In an Earth Day essay for The Boston Globe Magazine, Alan Weisman argues that the COVID-19 pandemic is a sign that human beings have grown too numerous and destructive.
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Is the coronavirus pandemic Mother Nature’s revenge?
Special Projects
Is the coronavirus pandemic Mother Nature’s revenge?
On the 50th Earth Day, it’s long past time to recognize that this overcrowded planet has run out of room to cut us any slack. By Alan Weisman Originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, April …
Manila, Philippines. Photo by Alan Weisman. On the 50th Earth Day, it’s long past time to recognize that this overcrowded planet has run out of room to cut us any slack.
By Alan Weisman
Originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, April 22, 2020
In China, I always admire how when it comes to food, nothing goes to waste. The Chinese eat practically everything: I’ve been served turtle knuckles, gelatin cubes made from duck’s blood, tuna eyeballs, sea horses, bowls of chicken feet, whole songbirds, and, yes, their nests. I once dined in a Chengdu Buddhist temple with biologists who counted more than 30 plant species on our plates.
Since I don’t eat mammals, I’ve avoided horseshoe bats or the endangered, anteater-like scaly pangolins — rare Chinese delicacies that, as we’ve learned, harbor a virus they can tolerate, but humans can’t. But before blaming China for igniting a global pandemic, we should understand why its people are such extreme epicureans: their long, sad history of famines. The last one, just 60 years ago, killed an estimated 40 million people.
Wouldn’t you eat everything you could find, too? Yet the reasons why you don’t have to — so far, anyway — make us all responsible for this plague’s breathtaking explosion, and explain why we can expect more. COVID-19 is a warning to brace ourselves for corrections that nature always makes when a species outstrips its environment.
It’s painful, though, when your own species is the one being corrected.
***
Calling this coronavirus Mother Nature’s revenge is evocative, but ecology — the science of how everything connects — doesn’t require a sentient, angry Gaia to smite us. Nature isn’t some peaceable kingdom from which we’ve strayed. It’s a violent place where big things devour smaller ones, which feed on even smaller ones. Nature’s balance is a bloody pyramid scheme that, since everything’s recycled, actually works, with multitudinous, prolific little critters below constantly being sacrificed to sustain the fewer but larger, more powerful predators above.
Like every other species, we Homo sapiens once mainly spent our time searching for food—searching so far that by the end of the last ice age, we’d reached nearly everywhere but New Zealand. By then, we’d started to notice that seeds would germinate where we spilled them, so we didn’t have to roam as much. Likewise, instead of immediately killing animals, we could capture some to eat later — and, like those crops, we could breed even more.
Since a few farmers can raise food for many, the population grew. But nature had limits: like other species, until fairly recently people died about as fast as they were born. Most children didn’t survive long enough to reproduce, and human life expectancy averaged around 40 years. A few good harvest years might let the settlements that sprouted near fields and water sources boom, until drought or disease regularly knocked their numbers back.
Then, in 1796, a British surgeon discovered a vaccine for one of the most virulent scourges, smallpox. The 1800s brought pasteurization of milk, disinfectants, and even more vaccines and treatments for rabies, anthrax, diphtheria, and tetanus. As life spans lengthened and infant mortality plunged, the nearly flat-line graph of human population rose past 1 billion. After German scientists in 1913 discovered how to suck nitrogen from the air and slather it on the ground, we shot up like a rocket.
No other invention has likely ever impacted the world so much. Previously, that essential nutrient was limited to what a few nitrogen-fixers like beans and legumes added to soils, and to how much manure we could spread. With artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we now grow far more plants than nature ever could; without it, nearly half of us wouldn’t be here. Despite two world wars and the murderous Spanish flu, by mid-century all that extra food pushed us past 3 billion. In the 1960s, after Green Revolution agronomists coaxed wheat, corn, and rice to produce far more grains per stalk, we skyrocketed again.
In nature, no large animal’s population can quadruple in just one century, but we did it by forcing our food supply with chemistry. Unfortunately, the sprays to protect lab-bred crops also slay pollinators and natural pest-controllers. Artificial nitrogen fertilizer sterilizes soil; its runoff fouls downstream waters, and its production emits vast amounts of greenhouse gases. When it degrades, even more wafts skyward. The combined exhaust from our engines, agriculture, industries, appliances, furnaces, and air conditioners has so overloaded our atmosphere that it’s turned on us — turning our seas to carbonic acid, torching our trees, unleashing ticks and mosquitoes, perverting the weather, and sabotaging our future.
Humankind’s presence on Earth is now so lopsided that growing and grazing our food supply requires nearly half the world’s ice-free land, literally pushing other species off the planet. As we invade their habitats, and poach remaining wildlife for market, their resident viruses and bacteria jump to the handiest species left: us. That’s how nearly 75 percent of new infectious diseases this century originated. As temperatures rise, even more will spawn.
With 7.8 billion of us bound tightly by trade and travel, even comparatively weaker contagions like COVID-19 — much less lethal than, say, Ebola — can now trash our economy, crash our lives, and expose how shaky civilization’s scaffolding really is, including our now-flimsy food chain: The few genetically-enhanced monocultures we depend on — try counting the species on your plate — are as susceptible to plagues as we are.
Yet even as we shudder to realize how near collapse looms, we marvel at strangely placid streets, at birdsong, and at glimpses of unexpected animals. Amid our yearning to throng those streets again, COVID-19 reminds us of the natural balance we miss, even to the point of wondering if collapse might not be so terrible.
Following the Spanish flu, this country went on a binge called the Roaring Twenties. But that 1918 pandemic was conflated with a world war; an armistice celebration was inevitable. This one is coupled with a far greater existential threat, from which we’re momentarily distracted. When this coronavirus finally burns out, there’ll still be a deepening climate crisis that will take much longer than any pandemic to abate. Will our deadly brush with COVID-19 help us finally see that nature’s run out of room to cut us any slack?
To get through this century alive, we must stop burning things for energy, and give animals the space they need — as Noah understood, we can’t save ourselves without them. (Underscoring United Nations warnings that we only have until 2030 to keep global warming from waxing out of control, a recent paper in the journal Naturefinds that by then — just 10 years from now — untold thousands of our companion species may be irretrievably beyond their temperature tolerance.)
How best to clear space? Start by educating every girl alive. Rich country or poor, regardless of religion, females who get past high school average fewer than two children apiece, and are indispensable to the social equity needed to engage with problems facing us all. And as we salvage our wrecked economies, let’s discard the notion that growth equals health. Endless economic growth clearly isn’t possible on a planet that doesn’t grow — look where it’s gotten us.
Real health means fewer of us crowding and infecting each other, clear skies and water, ample room to breathe, and thriving wildlife: not for sale, but in its element, where it’s thrilling to see, and where it can keep its microbes and viruses to itself.
Alan Weisman is the author of The World Without Us and Countdown. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
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Special Projects
Back to the Garden
Special Projects
Back to the Garden
Alan Weisman reconsiders the Genesis story in the light of what we now know came after it. His essay originally appeared in the 2018 book “Eden Turned on Its Side” by photographer Meridel Rubenstein.
Triptych: Ehmad and His Boat in the Central Marshes. Photo by Meridel Rubenstein, from Eden Turned on Its Side. By Alan Weisman
This essay originally appeared in Eden Turned on Its Side, by photographer Meridel Rubenstein, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum/University of New Mexico Press, 2018.
We are stardust,
billion-year-old carbon.
We are golden,
caught in the devil’s bargain.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden.—Joni Mitchell, Woodstock, 1969
Everyone knows which garden she meant. Something in us yearns to go back there. But could we, somehow? And to what, exactly, would we be returning?
To anyone whose cultural roots are entwined with a certain mystical history emanating from the Middle East, the Garden of Eden evokes either a carefree time before sin appeared, or a pristine, untainted planet—or possibly both, if you believe that the twenty-first century’s eco-perils stem from our sins against nature. But whichever it may be, it hearkens to a time before any of us was alive—yet one for which we oddly feel a visceral nostalgia.
That gut longing is even stranger, given that our notion of Eden comes not from experience, but from a book—in fact, from one of its most problematic passages. The Judeo-Christian Bible begins, logically enough, with God creating the world. Within six days, there are stars overhead, sun by day, moonlight by night, seas and sea creatures, land, plants, land animals, and finally people, both male and female. It’s a world we’d basically recognize, other than that it is entirely vegetarian: fruit, seeds, and green herbs shall be for meat, God tells humans and beasts alike.
All of that is described in Chapter 1—where, incidentally, there’s no mention of any garden: the entire Earth is bountifully blessed. But in Chapter 2, after the seventh day when God rests, logic begins to unravel.
Suddenly, the whole story starts over from scratch. This time, there’s no workweek plus a Sabbath; instead, God conjures up Heaven and Earth in a single day. And the sequence changes: again, he invents plants early on, but he sets them aside in some celestial nursery because, unlike before, he hasn’t created water yet. Next, he does so—then, just as the soil begins to moisten, he selects some dust to mold into a human being. A male.
Only after breathing life up man’s nostrils does God add the foliage—but this time, it’s to a garden. However gorgeous and fertile it might be, Eden isn’t all bliss and leisure. Here, God intends for man to “dress,” “keep,” and “till the ground.” He sets guidelines about what can or can’t be harvested, designates a network of rivers for irrigation, and finally, lest man be lonely, creates animals.
Adam gets to name these animals and to identify which are domestic and which are wildlife, yet they fail to assuage his solitude. So, borrowing one of his ribs, God clones him a more tempting companion. And you know the rest.
Much has been made by Biblical scholars of these two conflicting, coexisting creation tales. As their syntax and even their names for God differ (Elohim in Chapter 1; Yahweh in Chapter 2), it’s widely assumed that they were written at different times by different authors, drawing on different versions of earlier Assyrian and Sumerian legends that were later conflated, often awkwardly, into a single testament by anointed redactors, who thrashed out what was canonical and what wasn’t.
Small wonder religion breeds so much discord. To literalists who claim that the Bible is divinely inspired and thus entirely true, the second chapter simply details Chapter 1’s sixth day when man appears, to underscore God’s special relationship with us. (Thus, presumably, it’s more fitting that humans should precede the flora and fauna over which they hold dominion.)
Babylonian Talmudists tried reconciling another notable discrepancy, over whether woman was born simultaneously with man or later ripped from his rib cage like a bloody afterthought, by declaring that both were true. Appropriating a Sumerian legend of a she-demon, they concluded that Chapter 1’s female was Adam’s rebellious first wife, Lilith, who disdained his authority and abandoned him. In Chapter 2, God tries to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. The woman fashioned from Adam’s own bone is merely his “help meet”—so subservient she doesn’t even get a proper name until after she also proves too disobedient and seductive to control and gets them booted from the garden.
And us, too, so the tale goes—but that may well be why both creation myths are included in Genesis. Taken together, they reflect an evolutionary truth sensed by whoever compiled the Bible from collective memories inherited through their forebears’ stories and perhaps even through their cells and genes. In one version, we had the whole Earth’s bounty to pluck for our nourishment. (Archeology, littered with spear points, choppers, and blades, belies the vegetarianism, which probably seeped into the account much later, during the time of Isaiah: an ardent herbivore who condemned animal sacrifice and who prophesized a post-Messianic paradise where wolves would dwell among lambs and leopards lie peacefully with kids.)
But in version two, we are no longer hunter-gatherers. We’re stewards of orchards, tillers of soil, and pastoralists of the cattle that Adam named. Thus was born agriculture. Yet by giving us a garden, was the Lord setting us up for a Fall?
To grow, conveniently close at hand, food that we once roamed hither and yon to scrounge might have seemed to our ancestors an astonishing improvement over what Chapter 1’s God—or gods, or Mother Nature—had originally given us. But since a few farmers and herdsmen can feed many, the concentration of sustenance eventually led to concentrations of people. Soon our increasing numbers had to seek more fields and pastures, but they found that the greater world wasn’t all an oasis like Eden. Before long, as Genesis recounts repeatedly, people were warring over the choicest lands, and especially over water. This has not abated.
