenjin Book Prize, I expect to have no trouble finding sources to help my research.

During my book tour, my Chinese publisher arranged for me to appear on several panels

with eminent scientists on whom I hope to call for contacts and assistance.

That tour included events in Shanghai, an address at the National Library in

Beijing, and a 2½-hour discussion on a televised science program that claims a billion

viewers. But most memorable was a talk and book-signing I gave at Guangzhou

University, two hours north of Hong Kong. It was a Sunday afternoon and attendance

was optional, but 400 students showed up. These were bright, alert, and well-prepared

college kids: nearly half the questions were asked in English.

Their energy was palpably positive. Relieved of shackles that so restricted their

parents during the Cultural Revolution, they were bursting with opportunities to learn and

get interesting jobs and make money. The sky was their limit – figuratively, but also

literally, and they knew it.

Outside the hall where we met – where a light show projected nature images from

around the world onto an immense screen, intercut with the covers of every foreign

edition of my book – it was possible to gaze at the sun, a pallid disk swathed in gray haze,

all day long through the permanent murk over industrial Guangzhou. These Chinese


youth knew full well that future was theirs, one way or another. Environmental crisis

was the bogeyman standing between them and their dreams, and they were keenly

interested in how to avert it.

As our stimulating conversation continued, something occurred to me. “Is every

one of them an only child?” I asked my 28 year-old translator, my publisher’s foreign

rights director.

“Of course,” she replied, a little surprised at the question. “We all are.”

“I speak at universities in my own country all the time,” I said to my audience,

“and you’re one of the most animated and intelligent groups I’ve ever met. You don’t

seem psychologically warped. Don’t you miss having brothers and sisters?”

They acknowledged that they did, but they understood why reproductive restraint

had become necessary, and they’d adjusted. “Our cousins have become our siblings. And

our closest friends, too,” the session’s student moderator explained to me.

“We’ve kind of re-invented the family,” said another young woman.

In that moment, I was reminded of how adaptable Homo sapiens truly is, and how

much that flexibility explains how we’ve survived up until now.

And maybe portends how we’ll be able to keep surviving.

Chapter 9: Prosperity Without Growth?

One balmy October evening last year, I was back in China, where 150 guests and

I were being ferried from Hong Kong Island via sailing junk to a four-floor, five-star

restaurant in mainland Kowloon. The occasion was a dinner hosted by a global

commercial real estate investment firm for representatives of its clients. Not just any

commercial properties, but the kind that celebrity architects design to soar above, and

out-gleam, everything else in the world’s most expensive cities. (Several examples could

be seen across the water through the restaurant’s glass southern wall.) The clientele

weren’t individuals, but major pension funds, endowments, and insurance companies.

I was the guest speaker. “You’ll be talking,” I was informed, “to representatives

of about one-third of all the equity wealth on Earth.”


They had asked me to speak about prospects for the global environment in the 21st

century. Meaning, I understood, how would the environment affect global business. So

how exactly was I supposed to tell a gathering some of the world’s most extravagant

consumers, as they dined on endangered seafood hors d’oeuvres, and prime beef flown in

from Australia, that the only hope I saw for future ecosystems was for them to stop?

Stop, for example, thinking that endless economic growth was somehow healthy

on a planet that hadn’t gotten any bigger for the past five billion years.

Eventually, I prepared what I figured would be a startling message: namely, that

the time of defining an economy’s robustness by how dependably its quarterly profits

perpetually climb was over. While population and its demands had nearly quadrupled in

a century, we still only had one planet, etc. We had pushed to the very limits, and for the

first time in human history, we’d have to start learning to live within our means – or else.

Except, how do you tell that to a group of über-capitalists?

As it turned out, I didn’t need to convince anybody that evening that the days of

imagining that growth has no limits were over. Because between the time they’d invited

me and the October night when I spoke to them, they’d learned for themselves that

endless growth was a delusion. At a certain point, our constant reach had outstripped our

economic resources, so to keep the party going we – well, somebody; not me – invented

imaginary resources, such as derivatives so byzantine they could conceal the fact that

they were baseless, because they involved those mortgages that pretended that someone

who couldn’t afford one would somehow be able to do so years later when mortgage

rates ballooned.

