One of my assignments at MOTHER EARTH NEWS is to “clean up” some of the articles on the website — articles from the 1970s and ’80s that were not scanned accurately. Recently, I’ve been focusing on the Plowboy Interviews. These 90 articles, published from 1970 to 1986, are conversations with prominent, if not always well-known, individuals from every walk of life — science, agriculture, business, medicine, philosophy and more.

Many of the Plowboy Interviews are on controversial topics, such as population, which has recently been debated on the pages of the Mother Earth News magazine and on the website. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, was interviewed in 1974. Paul and his wife, Anne, subsequently produced a column, Ecoscience, on current environmental issues for the magazine.

It seems that some readers believe we should honor the magazine’s sustainable-living roots and stay away from politically-sensitive topics such as population. What these readers aren’t aware of is MOTHER EARTH NEWS has reported on controversial topics since its humble beginnings in 1970 — the Viet Nam war, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Reagonomics (in fact all of the presidents have been mentioned in the magazine), economics, the national energy policy, pollution and nuclear proliferation. The magazine was considered one of the leading anti-establishment, pro-environment publications, offering alternatives to the status quo.

To learn more about the early history of the magazine and it’s environmental/sustainable living focus, check out The Story Of Mother Earth News from the 20^th anniversary issue (March 1990). And search Plowboy Interview on the website to read the 90 interviews with people who had a profound impact on the country and the world.

BRYAN WELCH

We in the developed world consume far more than we need. We are fat, we drive big cars, we throw away whole households of valuable goods because we’re spoiled and we can afford to buy something new rather than preserving or repairing what we have. Our bad habits damage our environment.

But conservation is not going to save our habitat. Global warming, deforestation, desertification and pollution are all products of overpopulation. The poorest people don’t have the option of leaving the nearby forest standing, or keeping their goats off of an overgrazed pasture. For the world’s poorest people, every scrap of land is part of a thin barrier between life and death. They must use every resource available to keep themselves and their families alive. That’s the grim reality at the heart of human population growth. At some point we all end up there, struggling to sustain our lives regardless of the consequences for our community or our habitat.

Forests are being destroyed at a pace even with the rate of human population growth. Unless something changes soon, by 2030 we will only have 10 percent of the natural forests that stood on the planet when we started paying attention[1]. Locations rapidly losing their forests are diverse:

Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, Laos, Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, Ghana and the Cote d'lvoire have lost most of their rainforests, according to the biologists of Chicago’s Field Museum. Ninety percent of the forests of the Philippine archipelago have been cut[2]. In the last 30 years, the Rotary Foundation’s Fellowship for Population and Development estimates that two-thirds of the forests of Central America have been cut down. That’s two-thirds of the forests in Central America in just 30 years cut down by local people who need farmland and household firewood[3]. The same basic pattern holds all over the tropical world. If we look at the earth as an island — an island surrounded by outer space — then the experience of tropical islanders is unnerving. When we started keeping track, 60 percent of Haiti was forested. When the International Conference on the Reforestation of Haiti convened in 2007, less than 1 percent remained. The conference’s report is eloquent: “Haiti has become an environmental catastrophe and a human catastrophe ... With the forest cover gone, floods ravage the country at each rainfall. Topsoil washes into the sea. And since the only hope of Haitians for feeding their families is the soil and small scale farming, it is a terrible humanitarian disaster.”[4] 

In Haiti deforestation is both a symptom of overpopulation and a root cause of human suffering. Haiti is an example of what can happen when too many people have too few natural resources in a limited environment. Food for thought.

And in Haiti, as around the world, deforestation is mostly a local phenomenon driven by local needs. There are a few places where big timber companies are driving the process, but not many. In most places, local folks need the space and need the fuel. The wood is going into the fireplace or, tragically, being piled up and burned simply to make room for more poor farmers.

[1] Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. 2003, Vintage ISBN 0-679-76811-4
[2] Field Museum. The Lost Forest. 
[3] Rotarian Fellowship for Population & Development. Population & Deforestation. 
[4] International Conference on Reforestation and Environmental Regeneration of Haiti. Reforest Haiti. 

