Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
In this episode with award-winning author and journalist Alan Weisman, we discuss his 2013 book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? capturing his journey to over 20 countries over five continents to ask what experts agreed were probably the most important questions on Earth, and also the hardest. ‘How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing?’ This wide-ranging and immensely stimulating interview captures how growth-biased cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems are collectively undermining our ability to live within planetary limits, and also offers inspiring examples of people finding ways of better balancing our needs with those of the planet's and humanity's future - examples which could provide ways of imagining how we might better get through this bottleneck century.
We discuss the intended and unintended consequences of the Green Revolution which pushed us grossly beyond Earth’s carrying capacity, while causing irreparable harm to natural ecosystems. Weisman unpacks the ethnic, religious, and political complexities and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and how pronatalism and ecological overshoot factor into it. We also chat about some of the most successful family planning programs across the world, such as in Iran, Thailand, and Costa Rica, as well as outliers with the worst programs, including in China and India. The controversial role of the Catholic Church in pushing for large families not just across the West, but also in Africa, as well as in shunning the population conversation in environmental conferences, is also highlighted.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Alan Weisman 0:00
Basically, we're looking at a Ponzi scheme here. The reason that people like growth - be it population growth or be it economic growth - the more people on the planet, the more consumers that are. And to keep a business growing, either you outcompete your other businesses, and you steal their consumers, or people keep having more babies, and they need more of your products. The thing that pro-growth economists don't like to talk about is that the more people on the planet, the cheaper labor is, because basically you get a lot of poor, miserable people fighting each other for really crappy wages. And if you have fewer laborers being born, then they become more valuable, and you have to pay them more. And so you know, one of the things that goes on in a pro- growth government is clamping down on birth management, any way they can.
Alan Ware 0:55
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll hear more from award-winning author and journalist Alan Weisman about his journey to over 20 countries capturing how growth-biased cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems are collectively undermining our ability to live within planetary limits. We also hear some inspiring examples of people finding ways of better balancing our needs with those of the planet's and humanity's future - examples which could offer us ways of imagining how we might better get through this bottleneck century.
Nandita Bajaj 1:39
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 2:01
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals. And now on to today's guest, Alan Weisman has reported for more than 60 countries and all seven continents for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Orion, Salon, Vanity Fair and NPR among many others. His 2013 book, Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth, was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His international best seller, The World Without Us, now in 35 languages, was named best nonfiction book of 2007 by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orion Book Award and the Rachel Carson prize, among others. It also won the National Library of China's Wenjun Book Prize, and was named one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years by Slate in 2019. His next book, Hope Dies Last, about humanity's best realistic chances for getting through these daunting times, is forthcoming, featuring visionary people in several parts of the world determined despite all odds to find us a workable future. It explores the challenge to feed ourselves and energize our civilization, yet at the same time, restoring and enhancing, not exhausting, the natural environment crucial to our own survival. Alan lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, sculptor and theatrical artist Beckie Kravetz.
Nandita Bajaj 3:45
Hello, Alan, it is truly wonderful to welcome you to our show. As you know, this interview has been in the making for two years and had to be canceled for a number of reasons. But we're so glad that we can finally make this work. Of the many books you've written, The World Without Us and Count Down: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, were both incredibly moving and instructive for us. In your book Countdown, you traveled to more than 20 countries over five continents to ask what experts agreed were probably the most important questions on Earth, and also the hardest. How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing? I can say on behalf of our team and many of our colleagues in the sustainable population advocacy work, just how helpful and powerful it is to have such a richly researched book that puts population concerns center stage. In fact, as I've shared with you, after reviewing over 20 books as potential reading material for my university graduate course, Pronatalism, Overpopulation and the Planet, I found Countdown and I knew I needed to look no further. And even though the book is 11 years old, it remains as relevant today as ever. All that to say, thank you so much for your important work, and especially for joining us today. Welcome to our podcast.
Alan Weisman 5:09
Well, thank you. It's my pleasure to get together and to be able to talk about these things. And thanks for the nice words about my books. Appreciate that.
Nandita Bajaj 5:18
Absolutely. And we'll begin with your book Countdown, in which one of the big questions you focused on was the carrying capacity of the planet. And you cited people like Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, David Pimentel, and others who put it somewhere around 1.5 to 2 billion people consuming about two-thirds the amount of the world's rich countries. Since 2013, when Countdown was published, there's a billion more of us. We've seen ongoing ecological deterioration, as more of the Earth's planetary boundaries are being crossed. Ecological overshoot continues increasing, and wildlife populations continue to plummet. But the dominant cultural belief in human ingenuity and technology seems to be going strong. And part of that faith in technology came from our ability to artificially increase our carrying capacity through the Green Revolution. And most of us recognize the immediate benefits that the Green Revolution had on saving at least a billion lives. And yet, it came with its own set of unintended consequences that had immense ripple effects on people and the ecosystems as you covered in your book. Can you share the complexity of the intended and unintended effects of the Green Revolution?
Alan Weisman 6:38
Well, to understand the Green Revolution, we have to go back a few years. The Green Revolution took place in 1968. But there was really a prior step that made the Green Revolution possible and that took place around 1913 when two German chemical engineers discovered a way to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and slather it virtually limitlessly on the ground. Nitrogen is an essential nutrient to plant growth. The amount of nitrogen that's naturally in the soil that's available to plants owes principally to a few nitrogen-fixing plants out there, or to be more accurate, plants whose roots host nitrogen-fixing bacteria. And these plants are like legumes, acacias, beans, you know, soy for example.
