From David Richardson, Jersey branch, Population Matters.
KENNETH Boulding, the chief environmental adviser to President Kennedy, once famously said: ‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.’
This statement resonates strongly here in Jersey where we have more than our fair share of economists and accountants. Developers want more land to build on, economists sanction this demand in the name of ‘economic progress’ and our politicians, who are supposed to be guardians of our Island and society, duck their custodianship responsibilities and so the endless cycle goes on. From past performance, Jersey could surely be labelled as ‘mad’.
However, things are beginning to change and population issues are increasingly reaching the local headlines.
Over an 18-hour period on 15 and 16 March, two eminent UK speakers, John Guillebaud and Vik Mohen, are going to cram in a free talk at the Zoo on these burning issues, which is open to all members of the public, a talk to a crowded amphitheatre of students at Hautlieu School, and then finally a lecture to the doctors at the General Hospital.
The first lecture of this gruelling schedule will be, most fittingly, held at the Zoo. It was just over 50 years ago that the WWF was formed and also at about that time that the Jersey Zoo, founded by the great naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell, opened its gates to its first visitors.
These havens of conservation were a direct response to the alarming number of species and sub-species that had been going extinct since the beginning of the 20th century. Among those animals that became extinct were three sub-species of tiger, the most notable being the loss of the Tasmanian tiger in 1936.
The formation of organisations such as Jersey Zoo (now the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust) and WWF couldn’t have come soon enough and since then, as we now know, through careful animal husbandry we have managed to save many more species from extinction.
However, today the problems of conservation are even greater than 50 years ago. This is highlighted by the most recent tragic and alarming loss to extinction of the Chinese freshwater river dolphin. The reason why the fight for conservation has worsened is obvious: 50 years ago the global population was three billion; today it is seven billion and still rising inexorably. We are living in an era where we are being forced into an ever-decreasing amount of space with the same resources having to be stretched further and further.
Contrary to most people’s understanding, the study of human population is neither boring nor is the management of its growth insoluble. Through the increasing spread of education and of global media communication and in particular the empowerment of women and easier access to family planning there is a slim possibility that the global population could stabilise before it reaches ten billion.
Thankfully we are now just beginning to talk about population more openly. Hitherto many reports on climate change and environmental degradation fail to mention what every mother living on $1 a day already knows; her children will be better fed if there were four of them sitting around the table instead of ten.
It is exactly this point that one of the speakers at the Zoo lecture on Thursday 15 March is going to directly address. He managed, through non-coercive means, to introduce family planning in 2007 into the Madagascan fishing community.
Before he arrived at the south-eastern coastal shores of Madagascar women were having family sizes of more than ten children. Since the successful introduction of family planning in the area there has already been a noticeable decline in the number of children born and a projected improvement in their living standards.
Our national icon, Sir David Attenborough, who is also a patron of the Jersey Zoo, in a recent speech to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the WWF cited another success story that illustrates the possible slowdown in population growth. The empowerment of women in Kerala has brought about the rapid reduction in family size to under replacement level with the resultant miraculous improvement in the standard of living of all in that poor region of India.
Sir David goes on to argue passionately that we must all throw off this taboo about not addressing global population and talk quite openly about this problem. Furthermore, he urges all countries to develop long-term population policies. Many people in Jersey would advocate this point where our pursuit of capitalism and everlasting growth brings us into daily conflict with dealing with our own population issues.
I am sure that our visiting UK speakers will have lots more to say about this and a lot of other issues pertaining to population problems.
More information at www.jerseycharityevents.biz.
