i think. totally. that you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy correct call for us. to go on. and on this show we were revealed the picture of what's actually going on and we go beyond identifying the problem to try to rational debate real discussion critical issues facing america have a killer go ready to join the movement then welcome to the big picture. the nice conversations with great minds i'm joined by alan wiseman alan is an award

winning journalist whose reports of appeared in a variety of publications including new york times magazine mother jones and atlanta a finalist for the national book critics circle award winner of the prize in the national library of china alan is also the author of several books including the national bestseller the world without us and his latest critically acclaimed countdown our last best hope for a future up on earth alan joins me now in the studio alan welcome thanks for thanks for being with us to be here the essential story of countdown is the story of overpopulation it is it's something that i came to unexpectedly at the end of doing my last book the world with us which was really kind of a red herring because it was about how could we have a world with us theoretically wiped everybody off the planet so we could see how beautifully the planet would restore itself. in that readers would ask wow how do

we have ourselves back to that picture of a healthy world only kind of in balance with nature not in combat with it but i discovered that every four and a half days we were adding a million people to the planet and we still are and that didn't seem like a sustainable figure at all so i just raised it at the end of the book and sort of left the daily mirror and it became a really important talking point everybody wanted to talk about that's what friendly decided i should investigate it as a journalist and see can we know how many people and what could we do about it if we do and that it took you around the world it was the book is filled with these little vignettes these stories these travelogues that are just brilliant reading and and. you know average of the book i mean you're to the point where there is no way i can deny this is real. you know if the pressure of population is

destroying ecosystems it's destroying all the of human life it's destroying planets on and on it goes how did you come about that what brought you to that as a model for writing the book and what did you learn and what were the stories there were three reasons that had to do all that travel. one is the one that you just said had a document what's going on out there. there is it's not so much to say that. suppose we decide that the world has too many people in it but what can we do about that in the chinese trade the one child policy and everybody finds it a point a lot of chinese find it up for it and that's not going to fly anywhere else if that's what we decide we need to do so what i was curious about and i had some hints that it might be true that in the liturgies or the histories. or the development of all of the world's cultures religion. nationalities there is

something in there that could embrace the idea of so to speak refraining from embracing so much in times of need and. it was important for me to go sort of take the cultural temperature of the world to talk to many many people you know religious leaders. just everyday people and to find out. who is or something in their belief system without having to change them tell me what you believe is wrong somethin that would actually allow this to. to happen in the overwhelming majority of religions and cultures i found that to be true also. i needed to get these great stories you're talking about let's face it population it's sort of an affront just to fink about it. like any other organism we do it becomes natural we make copies of ourselves and the idea that we have to

put limits on that is reflexively repellent to us so i needed to go out there and not just come up with a book that was full of statistics and adding up all the damage done but to give real human stories of how it works in countries where population runs amok and also the countries that have done. a really good job of managing their populations without doing something as drastic a course of a direct tony and as what china attempted. in the second half of our interview here i want to get into some of those solutions but first some of these stories one of the one of the things that you point out the book repeatedly is tribe after tribe culture after culture culture religion after religion the people who are around are the people who are the descendants of people who had children you know the ones who do. i don't have any views on it's and. in the early days of many i mean you have

this population graph in the book where you point out that it took all of human history to reach a billion people around eighteen hundred and then the next billion people was around one hundred thirty years i would call nine hundred thirty the third billion maybe one hundred sixty fourth billion one hundred seventy four the fifth billion eighty days if i remember this is the graph that really looks like a hockey stick that's right yeah this should say it's twentieth century and and you could argue i mean you can you can make a an anthropologic case or perhaps a sociologic is. five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand years ago the tribe that had a a cultural or and or religious or both injunction to be fruitful and multiply have many wives or many children would be the tribe that would most likely survive in the you know in the face of tribal competition for territory. tell us about well the fact is that every day every tribe has. his head be fruitful and

