Get Off the Train and Walk

I wish I could be as cheerful as David Orr (2003; this issue) about our future , but I can't. If an " optimal " human population size is in the vicinity of 2 billion people (Daily et al. 1994), then what are our chances of reaching such an optimum before catastrophe overtakes us in the form of depletion of natural capital, war, terrorism and civil breakdown, famine, or maybe a new global epidemic? I think they are small, especially with the government of the most powerful nation in the world now led by an unelected puppet controlled by a gang of anti-environmental oil people dedicated to widening the gap between rich and poor, attacking other countries to gain control over petroleum reserves, and destroying the environment for short-term profit. Nonetheless, we have no choice but to try. I agree, of course, with Orr's conclusion that we are losing the struggle to create a sustainable society– and with many of his prescriptions for reversing the current plunge toward disaster. The essential problem we face is the ever-increasing scale of the human enterprise, a 20-fold expansion in the last 150 years as a result of the multiplicative impacts of population growth, increasing per capita consumption, and the environmentally faulty technologies (and social, political, and economic arrangements) that societies use to service that consumption (Holdren & Ehrlich 1974). Of these, population , consumption, and power relationships have largely dropped off political radar screens—including those of environmentalists. Today we know how to end population growth humanely and start a slow decline to a sustainable number of human beings. Among the winning strategies are the education and empower-ment of women and the supplying of contraceptives to all sexually active people. But progress in applying that knowledge has been too slow and spotty, largely because of lack of political will and the determined efforts of the environmentally ignorant and politically powerful to deny the existence of a population problem. A recent egregious example is an article by Nicholas Eberstadt (2002) of the Competitive Enterprise Institute , a conservative " think tank. " The piece displayed total unfamiliar-ity with the critical environmental problems associated with population growth and neglected the long-term impacts those problems have entrained. It reiterated the Nether-lands Fallacy (that high population density in a few areas means there can be high density everywhere) more than 30 years after it was first prominently exposed …