What Genesis doesn’t mention, of course, is that we were fighting long before we were human: Our chimpanzee cousins have never traded foraging in trees for working the soil, but they battle for territory anyhow, as our common primate ancestors also surely did. What sets us apart from them, however, is what else agriculture ignited.
Once farming and grazing were established, for the first time in our or any species’ history, a significant portion of the population didn’t have to spend all day finding food. Gradually people devised new things to do for a living: from artisanship to architecture to trade, from prostitution to priesthood. Soon many of us lived farther from crops and livestock and nearer to each other, in settlements, then villages, then cities. Whatever grief early urban dwellers might have sustained for some fabled, lost Edenic profusion gave way to the thrill of something entirely new: civilization.
A New Adam and Eve in the South Iraqi Marshes. Photo by Meridel Rubinstein from Eden Turned on Its Side. Long before that happened, successive waves of Homo sapiens had begun dispersing from our African origins. By fifty thousand years ago, we had spread all the way to Australia—and, by about fourteen thousand years ago, to the Americas. As a result, civilization emerged independently in several places. Among the first to appear was likely the one in the fertile crescent that our prehistoric ancestors followed from Africa into Asia. As we continue to learn about it, it turns out that Eden may be more than just a metaphor.
Genesis locates the Garden of Eden quite precisely, near the confluence of four rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates—whose joint Mesopotamian valley is often called civilization’s cradle—and the Gihon and Pison. The 1611 English-language King James Bible placed the Gihon across the Red Sea in Ethiopia, rather far from Mesopotamia. But several modern scholars believe that its translators confused Ethiopia’s ancient name, Cush, with a similar Hebrew name for the land of the Kashshites, who lived in what is now Iran’s Zagros Mountains. From there a substantial river, the Karun, flows southward, reaching a delta just above the Persian Gulf at a point almost directly opposite Saudi Arabia and Kuwait’s north-flowing Wadi Al-Batin.
That point is sixty miles below where the Tigris and Euphrates meet today, but back then—as noted by archaeologists who contend that the Karun and Wadi Al-Batin are the Bible’s Gihon and Pison—local topography was far different.
Until about eleven thousand years ago, repeated Pleistocene glaciations locked much of the world’s water into ice sheets, and oceans were hundreds of feet lower than today. When the first Homo sapiens reached the Persian Gulf, its upper third was well above sea level. British archaeologist Jeffrey Rose calls it the Gulf Oasis: a luxuriant delta, continuously fed by nutrient-rich sediments borne by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Al-Batin.
For hunter-gatherers, it would have been a paradise. But post-Pleistocene warming, which allowed their descendants to learn how to farm local wild wheat and legumes, also meant that to the north, vast glaciers were melting. As the thawing accelerated, worldwide coastal flooding commenced. At its peak, eight thousand years ago, Persian Gulf waters were encroaching so fast, according to American archaeologist and Middle East specialist Juris Zarins, that with each generation they advanced several kilometers farther inland. By the time civilization awakened in its cradle a millennium later, paradise had been lost beneath rising seas.
Fall and flood: memories passed from prehistoric ancestors to Mesopotamia’s Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, who passed them on to the Hebrews, and to us. Today, the last traces we have of the oasis that inspired them are some lush wetlands in Iraq’s Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, upstream of that now-submerged Eden. During the 1990s these rare marshes were also nearly lost, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tried to drain them to expel Shia rebels. But following his ousting, a courageous local and international effort has recovered almost half of them.
Staunching that ecological disaster is one of the few encouraging stories from that tortured region in recent years—but unless we act decisively, it could prove in vain, as ice is melting again. In an elaborate, circuitous lineage that humanity has confected, agriculture begat civilization, which begat industrialization, which inevitably—some might say incestuously—begat industrialized agriculture. Force-feeding soil with chemical fertilizer, and genetically developing hybrid grains with many extra kernels per stalk, we multiplied our foodstuffs far beyond what nature ever could supply. But unintentionally this unprecedented abundance also multiplied ourselves.