multiply in its beginning in order to become. the dominant power in its area by their religious power or national power and so. let's look at a latter day example the mormons they were polygamists because they needed to produce as big a nation as they possibly could as quickly as possible so people were going to push them around no a lot of people who look at the mormons in this in they find it really weird but look at the genesis i mean that's how all of us started here judeo christian world . all the patriarchs were polygamists they had numerous numerous ways until it was very interesting you get to joseph and joseph is. i think. it was the first ecologist he must have been extremely observant because

he realized that we were entering a time of scarcity and he held himself to one wife they only had two children with sons and ultimately console the pharaoh of egypt that in order to get through lean times we have to conserve. tell me who i interviewed and tell of the said that. the interpretation is that in times of famine you refrain from having children until. times are generous again interest in fact one of the i thought one of the more interesting stories in the book was when you went to salt lake city and sat down with a group and. let me reframe this for us it was. easy because there still is a big family yeah you know i had some concerns because i knew that i was going to

be talking about this point. when i went there so i learned looked into mormon history and i found out that there was a point where like joseph they realized that they had a crisis that they had to deal with it was simply this they had been polygamous for quite a while until the united states if you want to remain in the united states and not do it behind bars you have to be monogamous well the mandate to be fruitful multiply was still inherent in their culture so they kept having babies and suddenly around the turn of the twentieth century there was a crisis many mormon women were dying in childbirth because they were getting pregnant again before their bodies had recover from the last pregnancy fortunately the mormons are very good about stressing the importance of education and that was a new generation of mormon doctors to start a constantly women that for the good of themselves and for their families and really for. the whole culture because it's

a very family oriented religion that they had to start spacing their births to you know to save it themselves and when i met with these people this is a few years ago. we talked about well is it possibly at a critical time for saving mother nature that maybe birth staff to be spaced even more and who would be more actually appropriate for leading the way because in the mormons it's a new religion they're not tied so deeply to these ancient liturgies that the rest of us are stuck with and they've already gone through this once before tremendous positive reception of them are sold and sign a lot of books that night and this is on two separate occasions. in utah and people started talking about the same things that i hear everywhere everybody remembers a place where they used to go and it wasn't there far from home where you could sort of get away you could you know be out in the woods you could you know you

could hug trees you could chop trees if you wanted to cut firewood or you could listen to birds or shoot birds if that's what you like to do but it's a place you could go get away and now it's gone it's buried underneath condominium or strip malls and nobody likes that in utah they were telling me that now from provo. down the odds that this is a continuous strip city for more than one hundred miles and the smog is bad and of course they're in the colorado river basin their waters and scarce and they're really concerned that they're just getting a little too numerous. i don't know what the mormon temple thinks about this it's just like i went to the vatican for this book and the vatican has kind of painted itself into a corner and they're probably never going to change their mind but it's surrounded by this catholic country called italy where the women know exactly how many children they want and what it takes place. not just one fact italy i think has the

highest use of contraception per capita all that europe western european countries . if i could explain isn't too far because how do you how do you respond to people who say that you know. robert thomas small focus suggested this back three hundred years ago and he was wrong you know that population growth would ultimately destroy the planet or the quality of life for humans and that you're simply you know malthus. first and anything i'm a journalist i talk to people who are called me the ins and in see how they justify it and here's what i learned. this made his famous prediction back in seven hundred ninety eight the world was not very crowded then and people weren't dying of starvation all that much. but his latter day analogues pollan am erlick who. wrote the population bomb that appeared in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight said the same thing that they saw that the world was now at three and

a half million and it was getting very crowded and they predicted famines for india for pakistan and other parts of the world because. there is no way that food production could keep up with population growth but then lo and behold what happened actually the air looks said in their preface unless there is some miracle of agriculture and that miracle that a culture which we now call the green revolution took place norman bore log in his center for wheat and corn in mexico and scientists in the philippines at the international race research institute came up with these incredible crossbred strains of grains that would produce. much more food let's let's pick up from that in just a moment more conversations with great minds with alan weisman after the break.

i would rather ask questions to keep building positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.g.p. question more. i know c.n.n. the m s n b c news have taken some not slightly but the fact is i admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate. that was funny but it's close and for the truth and might

think. it's because one fall attention and the mainstream media work side by side the joke is actually on here. at our teenagers we have a different approach. because the news of the world just is not this funny i'm not laughing dammit i'm not how. you guys have to jeffs will handle the things that happen.

welcome back to conversations with great minds with alan wiseman alan is an award winning journalist as reports of her period have appeared in a variety of publications including new york times magazine mother jones the atlantic and he's also the author of several books including the national bestseller the world without us and his latest critically acclaimed countdown our last best hope for a future on earth and let's get back to it you were you were saying that the early expected sixty eight in the population by. famines and disasters are coming we're three and a half billion people unless there is a revolution in agriculture and you start telling us how that little the revolution actually happened through some really brilliant cross-breeding of plants that ultimately could produce much more grain per plant and these improved strains

literally were airlifted to india and pakistan and in the latter half of the nineteen sixty's and they saved those places from famine. that was the good. will. even though everybody started saying well look this disproves memphis. when norman borlaug won the nobel peace prize for this he was credited with having saved more lives than anybody in history . he didn't gloat what he said it's acceptance speech was we've bought some time for the world unless the population problem is handled in conjunction with the food production problem we're never going to be able to feed everybody and disaster will eventually strike because there are limits to how much we can possibly produce and. we're coming to those limits when i went to

india and pakistan i found that we're reaching some of those limits week in. he is about to surpass china now is the most populous nation on earth pakistan is one of the fastest growing and it's a country that's just frankly out of control it's it's a dangerous country there was a lot of mayhem when i was there some of the people i needed to interview i didn't get to because they were floating tortured in the karate lagoon and this is a daily occurrence there and when you've got a whole population. filled with unemployed young men because there's just not enough jobs to go around things get destabilized and we're talking about a nuclear power we're talking about a country that this by twenty thirty is going to more people in the today's united states it's the size of texas. so what is the carrying

capacity in your opinion of the earth. in terms of it seems to be less then what we are right now again as a journalist i don't know pine in these things i try to talk to the experts and one way of looking at it is let's look at some of the reasons why our population increase is really two medical improvements in food technology we just talked about part of it the other part. probably the most important invention in history was the invention of artificial nitrogen fertilizer. which is put it this way forty percent of us would not be on this planet without it because we now can create much more plant life than nature was able to create. there were only a few plants really that to fix nitrogen in the soil before but now. we can do it almost infinitely except it's made out of fossil fuels takes fossil fuels to make the. for the energy to make it and there's a downside to fertilize eating oil

a process emitting carbon dioxide yeah. so. at a certain point we run into these limits and. it proved to me like the mouth is actually wrong possibly they didn't get the timing of it right but now we're in a situation where the world seems to be bursting that it seems toward the end of the book you suggest i think it might have been in the author's epilogue that if the entire world were to go one child policy. within a human lifetime for generations roughly eighty to one hundred years or. that we would have a population of a little over one i think you said one point seven billion. one point six which is what the population was in one thousand nine hundred before these medical advances in technology advances made us double and then double again now i don't think

a one child policy is acceptable to most people even though a lot but what is acceptable to most people is being able to choose the number that they want one of the countries is big surprise to merican audiences that has had the one of the most successful family planning programs in history is iran and they did it completely voluntarily i had an amazing time over there talking to the o.b. g.y.n. . that instituted the program there was a fabulous in if you if wisdom dictates that you have the number of children you can take care of in a tubal ligation or a set to me is permissible they made contraceptives free and available to everybody and most important they encourage women to study a woman mostly university or just goes to school period have children until she's out of it because she wants to finish your education and she's got something

interesting and useful to do for her family and for society so you can do that with seven kids saying it would strain. sixty percent of the women sixty percent of the university students in iran today are female and they brought. their population growth rate down to replacement meaning male two people male and female have two children replacing themselves they did it a year faster than china no coercion well and they did it basically by the empowerment of women i mean we would not be we would not be an exaggeration to say that worldwide one of the most important things we must be doing is educating and empowering it's the best of all. every country i went to everybody that i talk to about this they say you get a girl in high school the chances are on the average she's going to have two children or less that's what she's going to decide to do and even in pakistan i saw places where girls were being permitted to go to school because it's

