ANOTHER VOICE
The population explosion is a demonstration of the human success story, whatever Sir Roy Calne says
CHARLES MOORE
Obviously one is constantly struck by the fact that there are too many people in a particular place at a particular time. There are too many people at Heathrow in August, and too many people driving out of London on the M4 on a Friday afternoon and too many people queueing at the best local sandwich bar at lunchtime. It is always annoying to find others trying to do what one likes doing oneself.
But this is really nothing to do with there being too many people in general. The increase in the British population in the past 50 years has been quite small. When we say there are too many people, we mean there are too many middle-class people like ourselves (although not, naturally, with our own taste and discrimination). In theory, one applauds the general spread of pros- perity. In practice, it is intensely annoying to find that so many of one's fellow coun- trymen have become rich enough to intrude upon one's own pleasures. Motor- ways are not crammed because there are too many bloody people but because there is too much bloody money. Indeed, in some respects, from a middle-class point of view, there are not nearly enough people — lis- ten to all those complaints about how hard it is too get a gardener and how all the 'real villagers' have moved away. What is oppressive is the sense, always felt by long- established people in a long-established culture, that the crowds are beginning to climb over the garden wall. `Odi profanum vulgus et arceo', wrote Horace, 1,800 years before the population explosion was born or thought of.
From this feeling of irritation with our fellow human beings it is a short step, in many people's minds, to thinking that the entire world is overcrowded. For some, this will be exacerbated by fear of other races breeding, for others by fear of masses of poor people. It is a bit dismaying to think that there are so many people in China, for example, though, for myself, I find the prospect of their becoming so predomi- nantly male and predominantly only chil- dren because of population control policies even more terrifying than the sheer num- bers.
It is easy to think that more people mean more trouble, more poverty, more disease and the destruction of the planet. Yet why should it be so? The amount of space taken up by the human race upon the surface of the earth is still minute. I read about 25 years ago that every human being could fit, standing up, on the Isle of Wight. Now, I suppose, one would have to transfer the biggest cocktail party in history to Ireland, but the point still holds. The history of civil- isation is, among other things, the history of human adaptation to physical adversity — the Dutch reclaiming land from the sea, for example. The space is there. As we need it, we shall find ways of inhabiting it.
A more serious objection than ,physical area is the environmental one. It is argued that ever-growing numbers of people, searching for ever scarcer resources, will destroy the conditions which allow life to sustain itself. One cannot disprove this, but this is because proof does not have much to do with it. I think it is a question of disposi- tion. Many people are disposed to think that the world is about to end. They will seize on current trends that appear to give credence to the idea. Sometimes they will see it in climatic changes, sometimes in pol- lution, sometimes in nuclear war, some- times in the religious language of apoca- lypse, sometimes in the population explosion. One day, presumably, they will be right. All one can say quite definitely is that they have been wrong so far — or you would not be reading this article. And one could also venture to suggest that while human folly is very great and our capacity for self-destruction is considerable, our desire to survive is even stronger. It is not impossible, but it is unlikely, that we will commit collective suicide. For that reason, I have never felt frightened at living all my life in the age of the atom bomb: the bomb's purpose is to preserve humanity, even though its power is to destroy it.
Doesn't something similar apply to popu- lation? Population growth would not hap- pen if millions of individual couples did not want children. Broadly speaking, and allow- ing for millions of particular exceptions, people have children because they want them, whether or not they use artificial means of birth control. Their reasons for doing so will be varied — they include most of the main human motivations such as love, money and security, and will therefore be good reasons. People will not bring chil- dren into the world knowing that they will starve. Parents make a calculation, although usually it is more an assumption than anything worked out on a piece of paper, that they will be able to provide for their children, and in the overwhelming number of cases they are right.
In the cases where they turn out to have been wrong, the biggest single factor for which they did not allow is not their own improvidence, or a breakdown of nature's capacity to supply them, but politics. The famines that afflict African countries most- ly take place in countries with very sparse populations, where harvests fail because of idiotic and ideological agricultural policies, or because one tribe persecutes another off its land. People always exclaim what a scan- dal it is that we live in plenty while millions starve, and so it is, but not because we refuse to share our plenty with the starving, which we don't. It is because the starving live in countries whose policies prevent the creation and distribution of the means of life.
All these billions of people are a symptom more than a cause, a symptom of a world which has become much better at providing for itself. If it had not become so, they would not be alive. They are evidence of what might be called the human success story rather than harbingers of human collapse. The continuation of that success is not inevitable, but it is more likely than not with- in any time-scale that is worth foreseeing.
Naturally one does not like the notion of more crowding, more despoliation of places that are beautiful, more roads and airports and houses to fulfil more and more material aspirations, so let me put it no higher than this: I would rather trust the world's parents to make their own free decisions about their children than I would confer any power in the matter on any gov- ernment on earth. Therefore, I would rather that the delegates to the UN Inter- national Conference on Population and Development stayed at home.
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