Averting famine means more people live to beget more people. And so human numbers quadrupled during the past century—the most abnormal population leap for any large species in the history of biology. With all of us hooked on energy, the exhaust from our swollen industrial civilization keeps turning up the heat, forcing seawater up river deltas and over coastlines. If the result of Adam and Eve’s original sin was procreation, here we are again, headed for another fall.
Pushed to this modern brink, more than ever we long to reclaim the fresh hope of Eden. Yet lest we despair, it’s comforting to realize that one day this Earth will surely see Eden restored.
Should our yearning help us muster the environmental wisdom and the will to act upon it, we’ll do whatever it takes to bring humans back into balance with the rest of nature.
Or, should we fail, we’ll drag many more species and much priceless Earthly beauty down with us. But not forever. This planet has endured enormous losses and massive extinctions before, from cataclysmic volcanic eruptions to colliding asteroids—yet each time, life, miraculously resilient, has rebounded, lovelier than ever. As it will again.
One way or another, we’ll be there too. Either we’ll have survived our excesses, and, like Noah, saved enough animals to give our own species another chance—or, like Adam, we will have returned to the dust from which we sprang.
Copyright Alan Weisman 2018
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The Homelands Blog
Alan Weisman: Have fewer kids
This month, as part of a special issue on the environment, VICE Magazine asked leading thinkers to weigh in with their ideas about what to do about climate change. Below is Homelands’ Alan Weisman‘s essay, based …
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The Homelands Blog
History’s most important invention
What was the most important invention in human history? The printing press? Antibiotics? Nope, says Alan Weisman in this talk from TEDxSitka. And he has a couple of simple ideas for how to undo its damage.
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The Homelands Blog
“Countdown” wins LA Times Book Prize
Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman’s “Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?” was awarded the 2013 LA Times Book Prize in the science and technology category. “Countdown” was also named the best general nonfiction book of …
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The Homelands Blog
Alan Weisman on Maher’s Real Time tonight
Homelands co-founder and senior editor Alan Weisman will be on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher tonight at 10 pm EDT. Alan will be talking to Maher about his latest book, Countdown: Our Last, Best …
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The Homelands Blog
Erdrich: “Countdown” is “world-changing”
The novelist Louise Erdrich has written a glowing review of Alan Weisman’s Countdown for her blog, Birchbark. She calls the book “urgent, eloquent, harrowing yet hopeful.” Please read this book. Take your time. You will …
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Alan Weisman
Special Projects
Countdown
Alan Weisman
Special Projects
Countdown
In this monumental piece of reporting, Alan Weisman travels to more than 20 countries, beginning in Israel and Palestine and ending in Iran, on an urgent search for ways to restore the balance between our species’ population and our planet’s capacity to sustain us.
In his bestselling book The World Without Us, Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman considered how the Earth could heal and even refill empty niches if relieved of humanity’s constant pressures. Behind that groundbreaking thought experiment was his hope that we would be inspired to find a way to add humans back to this vision of a restored, healthy planet – only in harmony, not mortal combat, with the rest of nature.With a million more of us every 4½ days on a planet that’s not getting any bigger, prospects for a sustainable human future seem ever more in doubt. For this long awaited follow-up book, Weisman traveled to more than 20 countries to ask what experts agreed were the probably the most important questions on Earth – and also the hardest: How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing? How robust must the Earth’s ecosystem be to assure our continued existence? Can we know which other species are essential to our survival? And, how might we actually arrive at a stable, optimum population, and design an economy to allow genuine prosperity without endless growth?
By vividly detailing the burgeoning effects of our cumulative existence, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable, practical, and affordable way of returning our planet and our presence on it to balance. The result is a landmark work of reporting: devastating, urgent, and, ultimately, deeply hopeful.
Countdown was the winner of the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for science writing, the 2013 Paris Book Festival Prize for nonfiction, the 2014 Nautilus Gold Book Award, and the Population Institute’s 2014 Global Media Award for best book. It was a finalist for the Orion Prize and the Books for a Better Life Award.
