Population Control

I'm the oldest of a very large family, and I always wanted my own large family as well. I've also always been interested in learning about animals and conservation. As a child I never thought that the two might be considered at odds with each other. I read descriptions of habitat loss and ZooBooks' not-so-subtle hints that we have a human overpopulation problem without taking much notice. In high school my English teacher constantly liked to talk about our population problems and joked about programs to limit the number of children one can have. I felt that was wrong, and I knew my religion encouraged having children, but until college I didn't really have a solid position on the subject.

Lessons From Religion

The first concept I learned came from religion. The Doctrine and Covenants 104:17-18 states:

17 For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves.

 18 Therefore, if any man shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not his portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, he shall, with the wicked, lift up his eyes in hell, being in torment.

It made plenty of sense to me. The Lord created the earth and made sure there were plenty of resources to care for the people he created. The problem lies with people who hog all of the resources instead of allowing others to take care of themselves. It reminds me of the agricultural fields around the city where I live--gleaning was banned because people would hoard all of the food and then open vegetable stands to sell what was intended to help everyone.

Another concept I came upon while in college was the idea that Satan, the enemy of all mankind, was fighting to destroy the place where we live. His goal is to make men miserable and to hinder the work of the Lord, and it makes a lot of sense that one of his targets is to make the earth uninhabitable or at least less beautiful. But I think there's enough information out there on this subject, and our culture seems to be erring from caring too much about the earth instead of the other way around, so I'll move on.


History and Innovation

People have been worried about over population for a long time. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich stated:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

If you look at the information he had available, you might be tempted to agree with him. In fact, the technology and practices available at the time were not enough to feed the world's growing population.

Obviously, the world did not collapse in massive famine forty years ago. What happened? At the same time Ehrlich was prophesying , a global movement called the Green Revolution was beginning.People made new discoveries and inventions which allowed farming to be much more productive.For example, Norman Borlaug bred new types of wheat. While "corn... as high as an elephant's eye" is poetic, it's not really that helpful: we don't eat corn stalks. Borlaug began breeding wheat that grows the same amount of food on a smaller plant, resulting in less nutrient and space requirements. While some of the effects of this were negative (widespread pesticide use and the crippling of the family farm, for instance), it also allowed us to support a larger population. More people means more innovators, and innovators help us to live better.


Economics

In order for a population to stay static, each woman needs to have two children survive to adulthood (one to replace her and one for her husband). Currently in the United States the birth rate is about 1.93 children per woman. Most developed countries are below, sometimes far below, this rate. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article claiming that America's baby bust will be the greatest threat to our economic standing (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323375204578270053387770718.html). The number of children being born cannot support the number of people retiring from the baby boom of the 50's.


The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

Open a map on your computer, zoomed out so you can see the whole United States-- google maps works well. Close your eyes and point to a spot on the map. Now zoom in on your spot. When I did it, I pointed to a spot just east of the Gulf of California in Mexico. As far as I can tell, it's about forty miles from any human habitation. My second try hit the Halfbreed Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, about thirty miles from Billings. Chances are pretty good that you didn't hit any human habitations either.

National Geographic recently came out with an issue that highlighted the importance of cities. They explained that having people in a more centralized location lessens the effect on the earth overall. It uses less wildlife habitat, and less gas as people don't need to travel as far. My husband visited a place in Korea where the people living in the "country" live in high-rise buildings with their fields stretched out in all directions around them.

Beatrix Potter says in her retelling of The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, "One place suits one person, and another place suits another. As for me, I prefer to live in the country." I completely agree with her. I'd rather be in the country, but within a short drive of a larger city. In fact, when I was younger I suggested that the entire earth should be divided equally among all of the people, and each should manage and take care of the section they'd been given. I'm old enough to know this wouldn't work, but the principle holds true--no matter where we live, we need to care for what we have.

One way of solving problems on a personal level is the principle of homesteading, which is that each person should try to be as self-reliant as possible, especially in providing food and other goods for their family. On a city, this might mean a pot of herbs in the window. On fact, the best garden I've had yet was a tiny plot in front of our rented duplex, barely big enough for three tomatoes and a zucchini plant smashed between the owner's mandatory rose bush. In the country, this might mean goats, chickens, and a large garden (my eventual goal). The principle remains the same no matter where you live.


Effects of Overpopulation Fears

One of the biggest problems of fearing overpopulation is that almost every solution to the "problem" involve violating the rights of others. Some people do decide not to have children in order to keep from "adding to the problem", but others see fit to force their opinions on others. This includes the murdering of unborn children, forced sterilization, one-child policies, and eugenics. Eugenetics means that someone in authority will decide for the rest of the population who is fit and who is not, and remove those who are not from the population. Hitler's extermination methods are a very extreme, well-known example. Abortion clinics targeting minority races and doctors suggesting abortion for "disabled" babies are less-known examples.



Quality and Quantity

My favorite story came from a college friend. She was attending an event in high school and was assigned a roommate with very different views from her own. The roommate explained that she did not want to have children because of overpopulation. Then she paused and said to my friend, "I'm glad you want to have children, though. The world needs more people like you."