There are a couple other sources of nitrogen for plants that have been available. One is from animal manure, and another is from lightning. When lightning courses through the atmosphere, it is so powerful it ionizes the nitrogen in the air. Nitrogen is this tightly packed little molecule of just two atoms and they're bonded together, but lightning will rip them apart. And that activated nitrogen that's left over can also be absorbed by plants. But that's nothing compared to what Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented, which is today known as the Haber-Bosch process, which is the most significant invention in the history of humanity. And most people have never heard of it.
Because the Haber-Bosch process, by pulling nitrogen out of the atmosphere, and you know our atmosphere is 78% Nitrogen, because it's that tightly packed molecule. It's inert. It passes right through our lungs without us even noticing it. They were able to make it available to plants through synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. And that completely blew the lid off of what nature could do. It meant that we could grow many more plants and the plants that we chose to grow were the grains that we have been eating since Mesopotamia in the varieties of wheat and barley, and maize that was discovered in the Americas. You know, relatively a handful of all the edible plants in the world are the ones that we now depend on. So World War One intervened. Nitrogen fertilizer wasn't really commercialized until around 1930. And in that year, the population was at that limit that Holdren and Pimentel, both from very different directions had calculated was maximum carrying capacity of the planet for Homo sapiens, without what we do starting to tip some of the natural systems that have been in balance since you know the beginning of planetary time here. So our population started to grow from there.
And by the mid-1950s it was pushing over 3 billion. And that was despite the fact that we'd had another one of these genocidal World Wars. And when we got into the 1960s, the population was growing faster than even fertilizer could keep up. And Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne who wrote The Population Bomb in 1968 predicted that there was going to be widespread famine. The Ehrlichs in their book prefaced it by saying unless an agricultural miracle takes place, and that agricultural miracle coincidentally did take place in that very same year 1968. And that's what we call the Green Revolution. It began in Mexico at a research institute that was funded mainly by the Rockefellers. And the director was an agricultural engineer from the University of Minnesota named Norman Borlaug.
Norman Borlaug basically did the same thing that farmers have been doing for the previous 10,000 years and would observe various plants that would come up in the field, would pick the most robust ones, and would you know rub them together to pollinate them. Over 10,000 years that was a pretty slow process. Norman Borlaug had access to species from all over the world. And he had other very refined laboratory techniques. But in a sense, we're not talking genetic modification here. We're just talking crossbreeding. And eventually he was able to crossbreed, starting with corn and later then with wheat and rice, varieties, grains, that would have a much shorter stock. They're called dwarf varieties. And the importance of that is that when a plant has a shorter stalk, it has more energy to put into producing grains. So that meant that the number of corn cobs would sometimes have as much as 10 times the amount of grains that a plant was producing.
The Green Revolution was literally airlifted to India and Pakistan, the fastest growing regions which were on the brink of famine, and it saved them. Those are the billion people that you mentioned before that were saved from dying. But when Norman Borlaug was awarded his Nobel Peace Prize - and it was the Peace Prize because he's credited with saving more human lives than anybody in history - he did not dwell on the fact or even suggest that we had solved hunger on this planet. In fact, kind of the opposite. Borlaug warned that unless we pair crop enhancement, and food production enhancement, with population control - and that's the phrase that he used - the Earth was going to be in a terrible bind within a generation, When I went to Norman Borlaug's Center for Production of Wheat and Maize, north of Mexico City, and he's since passed away but his predecessors thanked me for being there to talk about population because they say that was half of his message.
Alan Ware 13:22
He was on our board of advisors.
Alan Weisman 13:24
Exactly, World Population Balance, of course. But you know, people forgot that part of his message - that we need to limit, be able to take control and manage the numbers of humans with the amount of food that we're producing. Otherwise, the planet is going to be thrown completely out of whack. And that's kind of where we are today.
Nandita Bajaj 13:44
Yeah, I'm so glad that you covered a bit of the history of that because it's really important in understanding even Borlaug's core message that if we do not address population as an issue within the next generation, which is what the Green Revolution bought us, then population growth continues to outpace food production. And that is where we are now and in your book you talked about, which is from 2013, that a billion people are going hungry today, more than ever. And so it's not like it solved the hunger issue. It just pushed it forward into the future.
Alan Weisman 14:25
And of course, it's miserable to be hungry. But when we look at what's happening to this planet right now, with water shortages, with weather that has become completely unmoored, with heat extremes, even to the well-fed these days. So what we have to do, even as we feed these extra people that we are already going to have, we have to do what you folks are doing, you know, trying to show people how to limit the number of human beings that we give birth to. I mean, humanity is a wonderful thing. I love my own species. I'm not ready for it to go extinct, any more than I want any other species to go extinct. But too much of a good thing is just too much. And that's where we are right now.
