It may not surprise you to learn that Warren Hern, the Boulder abortion doctor, believes humans “have become a pathological process — a malignancy — in the planetary ecosystem” and that “if you like what the 20th century brought us in terms of war, famine, pestilence, and ecological destruction, you will love the rest of this one. It will be worse.”
Hern offered this apocalyptic prediction recently in The Colorado Statesman, but he’s been banging the drum of gloom regarding population for years — while doing his own small part, of course, to alleviate the extent of the “malignancy.”
But let’s drop the matter of Hern’s vocation so as not to prejudice the discussion. What’s fascinating about his almost hysterical anxiety over population growth is how it is refuted by facts on the ground. But Hern is so rooted in a fearful tradition that dates back to Thomas Malthus that he simply can’t help himself.
Hern deplores the fact that global population reached 7 billion last October and opines, “At this rate, we will reach about 13 billion by 2050 and 25 billion by the end of this century.” Really? The United Nations predicts a total population of 9.3 billion by 2050, rising to just 10.1 billion by 2100. Even its “high” estimate is much lower than Hern’s, while its “low” estimate, 6.2 billion, amounts to fewer people than we have today.
No wonder. As David Brooks of The New York Times recently wrote, “Nearly half of the world’s population lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level.” Incredibly, “Iran now has a similar birth rate to New England … the least fertile region in the U.S.”
Nor is Iran an outlier. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute reported this month that in the “great majority” of Muslim countries, “declines in total fertility rate have been jaw-dropping” — to the point that “it is likely that a majority of the world’s Muslims already live in countries where fertility levels would look entirely unexceptional in an American mirror.”
Indeed, most of the major exceptions to the good news about fertility — which has swept Latin America, too — exist in one continent, Africa.
So why would Hern offer the sinister claim that “there is no evidence that the human population as a whole will voluntarily limit its fertility” (my emphasis) when the evidence is heaped about him?
Why would he suggest humans — this “malignancy,” remember — will outstrip resources and food supplies when our species’ expansion in the past two centuries and especially the past 30 years has coincided with (notice I did not say caused) the greatest growth of per capita global wealth and health in history?
Such “humans-are-the-problem” pessimism has a long pedigree, of course, and it’s outlined in a book just out by Robert Zubrin, a Lakewood resident and president of Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace engineering firm. In “Merchants of Despair” (New Atlantis Books), Zubrin describes Malthus as “the founding prophet of modern antihumanism … a political economist who famously argued that human reproduction always outruns available resources.” Although Malthus (1766-1834) was wildly wrong, his many successors — at first bolstered by a twisted application of Darwinist thought to culture and race — have never relinquished the torch.
Zubrin recounts shocking examples of European officials washing their hands of famine in India, Ireland and elsewhere in the name of eliminating surplus population. He describes the ugly eugenics fad that swept the U.S. in the early 20th century and the forcible sterilizations and other abominations that resulted, the rise of a population control movement in the postwar years whose leaders were eager to support, or unwilling to denounce, coercive and even violent policies in the Third World so long as they allegedly dampened population growth.
In one telling admission, a co-founder of the Club of Rome said his “chief quarrel with DDT … is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” DDT saved millions of lives, but that was bad.
Zubrin rightly concludes that pessimists like Hern continue “to postulate a world of limited supplies, whose fixed constraints demand ever-tighter controls upon human aspirations. On the other side stand those who believe in the powers of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources, and so, rather than regret human freedom, insist upon it. The contest between these two views will determine our fate.”
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP.