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Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “Other Plans” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet. This book is now available for free online.
by Lierre Keith / Deep Green Resistance
Russia is a country with a negative population growth caused by “a collapse of the birth rate and a catastrophic surge in the death rate.”64 The country has a 0.6 percent population decrease, which means it will lose 22 percent of the population by 2050. That adds up to thirty million fewer people.65
One reason for the decline is that Russia has an extremely high involuntary infertility rate. Somewhere between 13 and 20 percent of married couples are infertile, and that number may be rising.66 For women, one of the main causes was a society-wide reliance on abortion as a form of birth control, abortions often done under substandard medical conditions. The literal scars of such procedures have left many women unable to conceive or carry to term. Sexually transmitted diseases are also a culprit—rates of syphilis are literally hundreds of times higher in Russia than in other European countries.67 Marriage rates have dropped and divorce rates risen, and 30 percent of Russia’s babies are being delivered to single mothers—this in a country too poor to offer public benefits. Women can’t afford to have more children.
Add to that a mortality rate that is “utterly breathtaking.”68 Tuberculosis, AIDS, alcoholism, and the disappearance of socialized medicine have pulled the numbers up. The main two causes of death, though, are cardiovascular disease (CVD), which in thirty-five years increased 25 percent for women and an astounding 65 percent for men, and injury. The increases in CVD is traceable to smoking, poor diet, sedentarism, and severe social stress. The injury category includes “murder, suicide, traffic, poisoning and other violent causes.”69 The violence is so bad that the death rate for injury and poisoning for Russian men is twelve times higher than for British men. And both CVD and the violence are helped along by vodka, which Russians drink at an extraordinary rate, equivalent to 125 cc “for everyone, every day.”70
Population in Russia is dropping dramatically without a cataclysmic event or a Pol Pot–styled genocide, which the authors of this book are often accused of suggesting. Though each individual death is its own world of tragedy, the deaths have not collectively brought daily life—or even the government—to a halt.
Russia may best illustrate the kind of slow decline of which Greer writes; and Russia’s disintegration is not even based on energy descent, as oil and gas are still abundant. The former USSR may give us good insights into people’s responses to economic decline, and how best to survive it, but as an example it does not address the conditions of biotic collapse that are our fundamental concern.
Except in one instance: Chernobyl. Ninety thousand square miles were contaminated with radiation; 350,000 people were displaced; and there is a permanent “exclusionary zone” encompassing a nineteen-mile radius and the ghosts of seventy-six towns.
But other ghosts have come back from the dead. Because despite the cesium-137 that’s deadly for 600 years and the strontium-90 that mammal bones mistake for calcium, Chernobyl has become a miracle of megafauna: the European bison have returned, as well as, somehow, the Przewalski’s horse. There are packs—that’s plural—of wolves. There are beavers coaxing back the lost wetlands. There are wild boar. There are European lynx. There are endangered birds like the black stork and the white-tailed eagle, glorious in their eight-foot wingspans. All this even though ten years after the accident, geneticists found small rodents with “an extraordinary amount of genetic damage.” They had a mutation rate “probably thousands of times greater than normal.”71 Yet twenty years after the accident, and with multiple excursions into the contaminated area, the same researcher, Dr. Robert Baker, said flat-out, “The benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chernobyl radiation.”72 Witnessing the return of bison and wolves, who could say otherwise? Even a nuclear disaster is better for living creatures than civilization. And the real, if fledgling, hope: this planet, made not by some Lord God but instead by the work of all those creatures great and small, could repair herself if we would just stop destroying.
Bison in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
There are better ways to reduce our numbers than through alcoholism, syphilis, and nuclear accidents. We don’t need to wring our hands in helpless horror, stuck in a wrenching ethical dilemma between human rights and ecological drawdown. In fact, the most efficacious way to address the twin problems of population and resource depletion is by supporting human rights.
One of the great success stories of recent years is Iran. People’s desire for children turns out to be very malleable. Even in a context of religious fundamentalism, Iran was able to reduce its birthrate dramatically. In 1979, Ayatollah Khamenei dissolved Iran’s family planning efforts because he wanted soldiers for Islam to fight Iraq (and n.b. to those who still think they can be peace activists without being feminist). The population surged in response, reaching a 4.2 percent growth rate, which is the upper limit of what is biologically possible for humans. Iran went from 34 million people in 1979 to 63 million by 1998.73 Let’s be very clear about what this means for women. Girls as young as nine were legally handed over to adult men for sexual abuse: for me, the word “marriage” does not work as a euphemism for the raping of children.
The population surge proved to be a huge social burden immediately, and Iran’s leaders “realized that overcrowding, environmental degradation, and unemployment were undermining Iran’s future.”74 Health advocates, religious leaders, and community organizers held a summit to strategize.
They knew that free birth control was essential, but it wouldn’t be enough. All the major institutions of society had to get involved. Family planning policies were reinstituted and a broad public education effort was launched. Government ministries and the television company were brought into the project: soap operas took up the subject. Fifteen thousand rural clinics were founded and eighty mobile health care clinics brought birth control to remote areas. Thirty-five thousand family planning volunteers were trained to teach people in their neighborhoods about birth control options, and there were also workplace education campaigns. The government got religious leaders to proclaim that Allah wasn’t opposed to vasectomies; after that, vasectomies increased dramatically. In order to get a marriage license both halves of the couple had to attend a class on contraception. And new laws withdrew food subsidies and health care coverage after a couple’s third child, applying the stick as a backup to the carrots.
The biggest social initiative was to raise the status of women. Female literacy went from 25 percent in 1970 to over 70 percent in 2000. Ninety percent of girls now attend school.75
In seven years, Iran’s birthrate was sliced in half from seven children per woman to under three. So it can be done, and quickly, by doing the things we should be doing anyway. As Richard Stearns writes, “The single most significant thing that can be done to cure extreme poverty is this: protect, educate, and nurture girls and women and provide them with equal rights and opportunities—educationally, economically, and socially.… This one thing can do more to address extreme poverty than food, shelter, health care, economic development, or increased foreign assistance.”76
There is no reason for people who care about human rights to fear taking on this issue. Two things work to stop overpopulation: ending poverty and ending patriarchy. People are poor because the rich are stealing from them. And most women have no control over how men use our bodies. If the major institutions around the globe would put their efforts behind initiatives like Iran’s, there is still every hope that the world could turn toward both justice and sustainability.
Photo by Jaunt and Joy on Unsplash