Alan Ware 15:09
And you do a great job in your book Countdown when dealing with the too much of a great thing in general, too many of us humans relative to the carrying capacity. And you open that book with a discussion of the population situation in Israel and Palestine. And since Countdown was published in 2013, the population of Israel and Palestine combined has increased from 12 million to over 14 million. And according to Global Footprint Network, the ecological deficit for Israel is third highest of any country in the world at 1600% overshoot, so that means their demanding on the land and sea resources for human consumption is far exceeding the ability of natural processes to regenerate those resources. So in that first chapter of Countdown, you draw all these complex connections between the ethno-religious based pronatalism, the population pressures, the ongoing environmental degradation, and the resource conflict. Could you share with our listeners some of the key connections that you saw between these forces?
Alan Weisman 16:15
Sure, well, I want to start with what you just said, Alan. The overshoot for Israel is also the same kind of overshoot that we have here in the United States, or for another country that I spent a lot of time and for my forthcoming book, Hope Dies Last, the Netherlands. And you know, the Netherlands is kind of the most perfect country anybody's ever been to. Everything functions beautifully there. It's really fabulous. But they import an awful lot of the stuff they need for that to happen. And one of the things that they import, by the way, is a lot of synthetic nitrogen, because their perfect fields produce so much food that, after the United States, they're the biggest agricultural exporter on the planet, but at considerable cost of all the nitrogen fertilizer, and those fields are, they're all about five meters below sea level. So that's an issue that the Dutch have to contend with. Israel, same way, you know Israel is way beyond its carrying capacity, if it were producing its own food.
So let's go back to the 1930s when Zionism was really coalescing, had been coalescing in Europe, where you had a lot of Jewish people had to flee the Russian Revolution. They were settling Europe and a lot of them were yearning to go back to where their Old Testament and Talmud says, you know, was their God-given homeland and that was what was then known as Palestine. And they started to go back, some of them, there were still a few that were already there. In fact, a surprising number of Jews never left the Middle East. And we came to a point where leadership was coalescing. And one of the leaders was a guy named David Ben-Gurion, who later became the first prime minister of Israel. And he talked to British ecologists because Palestine then, since World War One was under British mandate, and their ecologist calculated that the natural carrying capacity of Palestine was about two and a half million people. Ben-Gurion said that he knew that Jewish ingenuity could make the desert bloom. He was convinced that they could more than double that - that 6 million people could fit into the state of Israel that he foresaw and that it came to pass in 1948.
The shorthand version of that history is, why did that happen, is that 6 million Jews were exterminated in Europe in a holocaust that was so dreadful that the United Nations took it upon itself to divide that British Mandate into two countries basically, a Jewish state called Israel and Palestine. Well, back then Ben-Gurion's vision was still natural carrying capacity, you know it was agriculture, and the original Israel was a bunch of little kibbutzim. They were agricultural collectives that today mirror a lot of the small farming collectives that are forming in the United States and Europe and other parts of the world to try to raise food organically. And they were kind of beautiful, but they got really successful. Israel was supported by the United States, which of course, has a large Jewish community, to the tune of about $3 billion per year. And Israel developed a very technical society. And the beginning of the Jewish people, just like the beginning of all peoples, was a mandate to be fruitful and multiply. The Jews had even a stronger, more immediate reason was that those 6 million people who died, many of them were children, and many of them felt a religious obligation to have large families to repopulate those missing kids. And we get down to the point where I visited Israel for that book in the early 2000s. And the population between Israel and Palestine was double. It was 12 million people. And now, as you say, they've added even more.
One of the points that I make in that chapter early on, is that there was a demographic derby going. Yasser Arafat, who was the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization, used to say that the greatest weapon that they had was the Palestinian womb, and encouraged Palestinian women to have a lot of children. The Israelis were doing the same thing. They were paying premiums to women to have larger families. And each side was trying to be stronger and bigger than the neighboring tribe, who might be your enemy. The Palestinians, and the Israelis were of course, doing the same thing. But within Judaism - I was born into a Jewish family, I know this very well - there's no hierarchy like in the Catholic Church. Judaism is a whole bunch of different sects. And they range from being ultra-orthodox, to being secular. Well, the ultra-orthodox who settled in Israel, by the time I saw it, had realized that they came there as a minority and most Jews in Israel were living very much like Europeans and Americans. But the ultra-orthodox realized that if they had the biggest families, that they would gradually become so numerous that they would become a political force. So it was not just a biblical mandate, but a political mandate. Lo and behold, that's exactly what we have today in Israel. We have a coalition in Israel at the moment that Benjamin Netanyahu is leading. And he's leading because he has made a deal with all these ultra-orthodox peoples that believe all of Palestine should be a Jewish state, that there should not be a second state. There should not be Palestinians there at all.
You know, and they go back to the Bible, when after Moses’ death Joshua leads the Israelites into what they believed was the land that God had promised for them. And they began to smite everybody in their way. Or most everybody. They left a few places. Interestingly, one of the places they left was Gaza. Even Joshua knew that that wasn't a really good idea.