All these lofty financiers had just been slammed back to Earth – to the only Earth

we have, with its wondrous, but physically limited bounty – by a great big economic

reality check.

In fact, the notion I broached that night – redefining or inventing a new prosperity

without growth – was suddenly very appealing to them. What they wanted to know,

however, was how to do that.

Good question. One suggestion I could offer was that, since they were in the big

expensive building business, a way to both save money and relieve stress on the

ecosystem might be to build buildings that produce as well as consume energy. Although


we don’t know how to concentrate sunlight enough to run all our industries and

transportation systems, we do know how to make reasonably efficient, even attractive

photovoltaic films that can be slathered all over the roofs and faces of every building to

take advantage of the free solar energy that made life on Earth possible in the first place.

That might sound expensive, I said, but mass-producing the stuff to cover lots of

skyscrapers will start to bring down costs quickly. And, they wouldn’t necessarily have

to pay for it. Utility companies, who generally hate the idea of solar panels making

electricity on rooftops because it cuts into their profitable centralized control over power,

could be brought in as partners – in effect, to design, own, and operate a clean, on-site

power plant. In exchange for their investment, let the utility charge building tenants for

the solar electricity and for equipment maintenance. 5

It was a useful response that seemed to appeal to them, but it was also a bit of a

softball. As I spoke, satin-robed waitresses were passing out glistening desserts

involving exotic fruits, and it didn’t feel like the setting called for deep discussion of the

hard stuff. Such as:

Population inevitably will decline – either because we gracefully nudge our

numbers toward some ecological balance, or because some unpleasant act or reaction of

nature abruptly jerks us in that direction. That means a steadily declining number of

potential consumers, until those numbers reach a steady state.

That means limits on the number of products that can be sold. It also limits the

employee pool, which, like the consumer base, will shrink to fewer than one-third of

today’s population in my 1900-level scenario.

Bill McKibben’s 2007 book Deep Economy describes a growing revolution in

economics education that began in Paris at the demand of students at the Sorbonne, who

claimed that traditional supply-demand economics were absurdly out of touch with

reality. They insisted on being taught how steady-state economies might be created,

using capitalism’s creativity to design manufacturing processes and products that mimic

nature’s economy by recycling everything, including exhaust and eliminated waste. (In a

5 There’s no reason why this can’t happen anywhere, including on everybody’s houses. We wouldn’t have to pay up front for expensive solar equipment that takes years to amortize, nor master how to keep it working. Since we pay utilities every month for electricity anyway, why not pay them to do the solar and at the same time save tons of CO2 from going up chimneys?


shrinking economy, there will be plenty of excess materials to recycle as surplus

buildings are dismantled. We’ll need to mine less, and cut fewer trees. We’ll require

fewer construction workers, but many reconstruction workers.)

This thinking, McKibben wrote, is now spreading into schools of economics

throughout Europe and beyond. I look forward to visiting the Sorbonne to learn what

students and faculties have discovered, and what examples I can show readers. Potential

sources in North America are the University of Vermont’s Bob Costanza, who’s written

extensively about ecological economics and advised Burlington’s remarkable city-wide

composting and wood-chip power co-generation plant; Wellesley College economics

professor Julie Matthaei, a founder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network; Cornell’s

Lourdes Benería, professor of gender and economic development; and the University of

Maryland’s Herman Daly, a former World Bank economist who won the Right

Livelihood Award – the so-called alternative Nobel Prize – for work in developing

ecological economics. A Daly quote:

…we will then have what I call uneconomic growth, producing “bads” faster than goods – making us poorer, not richer. Once we pass the optimal scale, growth becomes stupid in the short run and impossible to maintain in the long run.

