The link between the environment and human population is a no-brainer.
I’ve been pre-occupied with the overlap between population and the environment ever since I read the Ecologist’s ‘Blueprint for Survival’ in the early 1970s. I’ve campaigned assiduously for progressive family planning programmes since that time on, just as I have for environmental and social justice issues. It’s always been a no-bloody-brainer that the two go hand in hand.
That’s not the case for the majority of people in the environment movement. For most of the big NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in the UK (United Kingdom), population has either been completely off-limits or grudgingly acknowledged as an important area of concern but not one in which they feel any need to get actively involved. Throughout that time, the intellectual and moral disconnect has, for me, been startling. And it still is.
A few months ago, as a Patron of Population Matters (UK), I teamed up with my good friend Robin Maynard (who is as baffled by this disconnect as I am) to invite the eight leading environmental NGOs in the UK to review their position. Guided by the headline conclusion from the Royal Society’s ground-breaking People and Planet Report in 2012 (“Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues”), we asked them whether they would be prepared to commit to the following six actions:
- Accept and promote the findings of the Royal Society’s People and Planet Report that population and consumption must be considered as indivisible, linked issues;
- Acknowledge publicly and actively communicate the crucial relevance of population to your organisation’s mission and objectives;
- Support and advocate the principle of universal access to safe, affordable family planning for all women throughout the world;
- Call on the Government to act on the findings of the Royal Society’s Report and draw up a national population policy;
- Use your organisation’s considerable policy resources, voice and influence to speak and engage members of the wider public in an intelligent, informed and honest debate about population;
- Include the population factor in all relevant communications and policy pronouncements.
Hardly a revolutionary manifesto—but you might have thought the sky had fallen in. Lengthy delays, prevarication, excuses, weasel words—that was our reality for the next few months. The responses confirmed all our worst fears, and with the honourable exception of Friends of the Earth (that has now developed a new and rather more progressive position on population, which—to be completely fair—is a much better position than the organisation had when I was its Director back in the 1980s), they’re all pretty much where they were four decades ago. Despite a massive increase in human numbers and a correspondingly massive deterioration in the state of our physical environment.
In the interests of transparency, Robin and I have therefore decided to publish summaries of all the responses, based on which we’ve produced a ranking of the best to the worst. [Remember these are British organizations.]
- Friends of the Earth
- The Wildlife Trusts
- Campaign to Protect Rural England
- Greenpeace
- Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
- Wildfowl and Wetland Trust
- National Trust
- Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF-UK)
As you can imagine, I take no pleasure in those findings, but my continuing anger on this score remains proportionate to that sense of collective blindness on the part of organisations that for the most part I respect and love.
[With the exception of the Center for Biological Diversity and Blue Planet United, U.S. environmental organizations do not rate well either. – Editor]
Source: http://www.jonathonporritt.com/blog/population-still-big-taboo
For the entire report, go to the website.
