Earth Day 2017

I participated in the very first Earth Day back in 1970 and it has become my tradition in this blog to revisit the talk I gave that day and see how things have changed (or not) over time. At the time I was just finishing my doctorate in demography at UC Berkeley and I accepted the invitation to drive down to Fresno State for their Earth Day festivities (and it was a very nice celebration). At the time the world's population was estimated to be 3.7 billion--a bit less than half of what it is today--but the growth rate was the highest the world had ever recorded. My message to the audience 47 years ago (yikes--has it really been that long!!) was not much different than it would be today:

It seems likely that if we don't change our ways the ultimate creditors of the world--our food resources, our water, our air, the quality of human life--all those things from which we have been so heavily borrowing, may just foreclose on us. Frankly, there are just too many people around, and if you don't think so now, you can wait another 30 years when there may well be twice as many people on this planet.

Fortunately, the birth rate did drop somewhat faster than we were expecting at that time and so 30 years later, in 2000, the population had increased "only" to 6.1 billion--not a doubling, but still a significant increase creating even more issues in terms of environmental impacts and questions of sustainability.

Population growth is not unilaterally responsible for pollution, but make no mistake, every additional person born into the world aggravates existing pollution problems and makes solutions more costly to  achieve.

Something must be done to check population growth and the sooner that goal is realized, the better off we will be both in the short and in the long run. Now, I have read letters-to-the-editor in the newspaper and I have talked to individuals who say that the will of God will prevail and that if we have faith we will avoid disaster; others place their faith in science fiction rather/or in addition to God and argue that, as in the past, future technological advances will spring us out of trouble. To these people I say that they may be correct, but I am not willing to wait and find out when there are things that I as an individual can do right now to actively encourage and support population control. 

The obvious issue was to lower fertility rates around the world, and I championed the cause not just of making birth control more accessible, but more importantly to create a social environment in which people preferred smaller families.  

We should definitely advocate for the immediate removal of all discriminatory barriers against women in education [remember that this was the first year women had been admitted to Princeton University] and in the professions. If you can get a woman out of the house and reward her with financial gain and social and economic prestige, then the social and economic costs of having additional children are going to increase for that woman and she is far more likely than ever before to prefer a small family. 

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons besides just the demographic ones for the existence of gender equality, but this is still a compelling issue in more parts of the world than we might wish to think about.

In the end, Earth Day is really about people, not the Earth. The earth will survive without us, but we can't survive without it.