Among my specific questions regarding how steady-state economies might

actually work is how investments could still be encouraged, and prosper. I intend to ask

traditional economists as well, ranging from American Enterprise Institute fellows and

University of Chicago heirs to Milton Friedman’s mantle, to Princeton’s Paul Krugman

and his acolytes. As I noted earlier in this document, the same economists who preach

endless growth on the one hand, turn around and counsel companies to find their leanest,

most efficient, ideal size. It’s time to see if such advice can be applied to an entire

system, where the goal is not more, but simply enough.

Chapter 10: The future as it currently unravels

This chapter will show worst case scenarios of a world growing and failing. It

will be set either in Nigeria or Pakistan – possibly both. These are the two fastest


growing countries on Earth today, with Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo,

Indonesia, and Bangladesh close behind.

Pakistan, currently at 163 million, adds 3 million more annually. It is also a

nuclear power, and politically unstable. Shaky politics, high birthrates, high

unemployment, and wretched wages make it a breeding and incubating ground for

terrorism. It is, in short, a snapshot of the future we’re headed toward in an increasingly

under-capitalized, uncontrollable, mostly miserable, poor urban world. Nigeria is an

African version, where humans and natural epidemics – mainly AIDS – are locked in

deadly proliferation. I’ve never worked in either country, so I’ll see them with fresh eyes.

I have contacts in Nigeria; I’ll rely on colleagues at the Committee to Protect Journalists

who know Pakistan a little too well.

Chapter 11: Medical Technology vs. Nature’s House Cleaning

Along with agricultural technology and exponential doubling rates, medicine is

the third reason that population surged over the past two centuries, and especially in the

20th. Beginning with the work of French chemist Louis Pasteur, advances in vaccines,

food purification, and disease eradication had the double effect of greatly lowering infant

mortality and increasing longevity.

To say that it’s controversial to oppose medical care is an understatement. A

distinguished ecologist once commented to me, off the record, that public anguish over a

famine in Ethiopia is just as ignorant as public campaigns against forest fires. Both are

nature’s way of cleaning house, he said. It’s futile and plain dumb, he asserted, to send

emergency food for too many people whose too many goats have eaten too much pasture

and pushed their lands over the edge, into the Sahara. Famines or epidemics are simply

nature bringing things back into balance.

On one level, of course, he’s right. This is nature handing out its pink slips. Yet

everyone’s emotions, my own included, override objectivity in this case, in part because

we’re people, too, and also because, in the case of disease, almost everyone over forty is

probably still alive thanks to medical advances. Our unavoidable wish is to live long and

well, and yet in doing so not to be a burden on the world – including the natural world.


So the question of optimal population size must take into account a population that is

doing every conceivable creative medical thing to maximize the survival of children and

live as long as possible.

It’s often pointed out that epidemics, be they be airborne or passed via bodily

fluids like AIDS, are, like other historical plagues the natural result of populations

reaching a critical mass where the disease can spread easily. Epidemics knock the

population back to a level where the virus’s ability to wipe out everything is held in

check. Among the most engrossing pageants in the years to come will be the battle

between humans and maladies that attack us: Which one can best the other, as medical

technology and mutating viruses race to stay ahead in a crowded world. As a Homo

sapiens, it’s hard not to cheer human victories in this epic Olympics of survival,

especially whenever our loved ones are beneficiaries.

For this section I will poll physicians, ecologists, genetic ethicists, philanthropists,

and pharmaceutical developers on the role of medicine in a population that is shrinking,

deliberately or involuntarily. If, say, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is successful

in eradicating AIDS or malaria or both, will the world be a healthier or sicker place, as a

result of the numbers of the otherwise doomed who will survive to use more energy and

make ever more copies of themselves?

It’s a gloomy question to raise, and I can only await their responses to learn where

this discussion will lead. One thing is certain, though: in smaller populations, epidemics

are fewer and more easily combated.

