A sterilizing virus

I recently came across a link to a short story by Gregory Benford, A Desparate Calculus, about a group of scientists who create a contagious virus that has an unusual side effect: it renders its female victims infertile by triggering their ovaries to release all their eggs at once. The virus is generally not fatal (though vulnerable groups such as the elderly might die, as they can in ordinary flu outbreaks every year). The ultimate effect of this is that it will stop most of the next generation being born – though a few women will likely be resistant to its effects.

Given my outlook you can safely guess I didn’t see this scheme as a bad thing :-). I wonder if it would be do-able in reality; obviously it would have ethicists and the general public in hysterics should they find out, so it would need to be implemented surreptitiously. I feel the situation with the world’s rapidly growing population and ongoing biodiversity loss to be urgent enough to justify such a drastic course of action. It would not involve killing vast numbers of people already here, but would prevent (most) future people from being born.

I suppose that measures such as IVF from stored embryos, cloning and artificial wombs could be used to get around the virus, but the last two technologies are not developed and the first can be difficult to achieve.

There would also be issues of body autonomy; the few fertile women might become valued for their wombs, and lose reproductive rights such as access to contraception.

While there are some worthy efforts to give women access to family planning and education in countries that don’t have or allow these, these are just too slow – they may take decades to achieve, if ever. And even in developed countries, women’s access to contraception and abortion are at times under thread from conservative governments – some states in the USA have currently been trying to overturn laws allowing access to these.

Iran going backward

Some dismaying news reported this week was that Iran had gone into panic mode by deciding to abolish its state-sponsored birth control program (mentioned in my 4/2/2009 entry) due to a falling birth rate – its population is currently around 75 million. The usual fear of an aging and decreasing population is a reason given, but by any other definition the program has been successful, with women having access to family planning. Now it looks like that will be made much harder for them. The last thing the country wants is a surplus of young people – that factor is one reason for the revolutions in other Middle Eastern countries. A New York Times article from April, “The Other Arab Spring” notes:

Especially when you consider the other stresses. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London, writing in The Beirut Daily Star in February, pointed out that 12 of the world’s 15 most water-scarce countries – Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine – are in the Middle East, and after three decades of explosive population growth these countries are “set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, one-third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women are reaching reproductive age, or soon will be.” A British Defense Ministry study, he added, “has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 percent – generating an unprecedented ‘youth bulge’.” […]

If you ask “what are the real threats to our security today,” said Brown, “at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilization, and everything begins to unravel?”

Another recent NYT article, “What Can Mississippi Learn From Iran?”, gives some details of Iran’s health care program, which a US state was looking to model for its own.

The Iranian reforms were relatively inexpensive to implement there. It was the early ’80s, just after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s return and the Iranian revolution, which had promised the country’s rural villagers the kind of social justice that had been lacking under the shah. At the time, more than half the population lived outside major cities, in or around more than 60,000 villages. The Iranians built “health houses” to minister to 1,500 people who lived within at most an hour’s walking distance. Each house is a 1,000-square-foot hut equipped with examination rooms and sleeping quarters and staffed by community health workers – one man and one or more women who have been given basic training in preventive health care. They advise on nutrition and family planning, take blood pressure, keep track of who needs prenatal care, provide immunization and monitor environmental conditions like water quality. Crucially, in order to gain trust, the health workers come from the villages they serve.

People who become very sick, or require surgical procedures, are referred up through a single, multitiered system: from health house to rural health center to district hospital. The integrated nature of the system is what makes it unique. Today, 17,000 health houses serve 23 million rural Iranians. Health disparities between rural and urban Iranians have narrowed; the Iranians have reduced rural infant mortality by 75 percent and lowered the birthrate. Iran’s reforms won praise from the World Health Organization, which has long advocated preventive, primary care.

And now they will abandon some or all of that? Utter madness.

African apocalypse

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan showed recently that he realized overpopulation was a timebomb when saying that his country’s citizens should limit the number of children they have. Unfortunately, most of the religious leaders there castigated him on this issue, and having large families is an embedded part of the culture.