But that kind of, in a nutshell, explains where we are right now. You've got a country that's very small. Half of it is a sandbox, and you've got two peoples warring over it, both of them with historical and religious mandates to occupy it. And it's a very, very difficult situation to be managing right now. And at the moment, it's not being managed at all. When Hamas in October of 2023 attacked Israel it was savage and it was also a brilliant strategic stroke. Israel at the time was convulsed in demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of people marching in the street against Benjamin Netanyahu, who was about to be convicted of a crime unless he could rejigger the Supreme Court to basically nullify the law that would bring him to heel. And again, he had the backing of this very populous, ultra-orthodox population that don't particularly like him, but wanted him to help fulfill their zealous mission. The army, many of the army is a reserve army in Israel. You get drafted when you're 18, and you're sort of always part of it. And they were all distracted. Many of them were in the streets marching, and Hamas realized that the Gaza border was not being very well guarded. So that's when they attacked, very, very vicious, they killed, you know, 1800 people, and tortured many more, took many more hostage. And they knew that that was going to be bait for Netanyahu because to engage in a holy war was the one way that Netanyahu was going to be able to save his own neck by distracting the rest of Israel and unify against this horrific attack. So as we've sadly seen, the Israeli response has been even more horrific. Thousands upon thousands of Gazan citizens have died, because Netanyahu will not quit. The day that he quits, he'll go back to court. And we're stuck in a terrible situation of a demagogue not knowing when to quit. If we look at the whole planet, he's not the only demagogue. Vladimir Putin is another one. And we've got others waiting in the wings who are willing to attack to remain in power. And it's a very, very dangerous time for humanity. And yet, here we are still trying to do our best.
Alan Ware 26:12
Yeah, thank you for adding the details of the complexity of the situation in Israel Palestine. It's not purely population pressure, definitely, there's a lot more religious, ethno-nationalist history. But it does show, as you mentioned with Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, or whether it's Netanyahu, a lot of these resource conflicts, whether it's water or oil or grain, food-bearing regions like in Ukraine, you start getting a rise of more conflict when there are pressures over resources.
Alan Weisman 26:47
Even in biblical times, there were fights over wells, and there isn't any more freshwater than there was before. Israel tries to make it. I've seen their desalinization plants. But again, that's a very energy-intensive process. It creates a pall of smoke that hangs over the Mediterranean coast. And it creates all this saline residue that you can't just pump back into the sea, because that changes marine ecology. Once again, we're trying to support too many people. And we're pushing the ecosystem by doing it.
Nandita Bajaj 27:25
And you know, as you've noted, this religious element of pronatalism - pushing women to have large families - it can be one of the most deeply ingrained pressures in many cultures. But you've also shone a light on some examples in the book, you know, in which you note that religious conservatism isn't always the determinative factor in promoting this kind of pronatalism. And when the government of a religiously conservative country such as Iran decides that smaller families should be the norm, it has multiple tools at its disposal to encourage people to choose voluntarily to have fewer children. And we know there are several examples where this has been achieved. But you specifically highlight elements of Iran's approach that made it so successful in its efforts to encourage smaller families. Can you highlight some of those just for our listeners?
Alan Weisman 28:24
Sure, you know, you mentioned at the beginning in your introduction that I asked some questions that had been identified by some of the people I interviewed as the most important questions on Earth. And one of the ones that I asked was, if we can determine what the comfortable carrying capacity of the planet would be for our species, you know, allowing us to live fairly comfortable lives - people like John Holdren used as a baseline a European existence, far less energy intensive than an American existence, more so than a developing country's existence - one that everybody would, you know, be comfortable with. So given that baseline, if it were fewer than what we have right now, which we know that it is, is there anything in the belief systems, the religions, the philosophies, the liturgies, the histories of all the world's myriad cultures, that would allow them to accept the idea of basically refraining from embracing, as Ecclesiastes says, you know, when it's the proper time.
In fact, a Jewish ecologist in Israel, who was orthodox Jew himself, gave me this great example from Judeo-Christian culture where we start with the Patriarchs - Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - who are supposed to be fruitful and multiply and fill the land and be stronger than the Canaanites and all those things. And then you get into the fourth generation. There were 13 Kids, Jacob's kids, and one of them a son named Joseph. I consider him the first ecologist in recorded history, because he realized that the world was entering a time of scarcity. So he counsels the pharaoh of Egypt and the Israelites that now it'd be a time not to keep expanding, but to conserve. And he himself, one of 13 children, only has one wife unlike his father, and has just two kids. And as you people know better than anybody, it takes two people to make children. So if they have two children, then they basically replace themselves and population doesn't grow. So I look for that in all different kinds of cultures. And, you know, I have examples in this book of Catholic cultures, Buddhist cultures. But particularly since even though this book is out in many different languages, my principal audience is my own in the United States I thought it would be really surprising to show that the most successful population management program ever was in a very orthodox Muslim country, and that was Iran.
The history of this - Iran is in the Middle East at the top of the Persian Gulf. Next to it is Iraq. And in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iraq, and that was when Iran had just had its Islamic revolution. It had been under the Shah of Iran, who basically was a puppet to the United States back then. And it was a popular uprising, supported by about 96% of the people, that overthrew the Shah and put into power the Ayatollah Khomeini who, in the beginning, was going to allow for a pluralistic society, everything from secular Muslims to very religious Muslims. Well, as we know that that changed, but while all that was getting organized and Iran was picking himself up after its revolution, Saddam Hussein from Iraq attacked because he wanted to grab an oil-rich province on their mutual border. And, at the time, Iraq was a NATO ally. And that meant that NATO supplied a lot of weaponry to Iraq including, it turned out, the prime materials for making nerve gas, which Saddam Hussein had no problems with using against the Iranians. The Iranians, all they basically had were people, and they just threw wave after wave of soldiers at the invaders. The ayatollah issued a fatwa requesting every fertile female to do her patriotic duty and to get pregnant to give birth to a 20 million man army that would always be able to protect themselves from the invaders. And at one point during the eight years that that war lasted before it finally ended in a truce, Iran had probably the highest birth rate in all human history. It was close to eight kids per family, and the population soared there.