Inevitably, there will be conflicting ethical questions regarding medical research

into artificially prolonging longevity – whatever “artificially” will come to mean in the

years ahead, since, again, those of us over forty already qualify for that description. In

The World Without Us I commented briefly on the transhumanist movement that

advocates and pursues the migration of carbon-based humanity to robotic or silicon-based

bodies. Although I still suspect that maintenance problems will continue to thwart these

efforts to turn us into eternally-young machines, hybrids involving humans hooked to

apparatuses are already common, and will probably become more so.

What nature, human ingenuity, and punctuated evolution – rapid biological

response to changing environments – have in store for us will be a captivating story in the


future. In this chapter, I hope to conclude that medicine is one technology we can retain

and continue to perfect, if we aim toward a human population in equilibrium with the rest

of nature – even as I document nature’s inexorable tendency to hasten bringing

everything on Earth into balance.

Chapter 12: Educated Women

The ending of The World Without Us prompted a handful of letters from women

who, although agreeing that population should return to the table as we plan the future of

Earthly survival, protested my definition of population control in terms of the number of

children born henceforth by every fertile woman alive. It was unfair, they argued, to put

the burden on women, when men were not just equally responsible, but often

promiscuously accountable for large numbers of extra, unwanted pregnancies.

My response, admittedly somewhat defensive, has been to explain that my

intention wasn’t to discriminate against or in favor of either gender, but just that the

statistics of population growth are calculated from how many children actually emerge

from female wombs, not by how many females men potentially inseminate. But the good

news, it turns out, is that the most powerful instrument of population control is not iron-

fisted policy edict, but female education. The more opportunity women have, the more

balanced our numbers become.

I intend to investigate the intriguing situation in Italy and other western European

nations, where female educational achievement is high and birth rates are low. This

research will include the efforts by their governments and church to thwart these trends –

I anticipate speaking to government demographers and planners, and to their counterparts

in the Vatican. I also will seek out psychologists, probably female, to understand how

this phenomenon works – that is, how women resist or overcome the pressure of

authorities in making life decisions such as whether to procreate, or how often.

I also need to see how this plays out in poor or developing countries. The most

obvious choice is India, which will become the world’s most populous country by 2025 –

but where, despite the notorious bedlam of cities like Kolkata, there’s also Kerala

province, where empowered women have made startling progress in improving the


quality of life and lowering birth rates. Another possibility is Afghanistan; I recently

appeared on a program with Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson, whom I would

consult for contacts and access to Afghan schools where girls and women are

increasingly attending.

In a recent commencement address I gave at the University of Arizona, I

congratulated the female graduates for doing their part to solve the future. It bears

repeating, and often, that among the simplest and most fruitful ways to restore our

equilibrium with the rest of the planet is simply by educating women. Again, I hope this

book will further confirm and help spread that message.

Chapter 13: The Religion Key

My experience with speaking publicly about population, as I described earlier, has

been surprisingly stimulating and even encouraging when met with potential cultural or

religious objections. I’m increasingly interested in searching for ways where liturgies

and tenets of various creeds might permit the possibility of population management in a

time when planetary crisis calls for unusual and unprecedented actions.

The idea is to try not changing anyone’s culture or beliefs, but to seek within each

a rationale to limit our numbers. I have no illusions about finding enthusiasm for this

within the Vatican or Mormon temples, but I do expect serious discussion of how to

respond to environmental issues – and, potentially, quite different opinions among

Mormons and Catholics outside their walls. I intend to raise these questions with

evangelical Christians – especially in the growing evangelical environmental movement –

and with Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and indigenous religious authorities, for starters.

I also am curious to see if there’s any conceivable common ground between Pro-

Life advocates and population control – e.g., institutionalizing birth control to lower the

number of unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortion; or streamlining adoption

processes to connect pregnant girls with childless families, or with families wanting their

single children to have siblings.