Two articles from April also looked at the social and environmental devastation that population growth is causing in Africa (as it is everywhere).

Across sub-Saharan Africa, alarmed governments have begun to act, often reversing longstanding policies that encouraged or accepted large families. Nigeria made contraceptives free last year, and officials are promoting smaller families as a key to economic salvation, holding up the financial gains in nations like Thailand as inspiration.

Nigeria, already the world’s sixth most populous nation with 167 million people, is a crucial test case, since its success or failure at bringing down birthrates will have outsize influence on the world’s population. If this large nation rich with oil cannot control its growth, what hope is there for the many smaller, poorer countries?

“Population is key,” said Peter Ogunjuyigbe, a demographer at Obafemi Awolowo University in the small central city of Ile-Ife. “If you don’t take care of population, schools can’t cope, hospitals can’t cope, there’s not enough housing – there’s nothing you can do to have economic development.”

– “Nigeria Tested by Rapid Rise in Population”, NYT 14/4

If Africa’s population increases according to the UN’s medium prediction, the continent will have about 3.6 billion people by the end of the century – raising its current share of global population from 12 per cent to about one-third. Nevertheless, its population could reach 5.2 billion or 2.4 billion by 2100, depending on whether fertility is 0.5 children above or below the UN’s medium estimate.

The population of the Sahel – those semi-arid countries bordering the Sahara – will double or more by 2050 at exactly the time that global warming is likely to have the harshest effects. As population growth and global warming coincide, the hunger and refugee problems in the Horn of Africa, and type of resource battles seen in Darfur or South Sudan, will multiply.

Worldwide, the UN predicts 15.8 billion humans by the end of the century if average family size remains around 2.6 children per woman, but 6.2 billion if it stabilises at 1.6 children. If fertility levels drop to the replacement level of 2.1, then there will be 10 billion people. (NS)

“How to defuse sub-Saharan Africa’s population bomb”, New Scientist 26/4

Wildlife there is already under serious threat; a lot of animal species are increasingly being corralled into wildlife parks that are surrounded by farmland, unable to traverse their ancient migratory routes. It is depressing to contemplate that the continent where humans first evolved – our ancient first homeland – may ultimately be turned into a wasteland by our species because we won’t or can’t restrict our numbers.

1/7:

Birth control key

MATT Wade’s report (“Children near starvation in world’s largest refugee camp”, 17/7) on the tragedy in Africa’s Dadaab refugee camp is heart-breaking. The clue to the cause of the problem is also in Wade’s report: overpopulation. One of the refugees has nine children, another has six children below the age of eight. The drought has dramatically exacerbated an untenable situation.

The only solution to poverty in countries such as Somalia is birth control. Developed countries give hundreds of billions of dollars a year for the economic development of poor countries. Any progress they make is swallowed up by the increasing population and the end result is increasing poverty.

It is time for us to reassess our options.

– Bill Mathew, Parkville

As always, the trinity of health care, family planning and education for women is the only long-term way to break the poverty and famine cycle in developing countries. Aid should be given only if these will be implemented also, otherwise such humanitarian disasters will continue.

“The Other Arab Spring”, NYT, 7/4. This opinion piece by Thomas L. Friedman notes that the revolutions that have shaken the Middle East since 2011 can be attrituted to the high population growth in the region, especially a high and unemployable youth population.

All these tensions over land, water and food are telling us something: The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well. If we focus only on the former and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilize these societies. […]

If you ask “what are the real threats to our security today,” said Brown, “at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilization, and everything begins to unravel?”

Damned if they do or don’t

Article reproduced below in case it disappears:

Study warns aborting girl fetuses will leave China with 24 million more men than women by 2020

Beijing – Abortions of girl fetuses are expected to leave China with 24 million more men than women over the next decade, according to a study that warns the imbalance will dash many young men’s chance at marriage and lead to increased crime.

China enforces strict family planning controls, including limiting most couples to having one child. Because of a traditional preference for male heirs, many families terminate pregnancies of girl babies in order to be able to continue trying for a boy. Infanticide of baby girls has also become a problem.

