Pakistan's ticking time bomb: Overpopulation

By Frosty Wooldridge

A quick glance at the human misery and suffering brought about by the flooding in Pakistan moves anyone to tears. The regular CNN, FOX and NBC depictions of human tragedy overwhelms anyone's senses.

Every international relief agency from the United Nations to the International Red Cross calls on governments around the planet to send relief, food, water, shelter and medical teams.

Unfortunately, that will not help their short term and long term predicament. At 172 million people in a tiny landmass called Pakistan, that country, without any concern for birth control and family planning-expects to add another 80 million people by mid century. Even today, they cannot feed or maintain clean drinking water for their overloaded population. Ironically, ancient religions such as Islam fail to understand carrying capacity, water, environment, resources and quality of life issues that drill down into the harsh reality that behind all the misery suffered in third world countries stems from two accelerating dilemmas: illiteracy and human overpopulation. Without dealing with overpopulation, no country can deal with illiteracy.

As the third world countries grow by 77 million annually, they cannot educate their citizens and they cannot intellectually move past their cultural paradigms and human suffering.

Dr. Garret Hardin, author, Stalking the Wild Taboo, brings home their dilemma:

"Those of us who are deeply concerned about population and the environment-"eco-nuts," we're called, - are accused of seeing herbicides in trees, pollution in running brooks, radiation in rocks, and overpopulation everywhere. There is merit in the accusation.

"I was in Calcutta when the cyclone struck East Bengal in November 1970.Early dispatches spoke of 15,000 dead, but the estimates rapidly escalated to 2,000,000 and then dropped back to 500,000. A nice round number: it will do as well as any, for we will never know. The nameless ones who died, "unimportant" people far beyond the fringes of the social power structure, left no trace of their existence. Pakistani parents repaired the population loss in just 40 days, and the world turned its attention to other matters.

"What killed those unfortunate people? "The cyclone," newspapers said. But one can just as logically say that overpopulation killed them. The Gangetic Delta is barely above sea level. Every year several thousand people are killed in quite ordinary storms. If Pakistan were not overcrowded, no sane man would bring his family to such a place. Ecologically speaking, a delta belongs to the river and the sea; man obtrudes there at his peril.

"In the web of life every event has many antecedents. Only by an arbitrary decision can we designate a single antecedent as "cause." Our choice is biased - biased to protect our egos against the onslaught of unwelcome truths. As T.S. Eliot put it in Burnt Norton:

"Go, go, go," said the bird, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality."

"Were we to identify overpopulation as the cause of a half-million deaths, we would threaten ourselves with a question to which we do not know the answer: How can we control population without recourse to repugnant measures?" said Hardin. "Fearfully we close our minds to an inventory of possibilities. Instead, we say that a cyclone caused the deaths, thus relieving ourselves of responsibility for this and future catastrophes. "Fate" is so comforting.

"Every year we list tuberculosis, leprosy, enteric diseases, or animal parasites as the "cause of death" of millions of people. It is well known that malnutrition is an important antecedent of death in all these categories; and that malnutrition is connected with overpopulation. But overpopulation is not called the cause of death. We cannot bear the thought.

"People are dying now of respiratory diseases in Tokyo, Birmingham, and Gary, because of the "need" for more industry. The "need" for more food justifies over fertilization of the land, leading to eutrophication of the waters, and lessened fish production - which leads to more "need" for food.

"What will we say when the power shuts down some fine summer on our eastern seaboard and several thousand people die of heat prostration? Will we blame the weather? Or the power companies for not building enough generators? Or the eco-nuts for insisting on pollution cuts?

"One thing is certain: we won't blame the deaths on overpopulation. No one ever dies of overpopulation. It is unthinkable."

As Hardin said, we abhor dealing with reality. In fact, in Joel Kotkin's recent book, he 'celebrates' adding 100 million people to the United States as if it amounts to a "Red Badge of Courage" in a diminishing world. He speaks on NPR with glowing reviews from Jennifer Ludden. He enjoys interviews in papers as he crosses the country to pitch his book. He leads Americans down a primrose path of more denial, stupidity and ignorance of their predicament.

Wouldn't Pakistan be better off with only 30-35 million people? Wouldn't it serve its own citizens to engage birth control and family planning. Wouldn't it better to life within a safe and sustainable country? Would it be much more enjoyable a life experience to live with dignity and equality? Answer: you betcha!