At the end of the war, an economist, who may be the most enlightened economist I've ever heard of, he was the head of planning and budget for the country, went to the ayatollah, and he said, We have a problem. He said, So many kids have been born that our economy is not going to be able to employ them all in 10-15 years when they get to be an employable age. And he said, A country that has a lot of unemployed young men they become angry. They basically destabilize the country. Iran wanted to avoid this. And the ayatollah gave the economist permission to come up with a plan. Shortly thereafter, the ayatollah died and a new ayatollah, who is still our present ayatollah, Khamenei, came in. And through a close vote in the supreme console, the ayatollah totally accepted the economist's plan, which was basically, it sort of had four planks to it.
One is that the government was going to have a publicity campaign doing, essentially what your organization does, showing that smaller families are healthier and happier, more prosperous, because they can take care of their kids. So that would be billboards, showing these big poor families and family with a couple of kids and everybody was well-clothed, you know you get the idea.
It also legalized and made free all forms of contraception. And that started with a fatwa that the current ayatollah issued - a religious opinion saying that there was nothing in the Quran that states that if you have the number of children who you can responsibly care for, that you can't have, the word that he used, was the word for vasectomy. But that was quickly interpreted to mean anything, because it was everything from condoms up to tubal ligations were made legal. And one of the first people I interviewed when I got into Iran, which took me about a year to arrange because the United States and Iran don't have diplomatic relations, but one of the first people I interviewed was a conservative Muslim OBGYN, a woman who talked about how they would go on horseback into these little villages. And they would bring all these different contraceptive tools, you know, from condoms on up, and they would set up these surgical theaters where they would offer women tubal ligation. So women would just line up, because they'd had so many babies they were tired of doing it. They couldn't take care of them.
The third plank in the Iranian plan, it was an education plank. They had already seen for 10 years the Chinese one child policy, because that started in 1980. And now we're talking about 1990 in Iran. And they knew that the Chinese policy, you know, which was started because China had gone through the world's most horrific famine, 40 million people died, and, and it was industrialized, and people were moving into cities. You know they couldn't feed everybody. And, anyhow, they implemented their one child policy. I spent a lot of time in China too for this book, but some of the problems of the one child policy were already becoming very, very evident, you know, that people, particularly rural people, resisted a government coming into your bedroom and telling you what you can do. People were sometimes taking female children out to the forest and leaving them there because they needed male children to help farm the fields. Iran wanted to avoid that. So very intelligently they said to people, You can have as many children as you choose. That decision should be yours. The only thing that was obligatory is that every couple attend premarital classes, which is not a bad idea for anybody in this world, frankly. You know, the Quakers do it. And those classes, they could go either to a health clinic or they could go to a mosque. And among other things, they would learn how much it costs to feed, clothe, educate children.
That coupled with the fourth plank, which was the most important of all, which was encouraging girls to stay in school. In by the time I saw Iran over more than half of all university students were female, as it still is today I understand. Long story short, it took China 10 years to reach replacement rate, around two children per couple on the average. Iran did it in about nine years. And it won all these awards from the United Nations as having developed this completely humane way of getting people to make a decision to have smaller families for the benefit of not just the country, but for their own self interest, for the benefit of themselves and for the benefit of their children. And it continued to work. It really lowered the fertility rate of the country.
Unfortunately, while I was there, and there's a whole chapter devoted to Iran, towards the end of my stay Iran had gone through a swing, where they'd gone from a fairly liberal president to a very conservative president, whose speeches to the country would be, if translated from Farsi, recognizable to anybody who listens to Donald Trump speak or listen to Orban speak in Hungary or Erdogan in Turkey or Putin in Russia. And he basically started dialing back Iran's policy, started taking all the money for those clinics. And that money started going into fertility clinics to encourage women to have more children. Now, that has not worked. It hasn't worked in any country that tries to do that. Many countries, from Russia to Singapore to today's Israel tries to bribe women to have more babies. But you educate women, and as the Iranian program showed and as I saw in all the countries I went to - rich country, poor country, Buddhist, Catholic, you name it - you get a girl into high school and chances are she's going to have no more than two children in her life. So far and away, the best family planning tool that I know of is educating women and giving them access to family planning means, whatever works.
Nandita Bajaj 40:08
Right. It's such an incredible example. And we're so glad that you detailed it, as you did in the book and just now, because what it demonstrates is in every geography, as soon as girls and women have the autonomy to decide when, whether, and how many children to have, we see the fertility rates begin to decline very, very quickly, and remain there, because it depicts this desire, as you said, for smaller families. But there has been a backlash, and even a backsliding of democracy, whether it's for militaristic reasons, or economic or nationalism. When these kinds of pronatalist incentives or fertility clinics, as you were saying, they don't work, then some of these more authoritarian governments are now turning to coercive measures, such as abortion bans, to try to force women to have children they may not otherwise have.