There are, of course, huge philosophical and theological questions: Is there room

in a scriptural interpretation of the Hebrew injunction to be fruitful and multiply to

recognize that we can out-multiply our fruitfulness? That is: if we have more children

than we can care for, then we’re not being fruitful? That we should multiply enough, but

not too much?

Is there possibly a corollary universal spiritual ethic that encourages justice for

women? I live in sheep-raising country, and a local pastor who’s also a sheep farmer

recently shared a piece of advice that applies, he says, to either of his flocks: “Don’t burn

out your ewes.”

I told him what I was contemplating writing, and why. He nodded soberly. “What

we’re facing today,” he said, “is an undoing of the first book of Genesis. We’re seriously

having to un-imagine the creation of the world. This night, I fear, is unlike every other.”

I’m fascinated to see where this research will lead. Many religions today are

caught in the same conflict: guiding flocks on how to live and sow their gospels for future

generations, even as they point to growing portents of an apocalypse. Managing

population to preserve Earthly existence both counters and complements these teachings.

Whether these tensions can be resolved completely is improbable, but whether there’s a

place for population management in religion, and vice-versa, is well worth exploring.

Chapter 14: The Demons of Demography

Late one night last February, I lay in a hotel bed in Perth, Australia, my internal

clock stubbornly clinging to New England time, and watched a “documentary” co-

produced by Japanese and Australians. The subject was the menace of population decline:

how aging populations, plunging fertility, and shrinking birth rates and work forces will,

sooner than we think, spell doom for each country. One interviewed statistician claimed

to have calculated a point in the 21st century when, he maintained, there would only be

one Japanese man remaining.

Implicitly looming over such nonsense is the threat of wildly breeding,

uncontrolled immigrant cultures poised to invade developed countries and dominate


demographically. According to a current article in Business Week, such fears have

elicited a new strain of politics in Japan over ways to boost the birthrate. Among recent

campaign promises: paying parents $270 a month per child and making state high school

tuition-free. Similar fears and subsidies are becoming common in western Europe (and

eastern: Russia is especially worried about potential demographic disaster).

These are serious issues, previews of a difficult transition to a smaller population

that would last a generation or two until age differences among demographic groups are

again in balance. Finding a graceful way to manage them, instead of attempts at bribery

and racial fear-mongering to try to counter them, will be a challenge. There’s a lot I need

to learn about the mechanics and pitfalls of demographic re-ordering, and I’ll be talking

to many demographers, politicians, and authors of various media broadsides, such as that

described above. I’m particularly interested in western European racial fears of a Muslim

demographic takeover, and will probably focus on it.

Chapter 15: The interesting Islamic Republic of Iran

Iran’s family planning program (Tehran's "other revolution," according to a 1998

Los Angeles Times article) began following the Iran-Iraq war, in 1988. In nationwide

fertility classes, instructors discuss environmental consequences of overpopulation along

with birth-control methods. To avoid problems of male preference elsewhere in Asia, the

program emphasizes gender equality. Washington-based Population Action International

has bestowed its highest commendation on Iran's policy as a model for developing

nations and the Islamic bloc.

Unlike the mule-back riders bearing birth control pills that I saw when Mexico

began its family planning program, Iran uses four-wheel-drive and even helicopters to

reach remote mountain villages and rural tribal areas, sending health professionals

bearing contraceptives, and even surgeons and anesthesiologists for performing

vasectomies and tubal ligations. As I noted earlier, it’s all free. Ruling clerics have even

issued fatwas approving it. (As previously noted, according to the Ayatollah Ali

Khamenei himself, "When wisdom dictates that you do not need more children, a

vasectomy is permissible.")


The opportunity to simultaneously respond to fears about waves of Muslims

devouring civilization’s future, to dispel myths and ignorance about Iran, and to see how

a country and culture can take responsibility for its populace is too rich to pass up.

Doubtless, reports I’ve compiled that mention Iran’s nationwide public-service family-

planning advertising and a National Population Week don’t describe the entire reality –

have people felt coerced to participate? Are large families subjected to discrimination?

