The population bomb keeps ticking.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: Column

AS THE 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo approaches, it seems astounding that there have been people making the argument that the planet has room for a steadily increasing population and that governments should stay out of the population management business. The basic argument from this perspective is that, properly handled, there can be a growth of resources to match the increase in population. Nevertheless, an appropriate growth of resources (food in particular) also assumes a lesser extent of human fallibility than has been experienced anywhere in human history.

The evidence strongly suggests that human beings are more capable of limiting population than they are of generating resources, employment, family satisfaction, and quality of life on a global basis. The incidental, but massive, damage that human beings are doing to the planet far exceeds the level of human organization that the UN or any other global body has exhibited. The problem rests, in great part, in human diversity, in the cultures that every segment holds as the source of human values.

The cause of the population expansion is mostly, but not entirely, cultural. The segments of society that are resisting population management fall into the categories of "can't" and "won't." In the "can't" category are those who don't have the opportunity or the education to understand either the need for birth control or the consequences of expanding populations. The lack of education is a critical factor, especially in the fastest expanding population--that of sub-Saharan Africa. In the "won't" category are those whose explicit or implicit cultures resist the intervention of birth control and, thereby, population management. In the implicit culture category are males who refuse to use condoms and couples who see many children as their social security. In the explicit culture category are some religious groups, particularly fundamentalists, who draw on beliefs that have origins in writings that are centuries or even millennia old.

Some of the arguments on the issue, like Jacqueline Kasun's 1988 polemic against sex education and population control (The War Against Population), deviate from reality because they begin with ideological (cultural) premises and carefully select (or distort) the "facts" about what is occurring around the globe. The Reagan and Bush Administrations relied on this type of thinking to gut the U.S. leadership position on global...