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It is a tragic measure of how
far the world has changed — and the infinite
capacity of modern man for taking offence — that there are no
two subjects that can get you more swiftly into political
trouble than motherhood and apple pie.
As for
motherhood — the fertility of the human race — we are getting
to the point where you simply can't discuss it, and we are
thereby refusing to say anything sensible about the biggest
single challenge facing the Earth; and no, whatever it may now
be conventional to say, that single biggest challenge is not
global warming. That is a
secondary challenge. The primary challenge facing our species
is the reproduction of our species itself.
Depending on how fast you read, the population of the
planet is growing with every word that skitters beneath your
eyeball. There are more than 211,000 people being added every
day, and a population the size of Germany every year.
As someone who
has now been travelling around the world for decades, I see
this change, and I feel it. You can smell it in the traffic
jams of the Middle East. You can see it as you fly over Africa
at night, and you see mile after mile of fires burning red in
the dark, as the scrub is removed to make way for human
beings.
You can see it
in the satellite pictures of nocturnal Europe, with the whole
place lit up like a fairground. You can see it in the crazy
dentition of the Shanghai skyline, where new skyscrapers are
going up round the clock.
You can see it
as you fly over Mexico City, a vast checkerboard of
smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to
the other; and when you look down on what we are doing to the
planet, you have a horrifying vision of habitations
multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.
The world's population is now 6.7 billion, roughly
double what it was when I was born. If I live to be in my
mid-eighties, then it will have trebled in my lifetime.
The UN last year
revised its forecasts upwards, predicting that there will be
9.2 billion people by 2050, and
I simply cannot understand why no one discusses this impending
calamity, and why no world statesmen have the guts to treat
the issue with the seriousness it deserves.
How the hell can
we witter on about tackling global warming, and reducing
consumption, when we are continuing to add so relentlessly to
the number of consumers? The
answer is politics, and political cowardice.
There was a
time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when people such as my father,
Stanley, were becoming interested in demography, and the UN
would hold giant conferences on the subject, and it was
perfectly respectable to talk about saving the planet by
reducing the growth in the number of human beings.
But over the
years, the argument changed, and
certain words became taboo, and certain concepts became
forbidden, and we have reached the stage where the very
discussion of overall human fertility — global motherhood —
has become more or less banned.
We seem to have
given up on population control, and all sorts of explanations
are offered for the surrender. Some say Indira Gandhi gave it
all a bad name, by her demented plan to sterilise Indian men
with the lure of a transistor radio.
Some attribute
our complacency to the Green Revolution, which seemed to prove
Malthus wrong. It became the received wisdom that the world's
population could rise to umpteen billions, as mankind learnt
to make several ears of corn grow where one had grown before.
And then, in recent years, the
idea of global population control has been more or less
stifled by a pincer movement from the Right and the Left.
American Right-wingers
disapprove of anything that sounds like birth control,
and so George W. Bush withholds the tiny contribution America
makes to the UN Fund for Population Activities, regardless of
the impact on the health of women in developing countries.
As for the Left, they dislike
suggestions of population control because they seem to smack
of colonialism and imperialism and telling the Third World
what to do; and so we have reached the absurd
position in which humanity bleats about the destruction of the
environment, and yet there is not a peep in any communiqué
from any summit of the EU, G8 or UN about the population
growth that is causing that destruction.
The debate is
surely now unavoidable. Look at food prices, driven ever
higher by population growth in India and China. Look at the
insatiable Chinese desire for meat, which has pushed the cost
of feed so high that Vladimir Putin has been obliged to
institute price controls in the doomed fashion of Diocletian
or Edward Heath.
Even in Britain,
chicken farmers are finding that the cost of chickenfeed is no
longer exactly chickenfeed, and, though the food crisis may
once again be solved by the wit of man, the damage to the
environment may be irreversible.
It is time we had a grown-up
discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this
country and on this planet. Do we want the
south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated
major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?
This is not,
repeat not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a
sense it does not matter where people come from, and with
their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the
economy.
This is a
straightforward question of population, and the eventual size
of the human race.
All the evidence
shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world
poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation
and access to birth control.
Isn't it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started
talking about the real number one issue?
Boris
Johnson is MP for Henley |