Reviews
“[Countdown] details the burgeoning effects that human population growth has on our environment. Weisman reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable way of balancing this impact.” – Mother Earth News
“Alan Weisman’s comprehensive and wide-ranging Countdown is the best, most important book on this vital topic in years and demands to be read by all.” – Edd Doerr, Secular Humanist
“[Countdown] takes the reader on an exploratory global tour with Weisman to see how different cultures, religions, nationalities and tribes view childbearing and population growth and how they are coping with increasing strains on cropland, water supply, biodiversity and public health… I’d recommend it to teachers, students, or anyone looking to learn more about our rapidly growing world while enjoying a page-turner with a diverse cast of characters.” – Population Education
“Please read this book. Take your time. You will weep and yet be cheered. As Alan said when he was here in Minneapolis, ‘there are saints out there’ so let’s support what they are doing and gain a little grace, each one of us.” – Louise Erdrich
“Alan Weisman’s Countdown is rich, subtle and elaborate. His magisterial work should be the first port of call for anyone interested in the relationship between population and the environment… It’s a tightly argued, fast-paced adventure that crosses the planet in search of contrasts.” – Literary Review
“His gift as a writer with a love of science is in drawing links for readers on how everything in our world is connected – in this case, population, consumption and the environment…The pleasure in reading Countdown is in the interplay of interviews with experts and with everyday working people around the world, all trying to figure out the size of family they want. Even the experts reveal themselves as a humane and committed lot.” – The Toronto Star
“Countdown is a gripping narrative by a fair-minded investigative journalist who interviewed dozens of scientists and experts in various fields in 21 countries. “ – Wall Street Journal
“Weisman makes a powerful case that the best way to manage the global population is by empowering women, through both education and access to contraception – so that they can make more informed choices about family size and the kind of lives they want for themselves and their children.” – Mother Jones
“He makes a strong case for slowing global population growth – and even for reducing overall population numbers – as a prerequisite for achieving a sustainable future…. Weisman’s emphasis on expanding access to contraception as the next-best strategy is both pragmatic and workable, as past efforts have shown. It is to be hoped that his message may be heeded sooner rather than later.” – Nature
“If, as Weisman posits, population growth is inextricably linked in today’s world with national security, what’s the solution? One answer on offer is through family planning development initiatives and women’s empowerment.” – US News and World Report
“A must read for all those who are concerned about the human prospect.” – The Huffington Post
“Spirited descriptions, a firm grasp of complex material, and a bomb defuser’s steady precision make for a riveting read…. Weisman’s cogent and forthright global inquiry, a major work, delineates how education, women’s equality, and family planning can curb poverty, thirst, hunger, and environmental destruction. Rigorous and provoking.” – Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“This is not a jeremiad but a realistic, vividly detailed exploration of the greatest problem facing our species.” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Provocative and sobering, this vividly reported book raises profound concerns about our future.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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The Homelands Blog
Alan Weisman’s “Countdown” launches today
We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, by Homelands senior producer and co-founder Alan Weisman. You should be able to find it in bookshops today, and if …
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The Homelands Blog
“Countdown” praised for message of hope
We can’t wait for Homelands co-founder and senior producer Alan Weisman‘s latest book to hit the shelves on September 24. It’s called Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? and it’s been getting terrific reviews. “Spirited …
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The Homelands Blog
When it comes to feeding the world, nothing will save us
One of the goals of the “Food for 9 Billion” project has been to show that keeping our growing number of selves fed (sustainably, equitably, healthily) is more than just a technical challenge. That’s because …
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The Homelands Blog
“Food for 9 Billion” reaching millions on air and online
We wanted to catch you up on the “Food for 9 Billion” project, which has been taking most of our attention lately. As loyal readers will know, Ff9B asks what has to happen for the …
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The Homelands Blog
“Food for 9 Billion” blog up and posting
The “Food for 9 Billion” blog is now live. It actually has been for a little while, but we didn’t tell anyone. You can see recent posts about World Water Day, the possibility that the …
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The Homelands Blog
More food for thought on population
It was great to see National Catholic Reporter blogger Jamie Manson‘s thoughtful response to Sam Eaton’s PBS NewsHour story about food and family planning in the Philippines. It’s worth taking a look at the comments, too, …
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The Homelands Blog
And here are the links to the Philippines stories…
Rather than revise our previous post, we thought we’d give you a little list of links to today’s stories on Marketplace and PBS NewsHour, and to some of the extra elements that went live today. …
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The Homelands Blog
Double shot of Ff9B on TV and radio today
Today is sort of a coming out for the “Food for 9 Billion” project, with features airing on American Public Media’s Marketplace and PBS NewsHour. Both stories look at the links between population growth and …
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Sam Eaton
Food for 9 Billion
Philippines: Too Many Mouths?