a rough situation lots and that's what the girls were aspiring to do because they all wanted to be like their teachers all they had to do in japan they're actually their population is declining and. i've debated on this program. typically catholic conservatives who although not always who are pretty hysterical about this you know all my god what are we going to do you know the and then you get into the whole the whole. the right wing commentary thing about you know the white people in america are on decline you know and all this sort of thing and it's like where how do you respond how do you how do you respond to people who say either a country's demographics changing is going to somehow harm that country i guess that's probably more of a side argument or the larger argument of just the core population the total

population of the country declining is a bad thing it seems to me like it's a good thing if you look at what happened after the black plague produced. the renaissance or the. you know the get russell. i'm going to respond to the first part very quickly. i'm the son of an immigrant. america is a nation of immigrants and that's what has made this country rich and great rich in all senses of the word and immigration just keeps enriching the potus for as a consumer i think we need to just kind of ridicule at the camp will be in terms of . the. whole problem of declining population in china japan has a declining population now because they had to cut off their baby boom at the end of world war two because they had lost their economy was in ruins they had people were starving and so they gave women the need the means to terminate pregnancies it

was an emergency move and women who didn't want to have watch more raby starved if you took advantage of that so now as the old pre baby boom generation is dying off it was a large generation suddenly it's sort of what populations go off the cliff. a lot of japanese economists are freaked out about this but i met a very visionary one with a major policy policy institute who sees this as a great opportunity this is something that inevitably asked. because the island has limits the japanese archipelago has limits in fact the world has limits and he sees them getting away as the population naturally shrinks from heavy industries and concentration of big port cities to spreading out across the countryside more light industries it's going to be great for laborers because there are fewer of them their wages are going to drop but because demand will be lower our people have more

leisure time in a less populated world and they'll be more world out there to enjoy it right now in japan. you know people go to work at seven am they come back at ten pm to what's to earn money to have a few consumer toys that they don't have enough hours to play with so this isn't in fact are a fairly simple math about that that as the population declines ratio of natural world per person increases. natural resources wealth everything else it seems like a declining population we have a net positive thing don't you know a huge part of this book that we haven't talked about is all the time that it's been with the ecologists trying to figure out how much nature do we need to ensure our survival you know where mammals were part of this ecosystem and there's no question that we have been pushing more and more species off this planet celebrating rate. to try to determine which species are essential to our survival

and nobody really knows for sure until we push one off that sweet should accept that one but we'll only know when it's too late it's probably a good idea to stop doing that like like the more he discovered seventeen hundreds of years ago also every rats distraction starting people started each other in the in the minute we have left what what do you think what was the biggest lesson for you alan wiseman writing that this is something that we can do right now that could have probably the fastest most efficient and most significant impact on helping our environment we're not very good at controlling consumption. we're not really adept at renewable cheap the totally pollution free energy. but we can control the number of consumers with the technology that we already have it's fairly benign technology and it's getting even better because there are some really benign male contraceptives that are about to become available. this would have an enormous

impact do you combine that. education for women and we could have a much better social world and a much better natural world it's an extraordinary vision and you've done an absolutely brilliant job with land out in countdown alan wiseman takes thank you so much for being with us pleasure to be here to have you with. to see this and other conversations with the great minds go to our website had conversations with great minds dot com. i've got a quote for you. it's pretty tough to. say where it's about story. but if this guy like you would smear that guy stead of working for the people politicians the mainstream media we're pretty much of a bribe right decision but. it's. a good read.

we're. for the a little it was a problem very hard to take over the world to get a long. life that he ever had that would make there's no. silver bullet. to the middle of the world with a. little. little little. little the only. one of the that the political.

elite welcomes it as conversations with great minds with dr alan lipman and sorry sold it after ellen levin is a clinical psychologist in private practice in new york an international speaker and has been involved with its spectrum of potential disorders for over twenty five years their private practice dr what the focus is on the.