Whatever the nuanced reality, this is a voluntary program, not an iron-fisted one-

child policy, and its success is rooted in an ethic of educating females. That ethic,

however, is recently under attack by President Ahmadinejad, who believes women

belong at home, not in universities. He is also trying to rescind population control, and is

advocating for large families. This may help explain why so many of the protestors lately

risking their lives in the streets of Tehran are female.

I expect this chapter to open eyes and, with luck, still raise hopes. Access to Iran

for foreign journalists is a delicate proposition currently, but I have excellent connections,

and I will do whatever is necessary to go see for myself.

Chapter 16: The World With Fewer of Us

When The World Without Us was published in Canada, the Toronto Star ran an

editorial titled “Why No One Acknowledges The Elephant In The Room.” It credited the

ending of my book as calling on humankind to think again about changing something far

more fundamental than merely light bulbs or automobile brands:

“Our numbers.”

I’ve recounted some of the reasons why taking control of those numbers has been

largely denied a place at the discussion table, even as we face environmental dangers so

boggling and complex that our ability to unsnarl them may prove to be our grand,

civilization-wide, mortal and final flaw. I understand, too, more subtle aspects of our

nature that allow people to comfortably accept being subject to the laws of God or nation,

but to resist being subject to the laws of biology.

Nevertheless, we just plain are. Yet it is through simple biology – no

technological breakthrough necessary – that we have an opportunity to create some space


in this bottle where we live, so that we and the rest of biology can breathe. A planet

where the traffic is cut by two-thirds or more, and those beautiful spaces to play, picnic,

and get away from it all are three times nearer. A world in which we can grow all we

want to eat without chemicals, and without killing soil and defiling rivers. Where the

percentage of carbon in the atmosphere diminishes faster with each passing year, buying

us back precious time to address unintended consequences that Henry Ford never

dreamed of when he began mass-producing horseless carriages. A world where the

presence of birds and other beautiful animals increases at a similar pace, and where the

oceans recover and replenish. All that, with us.

An elephant in a room is pretty hard to ignore. Yet, as the Toronto Star observed,

because the elephant actually is us en masse, arguing to bring our overwhelming presence

down to size elicits “…a visceral reaction in people, because it requires a reflection on

ourselves. So instead, we think of carbon-dioxide emissions as the problem of climate

change, but really it’s the number of people whose lifestyles require the level of energy

consumption and production that is 95 percent based on fossil fuels.”

In the commencement speech I gave at the University of Arizona in June,

I ended by noting: “We humans pride ourselves on being a species set apart from others

because we can foresee the consequences of our actions. Though I’m not necessarily

convinced that we’re the only ones who do that, I know it’s true that we can. I also know

that now is the time to take that gift of foresight and apply it, as never before.

“You graduates,” I concluded, “have been blessed to grow up, and grow educated,

in an unprecedented Age of Information. What we need now is for you to take all that

knowledge and raise it up to a new level: to transform the Information Age into an Age of

Wisdom. Do that, and I believe that we and our beloved Earth will be all right.”

As I write these words two months later, my country is near to blows over another

issue that seems so obvious it may as well be another elephant crushing its way down the

hall: basic health care. With innuendo, artifice, and unabashedly blatant lies, an

orchestrated disruption of a national discussion is capitalizing on the simplest way to

move the body politic: not by information or education, but by fear. Sarah Palin, once

nearly a step from the presidency, declared in writing on Facebook that “…the Obama


health care plan includes a death panel that will arbitrate when elderly patients need to be

euthanized.”

"The Obama health care logo,” chimed in Rush Limbaugh, “is damn close to a

Nazi swastika logo."

The fact that ignorance scores so effortlessly over reason bodes badly for the

chances that people in the United States of America, let alone all over the world, might

ever unite for the good of the planet and posterity and restrain themselves from having

more children than the planet can safely nurture.

So easily ignited, such mass ignorance might be an argument against a book such

as I propose – why back a futile gesture?

