Can We Afford So Many Americans?

by Dr. Norman Myers

The US [population] growth rate is 1.24 percent and far and away the highest among developed countries, which average 0.1 percent. It is even higher than China's. Only around half is made up of births, the rest being due to immigration. All the same, American women produce an average of 2.1 children, by contrast with 1.5 for most developed countries; the US's year 2000 birth rate was the highest since 1971. Of US births today, 26 percent rank as unplanned and 50 percent of those are unwanted, both proportions putting the country in a league of its own among developed countries. In France the amounts are 15 percent and 25 percent, roughly mirroring those of other developed countries. During the 1990s the US population grew by 13 percent--the largest 10-year population increase ever. Can the country consider itself a truly developed nation with such a large proportion of its population growth being "accidental?"

Yet ...the US has no population policy, nor has it any thought of producing one. It even supplies munificent cash payments for a third child. Meantime its growth rate means that, if it persists, the US population (already the fourth biggest in the world) will soar to well over twice its present 285 million by the time today's child becomes a grandparent. Is this prospect what the future grandchildren--or even today's Americans--want? According to a Roper public opinion survey, 72 percent of Americans worry that overpopulation will become "a serious problem," and 59 percent think the US population is too big already....How about reducing the 4.3 million births each year? Yet a comprehensive population policy remains an absolute no-no.

Consider too the US's position among the family of nations. With only 4.6 percent of the world's population, it produces a whopping 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions which contribute half of global warming processes. Put another way, an average American consumes six times more fossil fuels, with all the pollution they cause, than the global average. He or she consumes at least 50 times more goods and services than an average Bangladeshi, including water, grain, wood, steel and coal. Of course, the first four of these can be used indefinitely through recycling and other renewability technologies; regrettably they generally aren't. In any case, America's agriculture, proclaimed the most bountiful in the world and sufficient to supply surplus food to over 100 nations, is not nearly so productive as it might seem. To grow one calorie of grain takes 10 calories of fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, machinery fuel and the like. Truly, American agriculture is a case of "eating oil," and it is anything but sustainable in the long run, partly because of its over-loading of croplands and partly because over half of America's oil now comes from other nations, many of them less than friendly to the US.

All in all, the US causes more damage to the world's environments than China and India with their combined populations of 2.3 billion--eight times as many people.

Few people in Bangladesh--or in Cambodia, Madagascar, Bolivia and a good number of other countries for that matter--drive gas-guzzling cars, jet around the world, consume lots of grain-raised meat every day, enjoy food that has traveled an average of over 1000 miles to reach meal tables, sport several TVs with standby switches left on permanently, accumulate piles of plastic junk and generate waste that loads landfills to bursting point. Few countries have desertified so much of their territory as has the western US through overgrazing by livestock. Yet all these activities are called "growth." Key question: Can the US--and the world--afford so many Americans?

Dr. Myers is a Fellow of Oxford University. He was a Senior Advisor to the World Conference on Population and Development, and to the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Reprinted with permission from Population Press, www.popco.org