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senting a decline in the average number of children per woman from 6.1 to 3.8,^ meant, in part due to population momentum, that the doubling time only stretched during this period from 33 years to 39 years.° It's just a little higher now. But even should the U.N. plan fully succeed, there would still be almost half again as many people on the earth as there are now by the time a child born now is middle-agedâ€"and this is only if the plan fully succeeds. Ehrlich laments our incapacity to react to long-term processes and to comprehend the speed of growth, and points to a common error in our thinking. Imagine a pond weed, he says, taking a classic example, that doubles every 24 hours and will cover the whole pond in 30 days; how much of the pond does it cover on the 29th day?' Most people will intuitively visualize a pond nearly entirely covered by the weed as the final day approaches, though the correct answer, of course, is only half. We are just like this about population: we do not intuitively grasp what it means to speak of population doubling and we do not realize that exponential growth contains the potential for "big surprises""; that is, we do not realize that if we do not experience our world as on the brink of disaster now, that does not mean that disaster is not far away. (In Utah, we seem to notice rapid population growth only as a function of the influx of Californians, but do not seem to acknowledge that it is our own reproductive growth rates that have such great potential for population momentum.) But the neoMalthusians are not the only ones with a doomsday scenario to play before our eyes; the feminists have one too, though I think even the more radical forms of feminist critique I am describing here could make more of this than they do. If one is concerned with threats to reproductive freedom, there is a disturbing example already available: China, with its "one-child" program of involuntary, forcibly imposed family-size limitations. Feminists and others have, of course, been pointing to the abuses China's one-child policy engenders, like female infanticide and forced abortion, but I do not think theyâ€"or anyone elseâ€"adequately consider the possibility that China's mandated form of population control will be adopted as a model for other popula- ...8... |