My response to that is: combatting ignorance is a fundamental reason why we

write and publish books at all.


Population books, past and current:

I’ve read much of the canon of population literature, beginning with the famous

essay by Rev. Malthus. His best known modern successor is Stanford ecologist Paul

Ehrlich, author of several books including The Population Bomb in 1968 and, with his

wife Anne, The Population Explosion, in 1990. As I noted previously, Ehrlich was

widely scorned for warnings in his earlier book of widespread famine that failed to

materialize exactly when he predicted, because agro-technology produced harvests

unprecedented in the history of biology. Since those yields depend on fossil-fuel-based

fertilizers, the consensus among biologists and ecologists is that technology simply

delayed the inevitable. With fertilizer, that’s true even before fossil fuels deplete,

because the law of diminishing returns sets in as succeeding applications of artificial

nitrogen produce fewer results in chemically stressed soils, even as they create more

disasters downstream.

The 1990 book updates The Population Bomb, going into greater detail and

making its arguments both more persuasively and less stridently. Most memorable to me,

however, is the opening chapter’s title: “Why Isn’t Everyone As Scared As We Are?’

It’s a key question, because both books cite frightening figures that are hard to contest.

In that question lies my goal: To make this book – via vivid scenes, dramatic

settings, and personalities – a page-turner that will get the attention of far more readers.

The Population Explosion is well written, and I regularly find myself in agreement with

the Ehrlichs, but the book’s didactic tone, clear as it is, is the voice of a teacher. That is

no criticism – but two decades later, with much of what they foresaw closer than ever, I

think it’s time to try the voice of a story-teller.

Similarly, Beyond Malthus, a 1999 Norton/Worldwatch publication by

Worldwatch Institute president Lester Brown et al., is an informative, useful source, but

essentially a white paper from Worldwatch’s Environmental Alert series, directed more at

policy makers than a general audience.


Joel Cohen’s How Many People Can the Earth Support? (Norton paperback, 1996)

epitomizes for me the dilemma of great scholarship. This is a brilliant, exhaustive study

by the head of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Populations, so replete with graphs

and statistical formulae that his conclusions (there are many, because he gives ample

attention to many competing perspectives) are accessible mainly only to other scholars.

As a journalist, I’m constantly indebted to such people for devoting their careers to

sifting details of things we need to know. Yet a journalist’s obligation is to reach as wide

an audience as possible, and even as I labored with much interest through this weighty

tome, I was also being reminded that my own book must not be a struggle for readers, but

a highly readable engagement.

Although I gained such nuggets from Cohen’s book such as: “…the increase [of

human population] in the last decade of the twentieth century exceeds the total

population in 1600,” I was surprised that a work so encyclopedic was so narrowly

anthropocentric. It examined population questions through different cultural and

economic lenses, but it fleetingly mentioned environmental degradation only as it impacts

humans, not other species – and not in terms of how their loss might ultimately impact us.

A far more pointed example is a recent book written for both popular and policy

audiences, Philip Longman’s The Empty Cradle (Basic Books, 2004), which warns that

world prosperity is doomed if birth rates continue declining. This book fascinates me,

but not only for the reasons intended by Longman, a fellow at the New America

Foundation who writes for The Atlantic and The New Republic. Longman makes

articulate, well-reasoned arguments about why growth economics are threatened if

populations shrink, and particularly raises specters that I will have to address about the

resulting bubble of aging populations that becomes too expensive to support for a

reduced pool of offspring.

His thesis that “population growth is a major source of economic growth” is

probably true and almost persuasive, until you realize that the truth he describes exists

utterly without a context – that is, the environment that surrounds and permeates all

human economics is simply absent. His sole reference to nature, distant and frankly

snide, is a single sentence about how falling populations deprive environmentalists of


dire projections of human numbers exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity. Beyond that,

nothing about pressures on soil, water, atmosphere, or climate. The words carbon

dioxide occur nowhere in the book.

