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As a former emergency room physician, how could I resist an invitation to review a book with "fractured" in the title? When I served as chief of the medical staff and director of emergency services, my job was to put people back together. But after years of practicing medicine, I felt like I was straightening deck chairs on the Titanic while the whole ship was going down. My interaction with 30,000 patients supplied ample evidence of a world made toxic by the stress of too much—too much soot in the air causing asthma attacks to escalate; too many chemicals in the environment, doubling our cancer rates; too many people on the planet living unsustainable, stress-laden lives. So I quit my job and started writing, preaching, and speaking full-time about caring for the created earth, based on my faith as an evangelical Christian.
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Perhaps the most controversial issue that I talk about is population. Moral, intelligent, well-intentioned people hold sharply conflicting views on the population issue—an issue that is at the very crux of our environmental crisis. That is why the chapter on population in Allan Carlson's book Fractured Generations, though faulty in its conclusions, strikes me as worthy of discussion.
Fractured Generations is a book devoted to family policy issues. Carlson limits himself to one major issue per chapter, and ends each discussion with a list of public policy suggestions. I find myself agreeing with much of the reasoning in this well-researched book. My major source of disagreement with Carlson lies in Chapter 2, "Recrafting American Population Policy for a Depopulating World." Carlson tells us that many Western countries have either a nearly flat or slightly negative level of population growth, and that the United States, though still growing, may soon suffer the same future. He warns of a coming "surfeit of retirees" and an aging workforce that cannot compete on an international level.
In medical school, we were required to take eight semesters of statistics courses. Here's one statistic that no one argues with: the population of the United States has just reached the 300 million mark. At our present rate of growth, our population will reach 600 million in seventy years and one billion in a hundred years. And yet Carlson asserts that immediate policy steps must be taken to promote "greater fecundity" because "the demographic problem facing the twenty-first century is depopulation, not overpopulation."
Even if we were in danger of "depopulating," I disagree with Carlson's economic conclusions. He creates a false dichotomy when he implies that a sub-replacement rate of population growth will lead to dire monetary problems. If it's the workforce he's worried about, then all we have to do is open our borders. Countries that once depended on immigration for economic growth have slammed shut their doors. The rest of the world has more than enough people to meet the labor requirements of Western nations.
Indeed, the carrying capacity of the earth is a global issue, not a national one. If the children born between 2000 and 2005 were gathered on one island, that island would immediately be named the third most populous country in the world. On the flip side, not one island or acre of land has or can be added to this planet.
As I travel to speak with audiences about faith and the environment, I can see for myself the effects of population growth. In my lifetime, the world's population has doubled. The fields behind my boyhood home have sprouted "Woodfield Estates." Two-lane country roads are now six-lane highways. The streets of every major suburb are lined with cloned mega-box stores and chain-linked restaurants. Cities everywhere are becoming progressively more congested. This holds true around the globe.
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