A Visit to Berkeley
Deleterious consequences ignite
as wastage is excessively consumed--man
exacerbates the need for greater good,
exploits 5 billion people
in a free enterprise.
UC Berkeley was my Alma Mater, so I was naturally delighted when I received an e-mail asking me to give a seminar there. I gladly accepted and presented a lecture entitled "Answering Fundamental Questions and Tracing Evolutionary Pathways Using Bioinformatics." My host, Hiroshi, invited another UC professor, Jeremy, as well as Erwin, a visiting professor from Germany, and Amy, a professor from the Baylor School of Medicine in Houston to dinner following the seminar. I had known all of them previously but hadn't seen them in years, so dinner provided the background for a most pleasant reunion.
As the meal progressed, the conversation turned towards environmental issues, and I was surprised to learn that everyone present agreed that human population control was the number one issue facing the world. Further, we all felt that little could be done to protect the environment as long as the birthrate was out of control. There was a general feeling of gloom and doom as none of us felt that a tangible solution was at hand. I mentioned that I expected it would be no more than 3-4 hundred years before human life would no longer be possible on Earth. My colleague Jeremy immediately challenged this estimate. He pointed out that we have already destroyed over 90% of the world's forests, and that about 2.5% of the remaining forests, an area the size of Venezuela, is being destroyed annually. In a mere 20 years, 50% of the currently remaining forests of today will be gone. The time necessary to restore the 6-12 billion tons of gaseous CO2 entering the atmosphere every year to solid matter will then increase from the current estimate of 100 years to over 200 years. He felt that it would be less than 200 years before the Earth is inhospitable to human and most animal and plant life.
Amy emphasized a different set of disturbing facts. She pointed out that water consumption per person has doubled worldwide just within the last generation, and that the number of calories consumed per person has increased 30% in the same time interval. She noted that while this latter fact had allowed improvement of human health in underdeveloped countries, it's been undermining health in America where one quarter of the U.S. population is dangerously obese. In spite of the fact that agricultural productivity is declining as the underground water supplies are depleted, Americans enjoy eating as a primary pastime while ignoring the deleterious consequences to their health. This we noted while enjoying a sumptuous meal at a rather expensive restaurant. Of course excessive consumption and wastage exacerbate world hunger and environmental problems as the need for greater food productivity stimulates countries and individuals in a free enterprise society to cut down forests and exploit natural wetlands for potential agricultural purposes. Imagine what the pressures will be in 50 years when an estimated 5 billion people, half of the projected world population, may be starving!
One nation that has taken effective measures to control population growth is China. Stability of the Chinese population is largely due to governmentally imposed restrictions. Most importantly, zero population growth has allowed individual citizens to benefit from the economic advances the Chinese have made. By contrast, in India, where in the past eight years the population has increased from 0.8 billion to 1.1 billion, agricultural and industrial improvements have been immediately gobbled up by the burgeoning population, keeping the poverty level deplorably high. It's estimated that in just four more years, the Indian population will surpass that of China where the population is constant at 1.2 billion. No wonder India is so poverty ridden!
Erwin noted that European awareness of serious environmental and population issues is far greater than among Americans, and Hiroshi felt the same to be true in Japan. In fact, both in Japan and in many European countries, concern about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit, together with women's educational efforts, have allowed their populations to stabilize. In some of these countries the death rate actually exceeds the birth rate! Environmental protection legislation is also much stricter in most European countries than in the U.S.
While the trend towards decreased birth rates in Japan and Europe as well as the remarkable advances in China are encouraging, we noted that a stable world population would be insufficient to save our planet. The Earth simply cannot support 6 billion people. We must reduce the human population to a small fraction of the present value if the Earth is to absorb the various types of pollution caused by man and his machines without deleterious consequences. In the absence of population reduction, we can look forward to a time when our beautiful blue skies will be gone, replaced by a hot brown atmosphere, so full of pollutants, that people will have to wear space suits and gas masks to live and breathe.
There was little agreement as to what degree we'd have to reduce the human population to in order to preserve the Earth indefinitely. However, no one felt the planet could support more than one tenth of the present value. In the absence of such an unpopular action, the dominant species of Earth will certainly bring destruction and suffering to the future inhabitants of the planet.
Our discussions over dinner forced me to realize that many intelligent people had recognized the pending environmental crisis long before I became aware of its severity. Why had it taken me so long? Most Americans, including myself, tend to be isolationists, focusing on their own small worlds rather than seeing the whole picture. While an isolationist's approach may have worked for America in the past, it's no longer tenable. We need to gain full awareness of the impact of our activities on the world we live in and act accordingly. Too much depends on it.