There Are Just Too Many of Us

We all know it. We’ve all experienced the overcrowding of big cities, from which some of us fled to small towns like Santa Fe, now overwhelmed too with commercial development and part-time residents. But I hadn’t realized until a recent vacation in England that the overcrowding is also spoiling a city that a decade ago preserved some of the ambiance of a famous old town, where it was still possible to imagine the setting for Dicken’s novel, Bleak House and even preserved remnants of the eighteenth-century town that had captivated and nearly destroyed Moll Flanders. All such remnants of the past are now obscured or obliterated by enormous construction projects, causing blocked roads and sidewalks and creating ceaseless noise and dust.

It’s not the fault of these huge orange monsters. All this building has become necessary in England and everywhere else because THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY OF US. I’m not talking about immigrants who seem to be the last to keep alive a dream of a better life elsewhere; I’m talking about us home folks. Too many babies, too many children, too many adults—and perhaps the whole antichoice chorus is motivated by a desire to see more, more, more, population growth fueling commercialism at ever level, the malls, the vast chains, the locally owned stores obliterated because they can’t provide parking for the whale-sized cars and the mobs descending like locusts to spend their money.

Capitalism, red in tooth and claw.

Years ago, there was an attempt to talk about something called Population Control. It went along with President Jimmy Carter’s practical suggestion that we all put on sweaters in the winter and turn down the thermostat. Now, with window air conditioners thundering all over Santa Fe (like everywhere else, we are suffering from the climate disaster), Carter might have suggested that we put on t-shirts and turn the A/C off. Like sprinklers that waste most of their water on sidewalks, air conditioning, once turned on, stays turned on and makes us more unwilling to put up with even eighty-degree temperature.

A friend—like me a feminist—told me of talking about this problem with another woman of our persuasion, and learning that the feminist movement years ago abandoned support of population control. It may have been out of concern for black and brown women whom conservatives sometimes excoriate for having too many children; only those of us who are white and wealthy should be populating the earth with our kind.

I never heard this before, and I’m not certain how accurate it is; feminism has always made room for a variety of opinions about everything, one of the reasons for its health and longevity, even today when it is largely ignored.

But I do know THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY OF US, and applaud my friend, who has chosen to remain childless, for a decision that is essential if we are ever to make progress in restoring the natural world.

We are a long way from that. Most recent example is the sudden lack of baby formula, treated as a worldwide disaster. There was a time not too many decades ago, when many of us nursed our babies, providing them with nutrients never found in commercial formula. But then the Nestle Corporation began to promote formula as a better way and continued its campaign even when mothers in Africa, only having access to polluted water, mixed the Nestle power with that water and succeeded in poisoning their babies. And the support group, La Leche League, so essential to me when I was nursing my three sons, seems to have disappeared.

It’s all part of our destruction of the natural order. It’s all part of the fact that THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY OF US.

 

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Following the posting of this piece, Bonnie Lee Black emailed me the following passage from Paul Theroux’s book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, which is very much worth sharing with you—thank you Bonnie!

“What sent me away finally [from India on to Sri Lanka] was
something simpler [than the heat, dirt, beggars, bugs…], but
larger and inescapable. It was the sheer mass of people, the
horribly thronged cities, and colossal agglomeration of
elbowing and contending Indians, the billion-plus, the sight
of them, the sense of their desperation and hunger, having to
compete with them for space on sidewalks, on roads, every-
where—what I’d heard on the train from Amritsar: ‘Too many.
Too many.’ All of them jostling for space, which made for much
of life there a monotony of frotteurism, life in India being an
unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing.

“And not because it was India—Indians were good-
humored and polite on the whole—but because it was the
way of the world. The population of the United States had
doubled in my lifetime [P.T. is now in his early 80s], and the old
simple world that I had known as a boy was gone. India was
a reminder to me of what was in store for us all, a glimpse of
the future. Trillions of dollars were spent to keep people
breathing, to cure disease, and to extend human life, but
nothing was being done to relieve the planet of overpopulation,
the contending billions…”

In Women, Travel feminism Overpopulation La Leche League