Dear Sarah,
This is personal. You have my late mother’s beautiful name first name and my niece’s last name. We share a long history of Ashkenazi Jewish roots that might even get Henry Louis Gates of the PBS show "Finding Your Roots," excited. You have obviously absorbed the compassion that is baked into the clay of our people who have fought and are still fighting antisemitism going on 6,000 years of our persecuted history.
This otherwise admirable trait has however, seems to have tainted your article claiming that overpopulation has nothing to do with climate change. The history and topic of overpopulation is often a trigger word for those, like yourself, who are always on the lookout for those who have racist intentions. But I invite you, as a journalist, to look deeper. Look deeper into the science, the ecology. I invite you to investigate why someone like me, with your same background, would have written books and numerous articles over the years about how this issue is itself causing not only climate change but so much of the suffering you are trying to prevent.
I first got interested in the overpopulation issue when my rabbi at Beth El synagogue in Minneapolis had our discussion group read Paul Ehrlich's book, “The Population Bomb,” when I was in 10th grade. I went back to the same synagogue as an adult, the year Jane Goodall came to speak there for Earth Day, to discuss the reason Jews should care deeply about this issue which is causing our planet to bake and our resources to dwindle. In the dozens of speeches I have given on overpopulation around the world, I make sure I tailor each one to fit the audience. That time I started, “It’s all Rabbi Abelson’s fault” referring to the way he required us to read Ehrlich’s book so many years before. There was a lot of uncomfortable twitching in the audience because, like me, they had been raised to focus on replacing the Jews slaughtered in the holocaust by having at least three children.
The US has grown by a 125,000,000 people since I was in 10th grade. How can that growth be dismissed as impacting the issue you care so much about? The answer is it can’t. The continuing growth of US population, now mostly due to immigration, in one of the worlds’ largest greenhouse gas emitters can’t help but be a factor in climate change.
There are three important things to consider. The first is the concept of infinite growth on a finite planet. Our resources are going down rapidly as our population continues to rise. The addition of nearly 6 billion in the most recent century all needing and wanting food, water, shelter and energy is often unnamed source of so many of the problems you talk about. The second is that it is a mistake to focus solely on the rise of global temperature and its terrifying consequences.
Overpopulation is behind our need to continually destroy habitats to keep people fed and housed. Water scarcity is becoming a huge issue as you must know, but it is not just due to climate change, there are now billions more people who are thirsty. The third is the most important. It speaks to our mutual concern about preventing suffering, misery and early death. We must reduce the gap between declining resources and increasing demand. While it may be more politically correct to try to increase our crop yields and a myriad of resource-costly inventions, that only keeps up the demand for our country and our planet’s limited resources.
I hope you can join me upstream to see and discuss the big picture of the collective human footprint that is not only about heavy duty energy consumers but also about how many total feet that need and are going to need even the basic resources in the years ahead. Overpopulation not only causes climate change, but is responsible for injustice around the world. You cannot have justice in a world grappling for dwindling resources. Working to educate people with your platform as a journalist about the truth about overpopulation and its role in climate change and loss of biodiversity etc, would be a great example of journalistic rigor.
Sincerely,
Karen I. Shragg
Author of Move Upstream a Call to Solve Overpopulation