Alan Weisman 41:07
Growth is considered, by the way, the measure of a healthy economy. I mean, people say without even thinking about it, I mean, turn on progressive NPR. They'll talk about housing starts and you know how they were up, you know, as if that's a good thing, as if we need more sprawl. But basically, we're looking at a Ponzi scheme here. The reason that people like growth - be it population growth or be it economic growth - the more people on the planet, the more consumers there are, obviously. And to keep a business growing you need more consumers all the time. And that means either you out-compete your other businesses and you steal their consumers, or people keep having more babies, and they need more of your products, you know, be they Gerber Baby Food or whatever they are.
And I have a great chapter in Countdown, a Japanese economist who talks about how we can have healthy economies with a shrinking population, which Japan is now facing. For reasons that I explain in that book, Japan's population has peaked, just like China's is now peaking right now as we speak. But the thing that pro-growth economists don't like to talk about is that the more people on the planet, the cheaper labor is, because basically, you get a lot of poor, miserable people fighting each other for really crappy wages. And if you have fewer laborers being born, then they become more valuable, and you have to pay them more. I mean, what a concept, a well-paid workforce. If you read Adam Smith, basically sort of the founding father of capitalism, even Adam Smith talked about a country grows, an economy grows, but at a certain point, you don't want to keep growing. You want to hit stability, prosperity, and you want to stay there. Because otherwise it's just not going to work. And so I think you're very right. You know, one of the things that goes on in a pro-growth government is clamping down on birth management - any time, any way they can - and abortion is a particularly easy concept because in some interpretations, there are prohibitions against it.
Now, why does the Catholic Church prohibit abortion? For Countdown I also went to the Vatican. It didn't, really, through much of its existence. The Papal States, that was a European country. It was about a third of all of Italy today. And then in the mid-19th century, because of a populist uprising, someone basically took a populist pope at his word, and suddenly the Catholic Church was left with like a tenth of a square mile, Vatican City. It's the smallest country on Earth. So how do you get powerful when you are that small? Well, there are two ways. One is you declare the pope to be infallible. Papal infallibility did not exist before about 1860. I've got the exact date in the book. And from then on, when the pope was talking about matters having to do with dogma and religion, that was the voice of God. And you had to listen to the Holy Father.
Then in the following decades, suddenly, birth control, it was accompanying women's suffragism. Women wanted control over their bodies. And so they were starting to mail condoms through the mails and things like that. And there was a big crackdown on this, and the church got very much behind it. Because the second way the church is powerful, is if it has a lot of people tithing the church, paying into that collection. And the more Catholics, the richer they were. And they couldn't stop that from happening, because now they were this tiny little state.
And then, you know, I fast forward in the book into the 1960s, when liberation theology followed, basically the Cuban Revolution and a lot of poor people in Latin America, were looking at throwing off the shackles of governments that we're keeping them very, very subjected. And a lot of priests and nuns were very much part of that movement. They were human rights, as well as religious, advocates. And around that time, the United States develops the birth control pill. It doesn't have a pretty beginning. We use the Puerto Rican women as guinea pigs for a while and overdose them, before we came down to what was a manageable dose for a birth control pill. But it coincided with a time where liberation theology was growing throughout Latin America, the popularity of the Cuban Revolution was growing throughout Latin America, and the United States needed a billboard for capitalism, like the Russians had a billboard for communism in Castro's Cuba.
So they chose Costa Rica, which was one of the most stable countries in all of Latin America, largely because they abolished their army after a coup in 1948. They realized that it was much easier to control the population by giving them things they want it like schools and health clinics, good wages, you know, what a concept. So Costa Rica was a sort of peaceful place, and the United States set up USAID then to counter the Russian propaganda for communism. And Costa Rica was the biggest recipient, and that coincided with these brand new birth control pills. And some Costa Rican, very marginalized Protestant churches - a lot of them evangelical churches, you know, who were tiny compared to the Catholic Church - saw vulnerability, and they started all of these radio campaigns saying that, What your church says that you are a sinner and going to hell because you only want the number of children that you can responsibly raise? Our church loves you for that. And they became distributors of these pills for USAID. It was a handy infrastructure that was already in place, and women started fleeing the Catholic Church. So there was a human rights movement going simultaneously.
And the Catholic Church realized that they had this big problem. So then a pope, John the 23rd, called the Vatican Council, and they raised this question of, should we update our population policy? And it was sort of a drawn-out process, but ultimately, there was a resounding vote in favor of liberalizing the bans against birth control in the Catholic Church. I think it was 66 to 10. But in that 10, one of the dissenters, who was a brilliant bishop from Poland, issued a written opinion that pointed out that if the church lifted its ban on birth control, it would, in fact, be saying that over the previous century, the Protestants were right, and the Catholic Church was wrong. And if the pope is infallible, well, he can't be wrong. So if they got rid of demand on birth control, they would also be getting rid of papal infallibility, which was one of the biggest reasons that the Catholic Church remained powerful in the world. So they couldn't do it. And of course, that Catholic bishop then became John Paul the Second. And, you know, a very brilliant man, spoke all these different languages, but a very conservative man and the Catholic church today is still stuck with that.
But as I point out in the book, this little Catholic country, Vatican City, is surrounded by this other Catholic country called Italy, which has one of the highest percentages of women with graduate degrees anywhere in the world, and one of the lowest fertility rates because Catholic women in Italy know exactly how many children they want, which is one or two. So the only place that the Catholic church is growing right now - and they are the biggest promoters of that growth - is Africa. And Africa right now has a population growth, I mean, your organization must be really well aware, Lagos is slated to have 125 million people by the end of the century. I mean, that's crazy. It's not going to happen. But the Catholics need more Catholics. And they're pushing that. And at one point, in that chapter, I interview an African cardinal, Bishop Peter Turkson, from Ghana, who is very conservative. He explains to me how the rhythm method works so wonderfully, and he took classes in it, and he is right now on the shortlist to replace the current pope. So you guys ought to be aware of that.