The study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, reported in Chinese state media this week, specifically said such preferences were behind the ballooning imbalance.

“Sex-specific abortions are extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas,” the CASS report said. “The phenomenon of abortions of female fetuses is very serious.”

China bans tests to determine the fetus’ sex for non-medical reasons, but they are still commonly done, mainly by underground private clinics in the countryside.

The report said the male-female ratio at birth in China was 119 males to 100 females, with the gap as high as 130 males for every 100 females in some provinces. In industrialized countries, the ratio is 107 to 100.

The report is similar to other studies in recent years that warn of serious social problems because of the gap.

The official Global Times newspaper quoted researcher Wang Guangzhou as saying men with lower incomes would have trouble finding spouses in rural areas, leading to crime problems. The newspaper also said abductions and trafficking of women were widespread in areas with excess numbers of men.

The CASS study mirrors a report published last April in the BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, that said China has 32 million more young men than young women because parents facing strict birth limits abort female fetuses to have a son.

The BMJ study found even higher gender ratios, with 140 boys for every 100 girls in the 1-4 age range in Jiangxi and Henan provinces. The figures were based on data from 2005.

China imposed strict birth controls in the 1970s to limit growth of its huge population, noting that resources, especially land, were increasingly strained and that changes were needed in its new push to modernize. The government says the controls have prevented an additional 400 million births in the world’s most populous country of 1.3 billion.

Seems China can’t win either way – it has to get its population growth under control, but cultural preferences lead to a gender imbalance that could result in social instability. I have remarked in previous entries (2/6/2008, 18/1/2009) that a brutally pragmatic solution would be to cull the surplus males (wars do that anyway, in an uncontrolled manner).

“MPs call for 70m population cap”, BBC News, 6/1. UK politicians seem to belatedly be realizing that their island might be a tad overcrowded at 61 million or so. It will be even worse at 70 million! Public resentment at high immigration levels is growing, and will result in social unrest if not alleviated.

“It’s ‘dog eat dog’ on London’s overcrowded Tube: report”, The Age, 2/12/2009. An earlier article describing how overcrowding, here on the railway underground network, leads to a “survival of the fittest” attitude. I’ll again link to the article, “London’s a rat hole”.

Population overload

“Population overload”, BBC Focus, issue 207. This article provides an overview of the population growth issue, and the problems facing campaigners trying to bring attention to it, noting that fewer people means other social and environmental problems can be alleviated. It also notes that even if reduction measures were put in place soon, growth would still continue for decades due to momentum:

Provided all populations reach a fertility below-replacement level, the UN projects that the world population could peak late in the 21st century, and then begin declining for the first time in hundreds of years. But to achieve that we have to put the brakes on population before 2050. The trouble is, population increase until mid-century cannot be avoided. High fertility in the past, especially in the developing world, has built an inevitable momentum that fuels population growth – like a car braking at high speed, it’s going to take longer to come to a complete stop. There is still a high concentration of women of child-bearing age alive, so even if global fertility rates suddenly dropped to replacement level, it would take ageneration or two for the population to finally stabilise.

Articles from The Age:

“Most back immigration”, 1/12: this only involved a survey of 2000 people; hardly representative. “Migration numbers at record high”, 4/12. Alarming statistics on the yearly immigration rate (500 000!) and high birth rate. This is also making housing impossibly expensive, much to the delight of greedy investors and developers, but few others.

The federal and state governments have strongly supported the surge in immigration, arguing that it adds to Australia’s skilled workforce, diversity and economic strength. Without it, the Australian economy certainly would have gone backwards in the year to June.

Never mind the damned economy, what about keeping Australia liveable?

“Giving women a choice key to family planning”, 3/12.

The key to preventing a near-doubling of global population by 2050 is to enable women in developing nations to choose the size and spacing of their families, according to the United Nations population chief. Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, who heads the the United Nations Population Fund, said research showed about 235 million of the world’s women would like to cap their family sizes but had no access to family planning. Rejecting approaches such as China’s One Child policy, she said that slowing down future population growth could be achieved only through voluntary means.

