WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

This morning on my way to work, I caught the tail end of Anna Maria Tremonti's morning show on the CBC. She was hosting a debate between David Morley, the President and CEO of Save the Children Canada and Arthur Schafer, an ethics consultant for the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg. They were discussing the increased level of premature births worldwide. Arthur Schafer raised the issue that perhaps, in the extreme cases when the prognosis is pretty well hopeless, the lucky parents may be those whose child was not born within easy distance of a neonatal care facility. As Anna Maria succinctly put it, "You're saying that because we have the technology, we try to save lives that we shouldn't save. You know what you are saying is very provocative."

This issue of who lives and who dies, who can have more children and who should have less children, is also beginning to raise its head in the climate change movement. On Sept. 29th, Andrew Freeman of the Washington Post wrote Wear a Condom... Save the Planet?—a post that reviews the reductions in climate change gases that could be achieved by reducing our global population. He concludes that:

Recent studies show that family planning could be a money-saver compared to other ways of mitigating climate change. One of the studies, commissioned by the group Optimum Population Trust, concluded that every seven dollars spent on family planning would reduce more than one ton of carbon dioxide emissions, whereas it would take $32 in investments in low-carbon energy technologies to reduce the same amount of emissions.

Should family planning be included in any policy related to climate change? At present, according to Worldwatch Institute, global spending on contraceptive supplies and services totaled just $338 million in 2007, less than half that of 1995. Freeman goes on to say, "The issue is a political lightning rod." Apparently, so is his post, which was followed by a disclaimer stating, "The views expressed here are the author's alone and do not represent any position of the Washington Post, its news staff or the Capital Weather Gang". The disclaimer does not appear on any other blog entries on the page.

Global population is a serious consideration for the future of our ecosystem. We have been debating this issue since at least 1972 when the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, and yet solutions continue to evade us as we become embroiled in the emotional debates around reproductive choice, euthanasia and quality of life. The issue is so gnarly that some environmentalists refuse to discuss it.

Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance, calls it, "Talking population with the old men". She believes that we need to talk openly about this issue and that we need to listen to all perspectives. She describes her own as, "the perspective of a mother who believes her children are the greatest gift she could ever receive." Astyk says, "We need to talk about population but what we include and what we exclude, how we think about religion, politics, war, justice, sex and everything else has to come with us to the table." Above all, she says, we need to protect human dignity by affording people the ability to choose how to use their portion of global resources by creating cultures that will ensure everyone receives their own fair share.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. Should family planning and limits to population growth form part of our climate change strategy? Leave your feedback in the comments section below.