http://www.wesjones.com/asimov.htm
MOYERS: What about the subject you've written so much about - the population explosion? Right now, the population of the globe is over five billion. You've warned us about what will happen if it continues at its two percent growth rate per year.
ASIMOV: Actually, the growth rate is down to one-point-six percent, but with the higher population, it's the same amount in actual numbers: eighty million a year. By the year 2000, it's going to be perhaps six-point-five billion.
MOYERS: That's just twelve years from now. How many people do you think the earth is able to sustain?
ASIMOV: I don't think it's able to sustain the five billion in the long run. Right now most of the world is living under appalling conditions. We can't possibly improve the conditions of everyone. We can't raise the entire world to the average standard of living in the United States because we don't have the resources and the ability to distribute well enough for that. So right now as it is, we have condemned most of the world to a miserable, starvation level of existence. And it will just get worse as the population continues to go up.
MOYERS: But you can't just say to a woman, "Don't have children."
ASIMOV: That's not the problem; it's that so many people are saying, "Have children." There is such a pro-natalist attitude in the world. We celebrate Mother's Day so enthusiastically, we say, "May all your troubles be little ones," we celebrate additional children. I feel sometimes that if we'd only stop pushing for children, somehow there would be fewer of them.
MOYERS: Why did you say that the price of survival is the equality of women?
ASIMOV: Because if women are allowed to enter into all facets of the human condition, if they can enter business, if they can enter religion, science, government on an equal basis with men, they will be so busy they won't feel it necessary to have a great many children. As long as you have women under conditions where they don't feel any sense of value or self-worth except as mothers, they'll have a lot of children because that's the only way they can prove they're worth something. In general, if you look through the world, the lower the status of women, the higher the birth rate, and the higher the birth rate, the lower the status of women. If you could raise the status of women, I am certain the birth rate would fall drastically through the choice of the women themselves. We're always saying that there's no fulfillment like having
children, but I notice mostly it's men who say that. You know, men get along without giving birth to children. They do that by finding other things to do. If women could find other things to do, too, they would have fewer children.
MOYERS: But once again, you are in conflict with a biblical imperative, "Be fruitful and multiply."
ASIMOV: Right. But God said that when Adam and Eve were the only two people in the world. He said, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." The earth was replenished long ago. That's one of the problems of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists take a statement that made sense at the time it was made, and because they refuse to consider that the statement may not be an absolute, eternal truth, they continue following it under conditions where to do so is deadly.
MOYERS: What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?
ASIMOV: It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor: If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want to and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom; it should be right there in the Constitution.
But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door: "Aren't you through yet?" and so on. In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.
MOYERS: People say the United States is bringing its population under control, that many Americans are not even reproducing themselves, and that what the rest of the world does, we can't control.
ASIMOV: The population of the United States is still going up. The only time it went up really slowly was during the Great Depression, when there were no laws lowering the birth rate, there was just an economic depression, which made people think twice before they had children. But the United States is doing something else - it is absolutely refusing to help nations control population. Our feeling is that it's enough for us to make sure that the United States is in good shape, and what other nations do is their business. It's not just their business - it's our business, too.
MOYERS: Can we exist as a stable economy and a stable society if around us are turmoil and chaos?
ASIMOV: Absolutely not. Right now many nations are destroying the rain forests because they need the firewood, and they need the space for farms.
MOYERS: Why should we care about that?
ASIMOV: Because without the rain forests, we're going to have deserts. The food supply will dwindle. As a matter of fact, there's even the possibility that we're going to lose all kinds of valuable substances we know nothing about. Those rain forests have an incredible number of species of plants and animals that we know very little about. Some of them may produce chemicals of great pharmacological and medical importance. If properly cultivated, some of the plants might be new food sources. In addition to that, nothing produces the oxygen of the atmosphere with the same intensity that a forest does. Anything that substitutes for it will be producing less oxygen. We're going to be destroying our atmosphere, too.
MOYERS: What did you mean when you said once that we have to stop living by the code of the past?
ASIMOV: Times change. For example, in the past we felt motherhood was the most important thing a woman could do, and that to be a good wife and mother was the sum total of a woman's purpose in life. She didn't need an education or interests outside the house. You know, Kinder, Kirche, Kuche - the children, the church, the kitchen - or in English you say, "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant." Well, we can't do that any more. We can't raise women to be baby machines. In the old days, we didn't worry about the future. Now we must. Things are changing so fast that we have to worry about the future all the time.
"We can't raise women to be baby machines"... Nei, ikke dersom vi skal skape et bærekraftig samfunn.
Men dette er et av de virkelig, virkelig store utfordringene: Å sette opp de sosiale spillereglene - på verdensbasis - slik at det ikke lønner seg for noen, det være seg familier, stammer, religioner, eller nasjoner, å gjøre sine kvinner til babymaskiner.
Problemet er at det er en veldig sterk seleksjonseffekt involvert: Kulturer som gjør sine kvinner til babymaskiner vil gjennomgå eksponensiell vekst (til de når sin Malthusianske grense); kulturer som ikke gjør det, stagnerer.
Selv om ordet "stagnasjon" er negativt ladet i daglig språkbruk, så er det nettopp stagnasjon vi ønsker å oppnå i vår situasjon... vi ønsker oss et paradigmeskifte her.
Problemet er at dersom du har to kulturer, den ene med en flat befolkningsutvikling og den andre med eksponensiell vekst, så tar det ikke lang tid før den første er vekk.
Eksponensiell vekst trumfer alt!
(jeg har snakket om dette tidligere)
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