Nonetheless, the world environmental situation is so dire that limits on the number of children allowed should be considered by governments, no matter how draconian this seems.

“Population control best way to cut emissions”, 4/12. A proposed scheme by the Optimum Population trust to provide contraception to people in poorer countries.

The cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the trust claims that family planning is the cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions. Every £4 ($A7) spent on contraception, it says, saves one tonne of carbon dioxide being added to global warming, but a similar reduction in emissions would require an £8 investment in tree planting, £15 in wind power, £31 in solar energy and £56 in hybrid vehicle technology.

But clueless religious groups oppose this: “But it would be misleading if it was spent in this way. It should go to things like disaster risk reduction, food security and water.” Fewer people competing for food will mean more food and water available to go around.

Repeating history

“Our civilisation will be just as fragile as those before”, The Age, 16/6 (reproduced below). An excellent article pointing out that our modern civilization could go the same way as others before us in history (the ancient Romans, Mayans, those in India and so on) due to resource depletion, environmental damage, greed and hubris. The current situation is unique in that the Earth has never had to cope with the sheer mass of 7 billion people before, nor the immense amounts of waste produced in the form of plastics that will persist for millennia. Our methods of storing information on digital media are fragile and are unlikely to last as long as those of the ancients, who carved their writings and art on stone.

We think of ourselves as more enlightened and aware than previous civilizations, but humans seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over again in history without learning from the past, and we are still doing it. It is a frustrating and avoidable cycle, but one we as a species seem locked into, in our current stage of evolution. Perhaps this is because we do not live that long and so can’t plan for the long-term future centuries or millennia away.

Our civilization will be just as fragile as those before

Geoff Strong
June 16, 2009 – 12:00 a.m.

If it is true all good things must end, I wonder what will be our end. Having stood in the remains of Rome, ancient Greece and the ruined cities of Sri Lanka and India, I have reflected on the fantasy of their invincibility and the truth of their temporary might.

The artefacts of once wondrous civilizations draw me to the one thought: if there are archaeologists in the future, what conclusions will they draw about us? What will there be of value or magnificence in our lives to study?

Most believe this to be the most remarkable civilization ever – yet it could also be one of the most temporary. Technical prowess aside, it is the first with a truly global reach. Its common thread is the business activity that has spread tentacles to most parts of the planet.

But the past year has taught us the hubris of thinking this economic system will survive regardless. Is it unthinkable to wonder whether the whole of our global civilization can fall?

Many of us who grew up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation of the Cold War used to dwell on it all the time. Spike Milligan wrote a satirical play later made into a film entitled The Bed Sitting Room set in post-apocalyptic London nine months after World War Ⅲ. “World War Ⅲ, the Nuclear Misunderstanding, lasted for two minutes and 28 seconds – including the signing of the peace treaty.”

Even Britain has decayed before. As a Roman province its population was thought to be four million, yet after the Norman conquest, the Domesday book of 1086 records a population of less than two million.

Now that the main nuclear annihilation threat comes from the lunatic regime in North Korea, other horsemen have taken the lead in the apocalypse gallop: pandemic disease, economic famine and climate change pestilence.

We forget climate change is not just about a rise in temperature. Victoria’s trauma of Black Saturday in February was as much due to wind as to heat.

The increased power of moving air recently made an impact on one of our civilization’s most potent symbols. During one of the storms to hit south-east Queensland in recent months, a man was killed when a sheet of glass fell from a Gold Coast high-rise building, such was the force of the wind. If there was ever a symbol of the global business civilization, it is the high-rise. Like the pyramids of Egypt and the temples of Greece and Rome, the high-rise is the architectural representation of deepest beliefs – in our case money and the organisations needed to accumulate it.

Some may say they are our temples to greed. They were certainly the real and symbolic target chosen when jihadists attacked the West via the New York World Trade Centre in 2001.