Alan Ware 50:23
It is encouraging that despite being Catholic or Muslim or any number of other religions, it seems the overwhelming majority of girls and women around the world want accessible, affordable contraceptive options and equal opportunities for education to the boys and men. And these options have been shown to help them lead more self-directed, fulfilling lives.
Alan Weisman 50:47
The fact is, what we need are enlightened people. In Niger, the country that had the highest birth rate in the world is also one of the poorest countries in the world in West Africa, between seven and eight children per family, very conservative, Sunni Muslim country. Many of the families in the rural villages that I've visited were polygamous families where men would have three or four wives and they would have 30 or 40 children. But I traveled with a very enlightened, very religious, Sunni Muslim. He was my interpreter. And he took me to meet imams who realized that all the trees were gone, they'd burned them for firewood, people were starving, and that the land could not sustain families this big. And they would talk in their Friday prayers, how the Quran mandates that every child is entitled to two years of a mother's milk, which means that you have to space your children.
And I went to see both in Pakistan was the other country that I mentioned, which has this huge birth rate. You know, I saw these groups that were doing their best. They were using street theater, brilliant theater that I saw in Pakistan, where the people doing the street theater were also midwives and doctors who then would, at the end of the theater, invite women up on the stage to get an examination and to be prescribed a supply of whatever form of the family planning they chose. There were great efforts.
One of the most delightful chapters in Countdown is the story of how Thailand brought its population growth rate down below replacement. And that was an enlightened male who started that program, who was working in development. He was an economist and he started touring the country and he would see throngs and throngs of children. And he would realize there is no way that Thailand could ever develop unless they stopped growing. There were just too many. Because he was a gifted actor, and he actually was a television actor before as well as an economist, he developed all these speeches where he would get people laughing about birth control. He would have condom blowing up contests. He would do all of these crazy attention-getting things. But ultimately in every village he visited he would find some women who would be his accomplices. And he would provide, you know, what today are called micro loans and set them up in businesses. And they would always be women who again, knew that they couldn't have a business that they had a zillion kids.
And there's a great example in my book in Pakistan, where five enlightened men start a parallel school system to the national school system, which is so corrupt that oftentimes, teachers never even showed up. And it was, you know, you're talking about patriarchal, you know, girls and boys were separated. And so they started their own school system, which would have girls and boys together. And at age 13, every kid was asked, What would you like to be when you grow up? Anything, name it. And so boys wanted to be pilots or they wanted to be doctors or engineers, and girls also wanted to be doctors or they wanted to be school teachers. Whatever they wanted, they would pair them with someone of their same gender, who was a professional, doing what this kid wanted to do. And it started out in very, very ultra- conservative areas where you couldn't talk about family planning. But these girls saw that all these professionals, these women who then became the role models, in order to practice their profession, were having two kids or fewer. And it worked. So those are the kinds of things that work.
You know, the extreme example was in 1992, a lot of feminist women who justifiably were horrified by a program that came even before China's one child policy. That was mass sterilizations in India. The idea was, you know, India, of course, was growing, and now India's got even more populous than China. And close to 8 million women forcibly got their tubes tied. What is oftentimes forgotten is that about the same number of men got forcibly vasectomized. But as a result of that, and that conflated with the rising, very necessary movement of women's liberation in the world, kind of went overboard, where a lot of women's libs groups thought that any population movement was against women being able to do what women wanted. And several of those women groups sided with the Catholic Church at the first Earth Summit in 1992, which basically - between them and George Bush senior saying that the US economy is not negotiable - made sure that the word population was never uttered in the world's first environmental summit. Now, come on, how can we talk about the environment when we don't talk about the number of human beings who are using the environment or, as we are today,overusing the environment? So what you guys are trying to do with your organization is a hard thing to do. And there are ways to live within our means that could let us prosper and be happy on this planet. And sooner or later, we're gonna have to figure them out. Because if we don't manage this gracefully, nature's gonna do it to us.
Nandita Bajaj 56:40
Absolutely. And also to your point - and we've written papers about this, and we're constantly challenging the UNFPA and the feminists - that that feminist movement that shut down the conversation on population in their supposed statement that to allow women to have as many children as they want, they, of course, completely undermine the fact that the want for the most part is still very much manufactured by a lot of these growthist, pronatalist institutions. And unless we challenge those by directly confronting population as an issue of gender inequality, we cannot achieve the kind of gender equality they talk about. And I mean that's why we find your writing and your work just so admirable, because you pull so many pieces together that are impacting our planet. And as a longtime environmental journalist, you've had a lot of exposure in your travels and research to a more ecological way of thinking. What do you think it has done for you as a writer and as a human being?