Sam Eaton
Food for 9 Billion
Philippines: Too Many Mouths?
Once a leading rice producer, the Philippines can no longer feed itself. That leaves two options: increase supply or try to do something about demand.
In the 1960s, the Philippines was one of the world’s leading rice producers. Since then its population has more than doubled and the country can no longer feed itself. Not only has demand for food shot up, but farmland has been lost to development. This has put pressure on all the country’s basic life-support systems. It is felt most acutely by the poorest families.
While most of the countries in Southeast Asia have taken decisive action to slow population growth, the Catholic Church in the Philippines has resisted any form of population control. But some politicians are responding to a clamor among their constituents for family planning services.
The Philippines has one of the highest population growth rates in all of Southeast Asia. Its population, today just shy of 100 million, is expected to double by the end of the century.Photo: Sam EatonGovernment warehouses, like this one, store imported rice. The Philippines imports more rice than any other nation on the planet in order to feed its growing population.Photo: Sam EatonScientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines are scrambling to introduce higher-yielding rice varieties.Photo: Sam EatonMany farmers in the Philippines are poor -- with few tools at their disposal to boost rice yields.Photo: Sam EatonRice is the staple food of the Philippines.Photo: Sam EatonThe maternity ward at the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Manila is packed beyond capacity with new mothers who have no choice but to share the limited number of beds. More than 2 million babies are born every year in the Philippines.Photo: Sam EatonPopulation growth among the poor in the Philippines, where birth control remains largely out of reach, is about four times higher than the rest of the country.Photo: Sam EatonThe price of rice remains high, with poor Filipinos spending as much as 70 percent of their income on food.Photo: Sam Eaton -
Sam Eaton
Food for 9 Billion
Turning the Population Tide
Sam Eaton
Food for 9 Billion
Turning the Population Tide
When Filipino fishing families got access to birth control, the effects were dramatic: more food, kids in school, and a new will to defend their reefs.
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The Homelands Blog
The population elephant
A few comments on Marketplace’s story page for the first piece in the Food for 9 Billion series talk about the need to control population. It’s an important point, and one of our upcoming pieces, …
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Cecilia Vaisman, Nancy Postero
Searching for Solutions
Brazil’s Birth Control Crusader
Cecilia Vaisman, Nancy Postero
Searching for Solutions
Brazil’s Birth Control Crusader
In northwestern Brazil, a controversial doctor is on a mission to lower birth rates.
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Cecilia Vaisman, Nancy Postero
Searching for Solutions
Norplant
Cecilia Vaisman, Nancy Postero
Searching for Solutions
Norplant
In India and Brazil, population control advocates have come into conflict with feminists over the contraceptive drug Norplant, considered by some to be among the most effective birth control methods available.
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Cecilia Vaisman, Nancy Postero
Searching for Solutions
Family Planning in India
Cecilia Vaisman, Nancy Postero
Searching for Solutions
Family Planning in India
With funding from USAID, Indian health officials have launched a massive new family planning effort in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most densely populated state.
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Sandy Tolan
Searching for Solutions
Food for a Billion Indians
Sandy Tolan
Searching for Solutions
Food for a Billion Indians
It’s growing increasingly difficult for food production to keep pace with population growth. In India, failure could spell disaster.