Yet as the storms demonstrate, it takes less than attack by fuel-loaded aircraft to show their fragility. Just as tourists crawl over the skeletal remains of ruined temples and the unearthed pathways of old towns, will there one day be tours to the bony remains of our high-rise cities?

Most of us now feel global warming caused by our species is likely to change this planet into a place more hostile to humans.

Melbourne is growing rapidly and running short of water. We will have to rely on huge amounts of greenhouse-generating electricity for desalination and a similar amount to pump water through the north-south pipeline.

A testament to the importance of water is one of the most wonderful abandoned cities in India, Fatephur Sikri, near Agra. Its magnificent buildings were constructed by Mughal emperor Akbar and served as his empire’s capital from 1571 until 1585, when it was vacated due to an inadequate water supply.

Our civilization also seems to operate in ever-decreasing circles of endurance. Just as we seek to shorten the time it takes to do anything, we seem happy to accept decreasing lifespans of anything we create. At 70 years old, our timber house has lasted twice as long as a builder acquaintance told me is expected from a house built today. New raw-earth housing estates are smothered with brick-clad homes, many dressed up with mock columns and pediments.

But even more alarming is the fragility of the knowledge stored in the way we like to do it now – digitally. Fragments of stone writing from ancient Sumeria or Egypt still give us an understanding of their world. But try getting information from an ancient computer system, such as an early Apple – less than 20 years old but now useless.

What will an archaeologist, a thousand years from now, make of the millions of CDs, DVDs and computer discs unearthed as they sift through the remains of our rubbish tips? The mathematical and electronic wizardry that helped them make sense to us will be long gone.

Geoff Strong is a senior writer.

“Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People?”, Scientific American, 10/6. Feature article in the June 2009 Special Edition. It concludes that empowering women with access to education and family planning will help slow population growth.

Collected letters:

Population fallacy

IT IS a fallacy that we need high population growth to sustain our economy. Denmark has a stable population of 5 million, with a low birth rate and immigration rate. Its unemployment rate is the lowest in the European Union and is lower than Australia’s. The country exports more then it imports, its GDP per capita is similar to ours, and it provides a high level of foreign aid. In Australia we use population growth as an excuse to destroy our environment, our amenity and our democratic processes.

– Jennie Epstein, Little River, 15/6

Dreams shattered, all for Mr. Nice Guy

Your article (Insight, 13/6) portrays Planning Minister Justin Madden as Mr. Nice Guy. Fair suck of the sauce bottle. “Harry” is responsible for the destruction of Marvellous Melbourne, given his fixation with fast-tracking high-rise, high-density developments to accommodate the huge influx of migrants and students, and to make jobs for the construction industry.

His supporters point to European cities as successful examples of high-density living but fail to mention that those city fathers have always provided public gardens for the wellbeing of their citizens.

While our parks, gardens and golf courses are progressively alienated for yet more sports stadiums and housing developments, we are brainwashed into believing that we can no longer dream of owning a house on a quarter-acre block with the Hills hoist and a vegie garden out the back. We have to be content with living in high-rise human warehouses or outer-suburban, featureless gulags. Why should we forgo our dreams just because Madden and his boss, Premier John Brumby, support unsustainable levels of migration to the state and adhere to the fallacious belief that all growth is good?

– Lewis Prichard, Hawthorn, 16/6

“12yo pregnancy: ‘DoCS should have done more’ ”, ABC News, 16/6. In my view the girl should be forced to abort; she is far too young to undergo the stress of pregnancy. The affair is a ridiculous farce; children’s and teenagers’ “rights” are too lenient in Western society.

Small is happy

“One and only: singled out for the special treatment”, The Age, 10/5. This article says that single-child families are increasing (which would seem to conflict with the increasing birth rate?). Having one child is sometimes a deliberate choice, but sometimes because parents are older. Some parents, as featured in the article, have come from large families where they were “lost in the crowd” and conversely want their offspring to have more attention. Small families should be actively encouraged worldwide as this will help reduce population growth – one way would be to provide government benefits for a woman’s first two children, but none after that (those who remarry and want more children would also not receive benefits).

