World Affairs
Stop worrying, just interact
Published 21 July 2003
Observations on population
Remember the global population explosion? Not many people do. This month, World Population Day passed off, as usual, without incident (it was 11 July, in case you're interested), the UN recently revised its medium- term global forecast downwards, and in much of Europe the talk is of population decline. Larger families are back in fashion, particularly among the affluent middle classes - if the Blairs can have four children, why not the rest of us? Most seriously, perhaps, those who should act as our watchdogs are scuttling for cover.
Last year, the US group Zero Population Growth changed its name to the more donor-friendly but less informative Population Connection. This month, the UK charity Population Concern went one better, excising all references to "population". Henceforth, it will be known as Interact Worldwide, a title that nobody could take exception to - it emerged out of market research - but which will leave most of us groping for a sense of function.
The Pirandellian flavour of this should give pause for thought. Population Concern has ploughed a valiant but largely solitary furrow since it began as an offshoot of the Family Planning Association three decades ago. In those days, population was taken quite seriously, partly because of doomy tracts such as Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, and the group's original name, Population Countdown (itself changed in the 1980s to incorporate the more emollient "concern"), reflected this. But neither government nor civil society took up the issue and it was slowly pushed off the agenda.
The reason population has become the issue that dare not speak its name is the same reason that few would dare to comment on the Blairs', or any similar-sized, family. They'd tell you to mind your own business. For governments or charities, this translates into a fear of alienating voters or donors. Population Concern found that its name offended people's conception of their rights - even the innocuous-sounding "concern" was treated as synonymous with "control". This was particularly true of professional women aged 25-50, the biggest target audience. Corporate donors didn't like the vibes, either. With its old name, researchers concluded, the charity did "not have a long-term survival rating".
If a society doesn't want to hear something, there's no way - under current systems of opinion-forming and awareness-raising, heavily dependent on marketing techniques and private fund-raising - that you can tell it. This raises disturbing issues about political leadership, media ownership (the American right is particularly vitriolic about population campaigners) and public education. A culture that switches off when the bad news comes on is poorly equipped to solve its problems.
Is population a problem? Going on current forecasts, global population will have grown from 3.6 billion when The Population Bomb was written, to 6.2 billion today, to 8.9 billion in 2050. But numbers are misleading. As Ehrlich showed, it is affluence, technology and, above all, impact that count - which means anything from crowded holiday beaches, gridlock and road rage to lost species and devastated habitats. The average American has a global environmental impact roughly 18 times that of the average Indian - so although the numerical population of the US is 290 million, its level is, in effect, 5.2 billion, compared with India's 1.05 billion. The UK's real population is not 60 million, but 480 million. Points worth pondering when you're stuck in a traffic jam.
David Nicholson-Lord is researching a book on population for the New Economics Foundation
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