Unlike some others who vilify declining birthrates, Longman is no racist fear-

mongerer, but he never acknowledges that, even at lower growth rates, the population is

already huge and growing more so, albeit more slowly. (Even if we never double again,

9.3 billion humans by 2050 is no minor matter.) I find the fact that he is considered an

influential thinker significant, and his refusal to factor in the limitations of nature, or even

its presence, extraordinary and worrisome. He’s someone I hope to interview; Stewart

Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog, has offered to introduce us.

The most current pertinent book, Columbia University historian Matthew

Connelly’s Fatal Misconception (Harvard, 2008), is another exhaustive, scholarly

examination of just one aspect of population issues. Connelly’s book is a passionate,

solid critique of historical birth control programs on humanitarian grounds, linking them,

often with justification, to eugenics crusades that in their worst extremes led to Hitler’s

genocides.

I don’t argue with his contention that birth control movements can be manipulated

by those who advocate controlling populations of groups other than their own. As I’ve

reported myself, in recent American history thousands of women in Puerto Rico were

used, often without their knowledge, as guinea pigs in pharmaceutical experiments

involving contraceptive estrogen levels, or were subjected to tubal ligations without their

consent. (To this day, the phrase la operación in Puerto Rico is understood to mean

having tubes tied, often as the result of a routine medical visit having nothing to do with

reproductive issues.) And, as late as the 1990s, battles within the Sierra Club over

immigration and population smacked more of xenophobia than principles of ecology.

Yet once again, Connelly’s discussion ignores the natural context that underlies

all human life: an ecosystem sensitive to the number of inhabitants it can sustain, and one

requiring a healthy diversity of them. His book avoids any consideration of the

environment, except where it discusses environmentalism – not in terms of its scientific


basis, but as a political movement, again with some purported historic connections to

eugenics.

Although I appreciate his ardor and defense of women’s reproductive rights,

humanity has gotten into deep trouble by presuming that the only important determinants

in our livelihood are political, cultural, or economic, not natural. Ecology shows that

monocultures, be they pines, corn, or people, create imbalances that nature ultimately

can’t tolerate. The book I propose to write, which must acknowledge and respond to

issues raised by authors like Phillip Longman and Mathew Connelly, will consider their

concerns as part of a whole ecological context that cannot be ignored, except at our peril.

Marketing considerations:

I’ve done hundreds of newspaper, radio, and Internet interviews, and have

appeared as a guest on numerous local and national TV shows for The World Without Us

and for previous books. These include nearly all the NPR programs, and TV programs

such as The Today Show, C-Span, and The Daily Show. I’ve kept lists of contact

information to these media – producer and host names, numbers, email addresses, et

cetera – that should prove invaluable to publicists. I continue to give frequent public

talks: both TWWU and the recently updated edition of my 1998 book Gaviotas are used

extensively in colleges and universities, often as common-read selections for incoming

classes or entire student bodies, and I am regularly invited to discuss them. The issues

I’ll address in Countdown invariably arise in these talks and classroom workshops, and I

can expect to be invited back when it appears. I also expect many environmental

movements to feature and link to this book on their websites, as they have done with my

previous books.

Delivery time:

I estimate I’ll need 24 months to research and write Countdown, including travel

to places such as Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Israel, China, Nigeria, Pakistan,

Mexico, Brazil, Iran, and possibly Russia and Indonesia – again, a prospective list.


*

To convince a critical mass of world readers, and world leaders, that we must

consider managing our numbers if we’re ever going to achieve a healthy, sustainable,

lasting balance with the environment is a tall order. To actually get us all to act on that

knowledge is yet another. My hope, at the very least, is to re-open a discussion that has

too often been squelched by high emotions and social conflicts, by presenting it in terms

of the one thing that all contesting factions have in common: the Earth. Without a planet

to stand on, all our cultures, politics, economics, and religions aren’t merely irrelevant:

they’re gone.

Tall order, but so is abundant, clean energy. So we have to try.

– Alan Weisman

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