there is just too much threat today society. that. i think. everybody thought if you. did 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 calvinists. will. never go on. and on this show we were the all the picture of what's actually going on we go beyond identifying problems to try to rational debate a real discussion critical issues facing america are you ready to join the movement then welcome big. bertha 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 of 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 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 without 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 hoping that readers would ask wow how

do we add ourselves back to that picture of a healthy world only kind of in balance with nature and 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 dangling there 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 is the first occasion to a cure around the world i was the book is filled with these little vignettes these stories these travelogues that are just brilliant reading and and. you know halfway through the book i mean that you're to the point where there is no way i can deny this is real. you know the pressure of population is destroying

ecosystems it's destroying quality 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 was in the story there were three reasons i had to do all that travel. one is the one that you just said had a document what's going on out 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 poor and a lot of chinese find it a poor 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 religions nationalities there is something in there that could embrace the

idea. so to speak refraining from in. bracing 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. was there something in their belief system that 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 think 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 kone 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 in 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 didn't don't have any views on it and. in the early days of many i

mean you have this population graph in the book. well you point out that it took all of human history to reach a billion people around one thousand nine 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 kind of anthropologic case or perhaps a sociologic case. 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 have 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 is. head to 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 more old. all the patriarchs were polygamists they had numerous numerous ways to it's very interesting you get to joseph joseph is. i think possibly the first ecologist he must have been extremely observant because

he realized that we were entering a time of scarcely. and he held himself to one wife they only had two children both 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. because there's still a big families yeah you know i had some concerns because i knew that i was going to

be talking about this point when i 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 more men 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 there was a new generation of mormon doctors who start a consulate when 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. save 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 room are sold and sign a lot of books that night and this is on two separate occasions. in utah and the people started talking about the same things that i hear everywhere everybody remembers a place where they used to go and it wasn't that far from home where you could sort of get away 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 of the smog is bad and of course they're in the colorado river basin their water is getting 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 is 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 they expect are still affected only i think as

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 they are simply you know malthus. first of all i'm not an anything i'm a journalist i talk to people who are called me to see in that in in see how they justify it and here's what i learned. this made his famous prediction back in seventy ninety eight the world was not very crowded and people weren't dying of starvation all that much. but his latter day analogues pollen 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 and 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 ehrlich's said in their preface unless there's some miracle of agriculture and that miracle agriculture which we now call the green revolution took place norman bore log in his center for wheat and corn in mexico and the 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.

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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 about how 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 in the latter half

of the nineteen sixty's and they saved those places from famine. that was the good. well. 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 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 we india. 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 the stable and we're talking about a nuclear power we're talking about a country that this twenty thirty is going to more people in and 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 a pint 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 there's 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. let's just put it this way forty percent of us would not be on this planet without it because it we now can create much more plant life than nature was able to create. there were only a few plants really that could 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 this. for the energy to make it and there's a downside for it was eating oil a process emitting carbon dioxide yeah we're. it's so. at

a certain point we run into these limits and. in. the me they're like the mouth is actually were 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 that within a human lifetime for generations roughly eighty to one hundred years ago. that we would have a population of a little over one i think you said one point seven billion and one point six which is what the population was in one thousand nine hundred before these medical advances in technology advances it is 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 a 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 and if you if wisdom dictates that you have the number of children you can take care of. a tubal ligation or a sect to me is permissible they made contraceptives free and available to everybody and most important they encourage women to study a woman who goes to university or just goes to school period and have children until she's out of it because she wants to finish their 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 restraint. 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 to 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 into 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 will they had to get in 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 in decline you know and 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. you know yet 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 in the pot as far as i'm concerned i think we need to just kind of ridicule at the camp it 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 is 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. 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 who's 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 certain money to have a few consumer toys that they don't have enough hours to play with so there isn't in fact are a fairly simple math about that that as the population declines ratio of natural world per person increases. our natural resources wealth everything else it seems like a declining population we have a net positive thing i don't see the huge part of this book that we haven't talked about is all the time that it's been with the colleges 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 and celebrating rate. to try to determine which species are essential to our survival and nobody really knows for sure until we push off that

opes we 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 in the seventeen hundreds of years it was also rats story actually 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 weisman 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 cheaply 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 with. 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 of laying it out in countdown alan wiseman they sank you so much for being with us pleasure be happy. to see this and other conversations with the very minds go to our website had conversations with great minds dot com.

i've got a quote for you. that's pretty tough. stay with substory. let's get this good looking good smear about guns instead of working for the people both issues the mainstream media were pretty much on the bridegroom's vision. of the good rather. less time of the new alert animation scripts scare me a little but. there is breaking news tonight and they are continuing to follow the breaking news. alexander's family cry tears

of the war a great big other that had the added regard at a court of law found alive is a story made for a movie is playing out in real life. welcome to devise 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 attentional disorders for over twenty five years in a private practice dr letson focuses on the high i.q. adult and addles adolescent a.d.h. d. populations she specializes in identifying and treating complex presentations of a.d.h. d. may be misinterpreted or overlooked she's also the co-author of the book understanding girl.