Alan Weisman 57:52
Well, I learned more about writing from ecologists than I ever did from any writing teacher or journalism professor. Ecologists are people who study the connections out there in nature, how everything is connected to everything else. And if you affect one thing by taking it away, other things are going to start to collapse and cascade. If you nurture everything, other things are going to flourish. And the connections go all the way around the world. And they go down into the sea. And they go up into the atmosphere. They basically described a pretty healthy functioning ecosystem, such as the world basically was until the Industrial Revolution, when we started taking energy that nature didn't need for its natural cycle and had buried it and it had compressed and concentrated. And we found that if you touch a match to that concentrated energy, oh, wow, look at all the stuff you can do. And therefore we have our jet-propelled civilization today. And some of that stuff, it's gonna be hard to get rid of. I mean, look, we're talking to each other over these magical computers right now. And they're useful tools. But they magnify our presence on this world, which means that we simply have to be fewer.
Because we are mammals, we are part of nature. And you know we're not the only ones. Ants create these incredible anthill societies with all these different levels. The woodchucks under my own property do the same thing. We get beavers with their dams. We get birds with their nests. We get bees with their hives. We're just another creature out there building stuff. And we simply have to do it within our means. Because when any of them get more populous than their food supply allows, they suffer a die-off. And we have extended our food supply by chemically force-feeding it. But that can't go on forever, because we are now seeing the damage. We're seeing the damage downstream at the mouths of our big rivers. And we are seeing the damage in our soils that now are addicted to chemistry and they need more of it, because their microbial natural processes have been shut off by the artificial nitrogen that we put in there. And most of all, we're seeing it in the atmosphere that is packed with all the residue of our industrial society - the carbon dioxide, the nitrous oxide, and the methane. And this can't go on. It's coming back to bite us. Nature is doing what nature has done in the past. Every time there has been an extinction, it is making a big adjustment. And it's up for grabs right now whether we survive it.
There's still hope that we can. That's why I'm writing Hope Dies Last. I've met inspiring people all over the world who understand ecology. And they are working in all different kinds of ways - be it food production, be it biological conservation, be it coming up with ways to create energy that don't create a drain on natural systems and don't pack the atmosphere with more insulation. And frankly, I don't know whether we can use technology to solve the problems that technology has created for us, but I appreciate these people for trying. Whether they'll succeed the future will decide, and we're part of that future. Every one of us has to participate in it.
Alan Ware 1:01:43
Did you look at people who are trying to live more simply in a decentralized, local way, whether from developed countries or indigenous, so not requiring new technologies but new ways of human organization at a community level?
Alan Weisman 1:01:59
Yeah, I have a chapter that's set in Ojibwe country in northern Minnesota, where they have been fighting these pipelines, and I followed the saga of line three that carries the dirtiest fossil fuel of all, Athabaskan crude from the tar sands of Alberta, down to a port on Lake Superior and goes right through their traditional rice harvesting lands and fishing grounds and hunting grounds. And the movement there, by the way it's matriarchal women, because in the Ojibwe culture, men are the firekeepers, women are the waterkeepers. So it was women who were putting their bodies in front of all of the 212 lakes, streams, or rivers, that pipeline was crossing and getting arrested. And some of these women are going back to not only a native way of hunting and gathering, but a much saner way of growing foods and growing products that we need, like growing hemp - which is a much cheaper and more ecological way by far, in terms of water usage and land needs, than growing southeastern pine timber for paper industry. You know, that was very exciting. They also have their own solar energy industries that they're putting together, solar furnaces right alongside this traditional agriculture. I mean, the sad thing is that, right now, the biggest use of native land on the White Earth, one of the biggest reservations of all, is non-native leases for growing potatoes of North America's biggest potato grower, and the whole crop goes to McDonald's french fries. I mean, come on. It's just like, absolutely insane. And yeah, they're a good example of women who are fighting back against that kind of insanity. And, you know, they really believe from their long tradition of the prophecies that sent them to Minnesota, they have their own promised land history, just like the Israelites, because they were Algonquin people who lived in the Nova Scotia region, and they were sent to that land where food would be growing out of the waters, the wild rice. And that's where they settled. But it's a series of prophecies that when you get up to, I believe it's number six, that there's a fork in the road. And you can choose a green path, or you can choose a hard path, which they interpret as a paved path. And that pavement comes from the kind of asphalt that you get from places like the tar sands of Alberta.
Alan Ware 1:04:49
Well, that seems like a good place to end this interview with that, taking that path that leads to someplace better, not the tar sand path, right?
Alan Weisman 1:04:59
Well, I'm glad that we've had this conversation. It's been stimulating, and thank you for the work that you're doing.
Alan Ware 1:05:06
Yeah, we really appreciate all your writing and your ability to show us and not just tell us with your excellent storytelling, and you see the nuance, the complexity of issues in a way that a lot of people and writers don't. It's helped us connect the dots between carrying capacity, human population sustainability, and to challenge the human species kind of unquestioned take over the planet, and the peril that's put us in. So thank you.
Nandita Bajaj 1:05:36
Yeah, this was such a remarkable interview, as remarkable as you're writing Alan. And we know we waited a long time to get you on and it was absolutely worth the wait. Thank you so much for your wonderful work and we very much look forward to your upcoming book and helping to publicize it.
Alan Weisman 1:05:54
You're welcome and you know when Hope Dies Last comes out, you can be in touch anytime and I will tell my publicists. They will be having me go places to speak and by all means, you know, invite me to Toronto. Invite me to Minneapolis to speak. I'd be happy to. Thank you so much and Nandita, I look forward to staying in touch.
Alan Ware 1:06:12
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoy this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:06:40
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