The usual counter-argument is that the old will outnumber the young if this trend continues, and that there won’t be enough tax-paying young people to support previous generations, but it is a demographic trend that governments will just have to deal with. Not all old people are infirm, and they can still make useful contributions to society. Perhaps the idea of a fixed retirement age could be done away with – assuming older people can work in jobs they enjoy.

None of the above is intended to deny that we should plan carefully for the demographics of a population in which the number of older people is steadily rising (as the age-cohorts become more even-sized). But we should remember that the old are in many ways less of a burden than the young. Even in retirement, people are often highly productive, performing a myriad of useful and unpaid services, and deploying the skills and experience of a lifetime. By contrast the young, whether babies or school-age children, are too immature or too busy with their studies to be economically “productive” – and in fact need to be looked after by adults.

– Overloading Australia, page 100

This post at the Public Population Forum unfortunately brings racism into the topic – namely an overused assertion that white people are being “outbred” by people of other colors. She makes the mistake of associating skin color with culture, when they are entirely different things. Here’s how I try to express this:

Racism is defined as discriminating against or disliking a person purely because of their skin color and/or ethnicity. As all humans share the same biological makeup and heritage, such a distinction is superficial; skin color and other physical characteristics evolved to adapt to different locations and climates, and are not reflective of a person’s intelligence (or lack of it!). Therefore, on biological terms, such racism is illogical. It comes from a basic suspicion of people who “look different” from those one grew up with; such aversion can be overcome through education and familiarization.

Culture, however, is a different matter; it is not related to human biology. Some cultures are considered more desirable than others to live in, which is why there tends to be high rates of immigration to the former. Some cultures are just odious (e.g. those which regard women as chattels) and deserve to become extinct. Culture is thus not relevant to a person’s race; people of different skin colors who grow up in a particular culture will share the characteristics of that culture.

The countries with high population growth are often those described as “developing”, which happen to be places like Africa, etc. Women in these countries often do not have access to education and family planning, and their role is primarily to reproduce. This is a cultural feature, one that can be overcome when women are given access to such facilities – something that women in First-World countries (USA, UK, Australia, etc.) take for granted. Educated women will often choose to limit their family size, or decide not to have children, as they have control over their fertility.

China’s surplus males

I have addressed this topic before (2/6/2008 entry), but there have been three articles this week about the potential for social unrest that ensues from a population of single, unemployed young men. The cultural preference for boys in China and the one-child policy means that female foetuses are sometimes aborted.

“Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million”, New York Times, 10/4.

The Chinese government is openly concerned “about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for social stability and security,” the researchers said. But “although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested,” they wrote, China will have too many men for a generation to come.

“With 32.7 Million ‘Excess Males,’ What Will Become of China?”, io9, 14/4.

“Sex Reversal”, Slate, 15/4.

The government is very aware of the problem and has openly expressed concerns about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for societal stability and security. As early as 2000 the government launched a range of policies to specifically counter the sex imbalance, the “care for girls” campaign. This includes changes in laws in areas such as inheritance by females, as well as an educational campaign to promote gender equality. These measures have had some success, with reports of lower sex ratios at birth in targeted localities.

In other words, the quota on children, translated through sexism into a quota on girls, has created a political problem for the government. And this, in turn, has forced the government to confront sexism economically and culturally. This policy change is being driven not by moral enlightenment but by practical necessity. The old problem was too many children. The new problem is too few girls. Without enough girls, the boys become unruly. So the government, following the same collective logic that inspired the one-child policy, has become the world's biggest promoter of sexual equality.

A few commenters remarked that the time-honored method of dealing with a male surplus was a war, though this is somewhat uncontrolled and messy. The other rather drastic solution would be a controlled cull, as I noted in that entry. China can’t afford to relax its population policy if its government is to maintain social stability.

“The cut and thrust of secret men’s business”, The Age, 14/4. A short but positive profile of a doctor who has performed a huge number of vasectomies (13 000 to date!).