"Population vs. Environment — Leave It to Women"

Robert Engelman
Vice President for Programs
The Worldwatch Institute

In October 2008 Future Choices-TV returns to a theme we introduced earlier in the year with the “Mothering the Earth” series: the dynamic synergy between population, women’s health and the environment. Our October guest is Robert Engelman, author of More: Population, Nature and What Women Want. With a deft review of anthropological studies, historical observations and lessons learned from travels in the developing world Mr. Engelman leads us to the conclusion that women are the key to resolution of the dual problems of burgeoning population and environmental degradation.

In reviewing Robert Engelman's book, More: Population, Nature and What Women Want, on Amazon.com, Robert J. Walker gives it 5 stars when he says:

It seems inevitable that the world food crisis, combined with climate change and rising energy prices, will spur a renewed and contentious debate over the issue of population. Before that debate is renewed in its full intensity, everyone should read this book.
What the author gives us, and what is so desperately need at this critical juncture in the debate over population, is historical perspective. His book, in fact, takes up back to our ancestral roots to give us a better understanding of such things as human reproduction, the centuries' old debate over population, and efforts by governments to "control" population by encouraging human procreation or restricting it.
Many people today believe that birth control is a thoroughly modern invention, but as Engelman observes in his book, women throughout history have sought to control their fertility, as well as enhance it. In response to shrinking resources or deteriorating conditions, women have often sought--though not always successfully--to space or limit their pregnancies.
Engelman takes what he calls a "Zen' approach to population. He argues that the best way to "control" population is to give up control, by giving women the power to decide for themselves when to bear a child.

From the book (pp 100-101):

"We're tired of having one in front and one behind," one woman [in Mali] told us. It was a folk reference to carrying one child on the back while pregnant with a second...Family planning is anything but a foreign concept to women in even the remotest reaches of the poorest developing countries.

Next door to Mali in Niger, women call contraceptives "rest medicine."

Engelman notes that the desert island in the middle of the Pacific, Easter Island was once a lush jungle habitat. He posits that "the potent brew of population growth, environmental deterioration, and social collapse has made Easer island a popular metaphore for what coud happen to our own "'Earth Island' if we fail to learn the lessons of the past." (pp 158-159)

easterisland

After graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1976 with a fellowship, Robert Engelman traveled for nearly a year in Latin America, where he reported for the Associated Press and several U.S. newspapers. He later returned to Central America as a reporter for The Kansas City Times as one civil war ended in Nicaragua and another was flaring in El Salvador. Robert’s conversations with women and men in villages and shantytowns, and his up-close views of denuded forests, ill health, poverty, and violent conflict inspired a deep interest in the link between natural-resource scarcity and the steady growth of populations. |MORE



Burgeoning population has driven Ugandan to risk life and limb farming fields on hazardly sloping hilsides.

“Every human society is faced not with one population problem but with two: how to beget and rear enough children and how not to beget and rear too many. The definition of enough and too many varies enormously.” – Margaret Mead.

This page last updated October 3, 2008 18:49 .

Produced for LMC-TV	by Fran Snedeker