A Pivotal Moment; Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge edited by Laurie Mazur, Island Press, £18.99. Reviewed by Sheila Malone The population-related topics covered in A Pivotal Moment, Population, Justice and the Environmental Challenge have not always co-existed happily. But the great strength of this collection of articles edited by Laurie Mazur is that, while comprehensively reviewing past movements and ideas, it also takes us beyond some old Mazur is director of the Population Justice Project in the US. In her introduction she identifies the present as pivotal both environmentally and demographically. Firstly, the environmental crisis facing us has reached a peak in potentially catastrophic climate change. At the same time, population wise, the largest generation of young people in history is now coming of age. As the book's early chapters point out, despite the slowing of previously rapid population growth 80m people are still being added to our numbers annually. And nearly half the world's current population of 6.8bn is under the age of 25 - a huge base for further growth. The decisions of this 3bn strong young generation about their fertility and family size are seen as crucial in influencing whether world population levels reach only around 8bn or soar to between 9 and 11bn by 2050. Both Mazur herself and most of the articles in the book identify unsustainable production and consumption patterns as the primary cause of ecological crisis. They also point to the inequalities behind environmental impact. For instance, the countries of the affluent North eat up
31 * Reviews 32 times the resources and emit 32 times the pollution of the global South. At the same time, however, rapid population growth is seen as a factor that can worsen already existing UN figures tell us, for instance, that over the last 50 years human activity has altered the earth's ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in ant other time in human history. As a result two thirds of them are currently being degraded or exploited in ways As demands for food, fresh water and fuel all soar, our rapidly growing numbers and ever higher levels of (albeit inequitable) consumption are Especially pertinent are the chapters on the unprecedented increase in urbanisation. Since 2008 almost half the people in the world (over 3.3bn) have lived in cities. By 2030 this is However, poor and affluent city-dwellers are seen to have different impacts. The vast slum settlements of the poor often create local environmental damage -through hillside erosion and so on. On the other hand, the high energy use, consumption and waste of the affluent are responsible for soaring global carbon emissions which dwarf unsustainable lifestyles of the better-off. The USA is seen as particularly relevant here, since it has both continued population growth and the biggest per capita consumption in the world. Other articles point to the need to change the unsustainable and inequitable global capitalist system that underlies lifestyles. Population policies over the last five decades are reviewed in the third section of the
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32 book. From the 1960s onwards many governments, health and social workers saw a need to address the unprecedented world population increase. But the discussion about exactly how to do this produced some polarized positions. On the one hand were those who concentrated on the need for contraceptive and family planning services. Others -mainly left and feminist - saw improvements in economic and social conditions and in women's status, equality and rights as the key factors affecting fertility rates. In their view "development was the best contraceptive". As population growth slowed in the North, but continued to rise in the global South, some also saw the focus on family planning as unfairly targeting poor women in developing countries. Furthermore, past family planning programmes had led to coercive measures such as forced sterilizations, for example in India and Peru, and the notorious one child policy in China. A new paradigm for the future emerged in 1994 with the UN International conference on Population and Development in Cairo. This brought together development workers, reproductive health workers, environmentalists and women rights activists from 179 countries. The Cairo Program of Action offered a new rights-based approach to population, focused on voluntary reproductive health services and empowerment of women, and linked to sustainable development. It rested on sound evidence that when women have more control over their own bodies and their own lives they have healthier, smaller families. This brings benefits for women themselves (in well-being, education, job opportunities, status), for their families, communities and for the planet. A chapter by Adrienne Germaine details such benefits seen in countries as various as Bangladesh, Brazil and the USA. Another article describes an imaginative success in rural Philippines where a local midwife, known in her community as "the environmental midwife" has combined her medical skills with environmental education and farming support work. These kinds of partnerships are now the norm. They enable access to reproductive health and family planning services through women-centred, community-led projects, instead of externally imposed population control from above. The book's final part brings us up to date by looking at the rise of the religious right in both North and South. The Vatican and some fundamentalist Islamic states fiercely opposed the Cairo Program because of it support for abortion rights and much funding for new projects has since been blocked. The poorest women in the poorest countries have suffered most from this. There are still 200m women worldwide wanting, but unable to access, reproductive health and family planning services, and 80m unintended pregnancies annually. Some still argue that issues of development, environment and population should be kept separate and rights
* Reviews campaigned on for their own sake. Laurie Mazur, by contrast, explains that her concept of population justice as "putting the relationship between human numbers and environmental harm within a framework of underlying issues of sustainability and equality and respect for human rights". She also addresses the impact of our individual choices on others, including future generations - an urgent issue in the light of our current ecological crisis. Mazur's 'Call to Action' sets out four priorities for population justice: the securing of universal access to family planning and other reproductive health services; equal rights for girls and women; a just and sustainable global economic system; and reduced consumption in the affluent countries. These are strong aims, linked in a positive way that should be acceptable to reds, greens and feminists. If it is not, one reason may be the failure, especially of the Marxist left, to include serious study of demography in our accounts of development. This omission has left the field open to assorted population controllers and reactionaries. In Marx's debates with rival political economist Thomas Malthus it was, of course, necessary to condemn the idea of Malthus that the poor brought poverty and misery upon themselves through over-breeding. Marx was right to explain instead that their plight was the result of poverty and unemployment created under capitalism. At the same time, by not examining how population patterns themselves impact back on economic, social and environmental conditions, Marx left a legacy prone to onesidedness and economism. A Pivotal Moment offers us a different and refreshing approach, from which we can all learn.