Climate change fills the news channels right now and arrests the attention of people all over the world. The statistics and, more importantly, the images are startling. The average global temperature has been going up since 1850 and is accelerating. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are all at historic highs.[1] These so-called “greenhouse gases” allow the sun’s ultraviolet radiation to rain down on the earth’s surface, but they trap the infrared radiation emitted by the warm earth. The planet warms up.

Take a look at any historic comparison of alpine glaciers or polar ice caps. They are shrinking. Rapidly.

 Most scientists agree that human beings are causing global warming. We dig up fossil fuels and burn them, releasing carbon dioxide. We blanket our agricultural fields with nitrogen-based fertilizers that fill the air with nitrous oxide. We raise billions of agricultural animals in circumstances that create unnatural amounts of methane. We burn the forests and plow up the grasslands that used to capture carbon dioxide from the air and deposit it in the soil. Rich people are making the biggest contribution to these problems. According to CNN, the average American's annual carbon footprint is about 2,000 times greater than that of the average resident of the African nation of Chad. And the average resident of the UK will generate as much atmospheric carbon dioxide in one day as a Kenyan will in an entire year. Overall, the United Nations estimates that the carbon footprint of the world's 1 billion poorest people represents just 3 percent of the global total. Of all the carbon dioxide deposited in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, 80 percent of the world's emissions was generated by 20 percent of the inhabitants of the world's wealthiest nations.[2]

It is, therefore, tempting to think that we can solve the climate-change problem by tightening the belts of the rich. But I’ll reiterate the conclusion of my rough analysis of this situation: If the U.S. and Western Europe both cut their per capital energy consumption in half over the next 20 years and the developing world holds its per capita consumption steady, we’ll keep on emitting greenhouse gases at the same harmful rate we are emitting right now. Population growth will erase all our progress.

Furthermore, even if none of our planet’s new human residents owns an internal-combustion engine, they will still need to burn wood and plant gardens. Deforestation and desertification are symptoms of human overpopulation, and those symptoms are spreading.

For centuries now Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus has been, on and off, an object of derision because people associate him, unfairly, with predictions of a doomsday scenario in which humanity should long ago have suffered a population catastrophe. In fact, that wasn’t part of his fundamental thesis. He was, explicitly, putting a bee in the bonnets of the enlightenment philosophers who visualized a Utopian future for humanity in which every individual would have enough to eat. Malthus suggested that wouldn’t be achieved as long as population growth continued apace and, indeed, he seems to have been proven right by the events of the intervening centuries.

He was wrong about the arithmetic increase of the food supply. We’ve managed to make food supplies increase geometrically. Even so, someone is always starving.

In Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,”[1] one of his characters warns, “It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh.”

Those who want to take the risk and discredit Malthus might nevertheless point to two “green revolutions.” The first one came during the 20^th century when new science helped create sudden, astonishing growth in our food supply. In 1968 William Gaud, former director of the United States Agency for International Development called the achievement a “green revolution”[2] in a speech. He believed that the growth in our agricultural productivity would revolutionize human life worldwide. In fact, we did increase food production to keep up with worldwide population growth. The innovation that made this agricultural revolution possible was funded by wealthy nations like the U.S. who were concerned that famine in nearby poor nations, like Mexico, could threaten economic security.[3] U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, The Rockefeller Foundation and Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho got the wheels turning. The Ford Foundation and others soon pitched in to provide money to scientists who were working to increase food supplies. The production of cereal grains in developing nations more than doubled between 1961 and 1985.[4] In places like Mexico and India the gains were orders of magnitude more impressive.

Still, true to Malthus’ predictions, poverty and famine persisted. We fed a lot of people, but we never managed to feed everyone. Throughout the last quarter of the 20^th century the newspaper stories about mountainous piles of surplus grain in North America routinely ran side-by-wide with stories about starving multitudes in Africa.