Raise the change you want to see in the world. This is what makes the most sense to me. I for one believe that there are a lot of problems in our culture. I can't change everything, but I can teach my children right from wrong. I can teach my children how to live a good life. And they will go out into the world and interact with others. I will do my bit, and they can do theirs, and goodness will spread, little by little, person by person. Lasting change for the better is never successful when crammed down people's throats. It happens on an individual level, one by one, person by person. And that's how I hope to make a difference.

The Science of Religion: Truth and Fact

While reading comments online and talking to people, I have found that many seem to think that science and religion are incompatible. This feels rather strange to me, as a science graduate from a religious university. Science and religion are completely different things with completely different objectives, and a blanket assumption about their relationship (or lack thereof) is often overly simplified and inherently untrue.

Some people will reject anything called science in favor of their religion, while others will disregard anything religious yet accept anything as long as it's called science. One major cause of this apparent incompatibility is that people do not understand the difference between truth and fact.


1: Truth

Truth is.

In the book 1984, a government leader explains how his organization views truth. He tells the main character that if he believes that he has flown around the room, and the only other person in the room also believes that he has flown around the room, then he has indeed flown around the room. If a trusted leader says that he is holding up four fingers, then he is holding up four fingers, no matter what he is really doing. If a piece of evidence is forgotten, it does not exist.

Obviously, this is not true. The reader knows perfectly well that this man has not flown around the room, that he is holding up only three fingers, and that the piece of evidence does exist.

What is truth? To be brief, truth is.

I think all of us have the capability to understand this. We all accept that some things are. Truth is unalterable, and it exists independent of belief. If everyone in the entire world believed that the earth is flat, it would not change the truth.

Religion is an institution of truth. Of course, not all religions are true--this is impossible, since most of them consider themselves the one and only truth. However, the purpose of religion is to teach truth. Whether correctly or not, religion teaches what is and what is not. Perhaps some individual religions are fact based--perhaps some will claim "we have made many observations, and as far as we are able to understand, this is how things are", but I do not know of any. Sometimes individual teachings will come into conflict with well-established or widely-believed fact, which does create a separation between that particular religion and science, but it does not mean that all religions and all science are incompatible.

How do you know what truth is? This is a very personal, and a very religious, matter.What you accept as truth and what you do not is up to you, but it is important to realize that your acceptance does not make it true. You will have to find things out for yourself. And how do you find out what the truth is? The process most often used for discovering truth is science.


2: Fact
       
When you go to a science class, chances are you will be given a long list of facts that you are required to know. Especially in the early grades, these facts are presented as truth. Students will accept these as truth, and many people still think this way. If science says it, it must be true. As long as some piece of information has the big label with "science" stamped on it, than it's truth. But defining truth isn't science. That's religion. People who think this way will often find that their "religion of science" clashes with other religions. And really, that's not surprising. Religions are rarely compatible with one another.

In science classes, we learn facts, not truths. Caterpillars turn into butterflies. Cells divide to make new cells. Electrons surround atoms. These are all facts.

Most of us accept these as truth. But, as I've already explained, truth is not based on acceptance.

But everyone knows that caterpillars do turn into butterflies, you insist. I've seen them do it.
No. You have seen one caterpillar turn into a butterfly. You may have seen many caterpillars turn into many butterflies. But in order to say that every single caterpillar will turn into a butterfly, or even that every single caterpillar would turn into a butterfly under ideal conditions, you need to make an assumption. You must assume that because this has happened many many times, it will happen in other situations as well.

Science is what makes that assumption. Science says that the more times an individual thing has happened, the more likely it is to be true. When one thing has been proven enough times and under enough different circumstances, it is called fact. Fact is not truth. Fact does not say that something is. It says that something probably is, or that it is as far as we are able to observe, or that it certainly seems that way. But it does not claim to be truth.

Science is a process used to help people decide what is truth. Remember those science projects in elementary school? Those come closest to explaining the true nature of science. You have a statement that you want to prove, so you design an experiment. You control as many factors as you can, and you run your experiment. You get a result. Is that result truth? Maybe. Is that result fact? Well, it's on it's way. You've learned that your caterpillars did turn into butterflies. But what about other kinds of butterflies? What if your caterpillars were unusual? So you run some more experiments, and other people run similar experiments, and after a whole lot of experimenting  you decide that the evidence shows that your statement is true (or false), and that many other people agree with you.

Congratulations. You have a fact.

Is your fact true?

Probably.

The process of science helps us decide what is true. We decide how many experiments it takes for a statement to become fact. We decide what facts we accept as truth, and which we do not.

This process is not limited to caterpillars and cells and electrons. It can be used for anything. In fact, this process is often used in religion. We tell people to "experiment on the word". Pray about it, we say. Ask, and listen for an answer. Try living the commandments and see if they are the correct way to live. These are all scientific experiments. Conduct your own experiments, do your own research, and decide for yourself what it takes for you to accept something as truth. Then you can stand by it and be sure for yourself.