Green Options

A new study finds that there is a 50-50 chance all of the Colorado River reservoirs — in California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona — will run completely dry by the year 2057 if currents trends and practices continue.

By Lester R. Brown

As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital resources intensifies within societies, particularly between the wealthy and those who are poor and dispossessed. The shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person that comes with population growth is threatening to drop the living standards of millions of people below the survival level, leading to potentially unmanageable social tensions.

Access to land is a prime source of social tension. Expanding world population has cut the grainland per person in half, from 0.23 hectares in 1950 to 0.10 hectares in 2007. One tenth of a hectare is half of a building lot in an affluent U.S. suburb. This ongoing shrinkage of grainland per person makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to feed the 70 million people added to world population each year. The shrinkage in cropland per person not only threatens livelihoods; in largely subsistence societies, it threatens survival itself. Tensions within communities begin to build as landholdings shrink below that needed for survival.

The Sahelian zone of Africa, with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, is an area of spreading conflict. In troubled Sudan, 2 million people have died and over 4 million have been displaced in the long-standing conflict of more than 20 years between the Muslim north and the Christian south. The more recent conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan that began in 2003 illustrates the mounting tensions between two Muslim groups–camel herders and subsistence farmers. Government troops are backing Arab militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of black Sudanese in an effort to drive them off their land, sending them into refugee camps in neighboring Chad. At least some 200,000 people have been killed in the conflict and another 250,000 have died of hunger and disease in the refugee camps.

Birth control has become an important issue for woman’s rights as well as the environment. However, a survey of South Korean women age 19-34 found 45% believe contraception should be a man’s responsibility.

The survey, by the Study Group for Contraception, shows that most women are doing little or nothing to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Of the 1000 women who participated in the survey, one in five said she relied on coitus interruptus or timing pregnancy cycles as a form of birth control. Both methods have high failure rates of around 25%.

What’s more, abortion is illegal in South Korea, except under extenuating circumstances. The result is an almost entirely first-world country where each year hundreds of thousands of women practice illegal abortions at “don’t ask don’t tell” clinics.

It’s a topic that, by its very nature, provokes a passionate response.

Should population growth be curbed?

Immediately, we are faced with important moral, ethical and religious quandaries.

I write this in the light of a piece that appeared in the UK’s Observer. In it, John Gray, a political philosopher, states:

The uncomfortable fact, which is ignored or denied by both ends of the environmental debate, is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or 10 billion, the level forecast in UN studies for the middle of this century.

Editor's note: In today's Red, Green and Blue, our political commentators Jimmy Hogan and Shirley Siluk Gregory weigh in on New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's PlaNYC for the city's long-term sustainability.

Our format has changed just slightly. Each writer will alternate starting the discussion with a post; the other one will join the discussion in the comments. Remember — you're always welcome to join in!

Shirley: It's hard to

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