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The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • On the Beat

    What’s the Link Between Population and Nuclear Energy?

    April 4, 2011 By Meaghan Parker
    The popular Big Green Purse blog, written by best-selling author Diane MacEachern, recently asked the Worldwatch Institute’s Robert Engelman, “What’s the Link between Population and Nuclear Energy?” The blog, which encourages women to use the “power of the purse” to improve the environment, wanted to know: “Why aren’t we talking about reducing population as part of our global strategy to minimize dependence on power sources [like nuclear energy] that pollute the environment and threaten people’s health?”

    While “reducing population” is not possible, slowing population growth may be, if fertility rates continue to fall. As always, Engelman answered the tough question with thoughtful aplomb, offering three core values as a starting point:
    One: see the global environmental dilemma not as a problem to be solved but as a predicament to be responded to. We can’t control our future, but we can act with integrity as we aspire to build just societies in an environmentally-sound world. Addressing our numbers can become part of that.

    Two, embrace human rights as a foundation for our actions. All people – even if too many or consuming too much – have dignity and a right to be here. As it happens, population policies based on the right of all women to choose whether and when to bear a child actually slow the growth of population. …

    Three, acknowledge that no one can claim a greater right than anyone else to use energy and natural resources. This is called equity. We cannot object if the poorest people living today and yet to be born succeed in gaining the means to consume as much as Americans do.
    But I’m wondering how the readers of Big Green Purse – which is replete with media-friendly lists like “Top Ten Eco-Tricks” – can translate population and its messy intersection of human rights, health care, and consumption levels into an individual purchasing decision.

    As Engelman writes, “The idea that we can easily trim our individual consumption to come into balance with nature – worthy as that effort is – looks increasingly naïve. If people in the developed world slash their per capita greenhouse emissions by half, their effort could be counterbalanced by people in developing countries boosting theirs by just 11 percent.”

    Photo Credit: “Trojan Nuclear Power Plant,” courtesy of flickr user tobo.
    Topics: climate change, consumption, energy, family planning, media, On the Beat, population
    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/12360687918388496935 Robert Engelman

      Thanks for your response to my Big Green Purse blog, Meaghan. It's a logical and legitimate question: Is it really possible to reach sustainability through reducing consumption alone? Personally, I'm dubious, but it's also the case that we haven't tried very hard. We can turn the question around and ask the same thing about population and it would be even more obvious it can't be done (sustainability through slowing or reversing population growth). But the likely impossibility of reaching sustainability through feasible reductions in consumption is one reason among many to attend to the needs of women and men for reproductive health services that help make sure all births are intended and sought by parents.

    • http://profile.typepad.com/6p00d83451bba269e2 Diane MacEachern

      Meaghan, Thanks so much for flagging my post for your readers. The first tenet of Big Green Purse is to consume less. "Not buying" is as much an individual purchasing decision as "buying green." Many reasons motivate consumers to curb consumption, including the understanding that too many people buying too much stuff is a recipe for social and ecological disaster. Helping people understand the impact of their own "ecological footprint" will, hopefully, build support for a planet where population growth and environmental protection come into greater balance.

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/07430391562374233505 Meaghan Parker

      Bob, good point about the relative weakness of efforts to curb consumption. Would you also say that we haven't tried very hard to "attend to the needs of women and men for reproductive health services"? If so, who should try harder and how can they close the gap?
      Diane, many thanks for pointing out that consuming less is a purchasing decision, too. But I am intrigued by the possibility of developing a way to "buy green" that could support efforts to meet the needs that Bob discusses. Perhaps it's a creative marketing challenge for a particularly forward-thinking company.

    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/12360687918388496935 Robert Engelman

      Thanks for the comment, Meaghan. A couple of points. One, of course we haven't tried hard enough, speaking generally, to meet reproductive health needs. There are multiple reasons to do that, and I'd argue that we should promote doing so for all the associated benefits–individual, community and global. On the consumption issue, I'm intrigued by one or two bloggers I've seen who say the issue isn't so much "buying green" as not buying at all. Not easy given the society we live in, but worth trying to the extent possible.

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