It seems inevitable that the world food crisis, combined with climate change and rising energy prices, will spur a renewed and contentious debate over the issue of population.  Before that debate is renewed in its full intensity, everyone should read More:  Population, Nature, and What Women Want, a new book by Robert Engelman, vice president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute. 

What Engelman gives us, and what is so desperately need at this critical juncture in the debate over population, is historical perspective.  His book, in fact, takes up back to our ancestral roots to give us a better understanding of such things as human reproduction, the centuries’ old debate over population, and efforts by governments to “control” population by encouraging human procreation or restricting it.

My father once said to me, “The problem with your generation is that you think you invented sex.”  Along the same lines, it might be said that many of us today believe that birth control is a thoroughly modern invention, but as Engelman makes clear in his book, women throughout history have sought to control their fertility, as well as enhance it.  In response to shrinking resources or deteriorating conditions, women have often sought—though not always successfully—to space or limit their pregnancies.

Engelman, as a result, takes a “Zen’ approach to population. Based upon his historical research and his conversations with women in developing countries, he concludes that:

The best way to “control” population is to give up control, in fact to give control away to those who can best decide for themselves when to bear a child.  Enlightenment will arrive only after one has given up the search, and positive population outcomes only after the forcing stops.

He notes that many women in the world still lack access to modern contraceptive methods and that, if given that access, fertility rates will likely decline further. Giving girls the education they need and the gender equality they deserve, he argues, would also result in lower fertility rates.

At the same time, he voices the conviction that concerns about an eventual population implosion are overblown.  As the planet gets less crowded, he believes that women will want more children, enough at least to keep fertility rates at or near the “replacement rate” needed to stabilize population.

Engelman makes clear, however, that world population may already be, or may soon be, unsustainable. He says, “…the world food situation has become in recent years less reassuring, less comfortably a refutation to Malthus’s prediction….As hazardous as prediction is, it’s getting hard to be confident that farmers and families will easily feed the 9.2 billion people projected to be alive in 2050.”

In the last chapter, he notes that people in developing countries dream of acquiring the necessities that we take for granted. “But what happens,” he asks, “when the dreams of people everywhere become unsustainable—not because of the nature of the dreams, but because the numbers of the dreamers?” 

Good question.  His book, however, may help us to avoid having to answer that question.  Let’s hope.