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Population,

Is our woe;

Saving every

Embryo.

You’ll be pleased to hear that in a very low-key and gingerly way, the Sierra Club has publicly admitted that overpopulation is a big problem. And they may have gotten away with it. No reports yet of widespread defection by Catholics or evangelicals. What a relief! Now the Club won’t have to deal with that landmine again.

Most environmental groups just ignore the issue altogether. Discussions of overpopulation are understandably avoided like the plague. Yes, we’re all against it, but since its obvious cure lies in birth control, sex education, stern immigration rules, and maybe even abortion, rare is the nature lover who wants to meddle. Various churches will have your head if you do. Further, American foreign aid policy prescribes an abstinence-only approach to overpopulation. Equally dangerous are compassionate human rights groups which urge us to welcome millions of immigrants to join us here in the U.S. in overusing Earth’s limited resources.

But at least one good thing, we have finally reined in our ridicule of China’s single-child policy. That’s because it seems to be working. Luckily religion is weak over there. Perhaps even more amazingly, population control is also spreading in desperate Bangladesh, despite its strict adherence to Islam. Sometimes practicality wins out. In most of the Third World, however, unsustainable populations are exploding, egged on by faiths and cultures that promote fecundity, unhindered by aid programs that promote birth control.

In our state, growth is seen as an unassailable virtue. Cities that actually lose population are tagged as doomed, while those with booming new subdivisions are viewed as the future of our species. More buildings mean more tax base, more business and more vibrancy.

Attitudes toward immigrants are similar: they provide more customers, more cheap service workers, more taxpayers, more Social Security revenue. We just don’t want them to bring their kids, get sick, or keep speaking Spanish. Their big environmental problem is of course that in order to live here at all they must adopt our wasteful ways, consuming gas and electricity while elevating global warming. Still, as long as they go home each night to their ghettos we don’t grouse too loudly.

So, as a nation we remain ambivalent about overpopulation. Intellectually we know it is destroying the world, but individually we have reasons to keep quiet. Indeed the New York Times just ran a long baleful story on the travails of Pittsburgh as its numbers dwindle. Meanwhile, Russia is sending recruiters to Armenia to help fill its vacant jobs.

But that’s not the problem for most of the world. The far more common complaint is that there are too many people and not enough jobs. Or food. Or health care. Or money.

By now it is well understood academically that the key to stabilizing overpopulation is the education of young women. Helping them mature has turned out to both defer and cap childbearing. But that simple humane act can generate a cultural revolution in many poor lands, and its sex education component means a religious revolution in some donor lands as well, especially the United States.

Thus the world races daily deeper into the pit of resource destruction, simply by creating too many people. It’s not only oil and gas that get squandered, but water, soil, forests, fisheries, minerals, farms and air quality. It seems Biblically ironic that while religion is in many ways the protector of our gracious provenance, at the same time it is also religion that is cruelly destroying that provenance through preservation of every sacred sperm and egg.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn.