Freedom [111]
“You should come with us to South America,” Lalitha said. “We drive along these little roads, there’s terrible exhaust from bad engines and too-cheap gasoline, the hillsides are all denuded, and the families all have eight or ten children, it’s really sickening. You should come along with us sometime and see if you like what you see down there. Because it’s coming soon to a theater near you.”
Crackpot, Katz thought. Hot little crackpot.
Walter handed him a laminated bar chart. “In America alone,” he said, “the population’s going to rise by fifty percent in the next four decades. Think about how crowded the exurbs are already, think about the traffic and the sprawl and the environmental degradation and the dependence on foreign oil. And then add fifty percent. And that’s just America, which can theoretically sustain a larger population. And then think about global carbon emissions, and genocide and famine in Africa, and the radicalized dead-end underclass in the Arab world, and overfishing of the oceans, illegal Israeli settlements, the Han Chinese overrunning Tibet, a hundred million poor people in nuclear Pakistan: there’s hardly a problem in the world that wouldn’t be solved or at least tremendously alleviated by having fewer people. And yet”—he gave Katz another chart—“we’re going to add another three billion by 2050. In other words, we’re going to add the equivalent of the world’s entire population when you and I were putting our pennies in UNICEF boxes. Any little things we might do now to try to save some nature and preserve some kind of quality of life are going to get overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, because people can change their consumption habits—it takes time and effort, but it can be done—but if the population keeps increasing, nothing else we do is going to matter. And yet nobody is talking about the problem publicly. It’s the elephant in the room, and it’s killing us.”
“This is all sounding more familiar,” Katz said. “I’m remembering some rather lengthy discussions.”
“I was definitely into it in college. But then, you know, I did some breeding myself.”
Katz raised his eyebrows. Breeding was an interesting way of speaking of one’s wife and children.
“In my own way,” Walter said, “I guess I was part of a larger cultural shift that was happening in the eighties and nineties. Overpopulation was definitely part of the public conversation in the seventies, with Paul Ehrlich, and the Club of Rome, and ZPG. And then suddenly it was gone. Became just unmentionable. Part of it was the Green Revolution—you know, still plenty of famines, but not apocalyptic ones. And then population control got a terrible name politically. Totalitarian China with its one-child policy, Indira Gandhi doing forced sterilizations, American ZPG getting painted as nativist and racist. The liberals got all scared and silent. Even the Sierra Club got scared. And the conservatives, of course, never gave a shit in the first place, because their entire ideology is selfish short-term interest and God’s plan and so forth. And so the problem became this cancer that you know is growing inside you but you decide you’re just not going to think about.”
“And this has what to do with your cerulean warbler?” Katz said.
“It has everything to do with it,” Lalitha said.
“Like I said,” Walter said, “we’ve decided to take some liberties with interpreting the mission of the Trust, which is to ensure the survival of the warbler. We keep walking the problem back, walking it back. And what we finally arrive at, in terms of a final cause or an unmoved mover, in 2004, is the fact that it’s become totally toxic and uncool to talk about reversing population growth.”
“And so I ask Walter,” Lalitha said, “who is the coolest person you know?”