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Page added on April 16, 2014
Why Controlling the World’s Population Might Not Be About Numbers After All
In a world with limited resources, we have to conserve what we have and reduce the number of people on the planet—at least, that’s what most of us believe. But is this true? That’s the provocative question raised by the new documentary Misconception. The film, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 20, gives us a personal look at the social and political ramifications of population growth.
Oscar-winning director Jessica Yu (best documentary short subject) began exploring the issue of population growth while making her previous documentary, Last Call at the Oasis, which is about the global water crisis. During every post-viewing question-and-answer period, “we literally had people saying, Your next film has to be about population growth,” says Yu. But instead of beginning with the traditional population-suppression-equals-enough-resources mind-set, Yu says she and her collaborators decided to confront “misconceptions about the role of population in the global picture.”
Misconception challenges our assumptions through the stories of three everyday people: Bao, a Chinese bachelor who’s facing pressure from his family to marry; Denise, a Canadian pro-life activist; and Gladys, a Kampala, Uganda–based journalist who works with abandoned children.
At 29, Bao is under the gun to tie the knot. We see him attending learn-to-date classes and being chastised by relatives who think he’s waited too long. While most Westerners probably can’t imagine the kind of odds he’s facing—China has 30 million fewer women than men—Millennials across the globe are confronting similar challenges.
“They’ve been told you should have someone who’s educated and good-looking, and you shouldn’t have to settle for less,” says Yu. Today’s “young people are holding off on marriage because they want more education and more from their career,” she adds. However, “what makes it different in China is that the traditional mind-set from the grandparents and parents is still very strong.”
They’re right to be concerned, says Yu, because “there’s not a huge safety net for the older generation.” In China, “you depend on your offspring and their spouse to take care of you.” If those young people don’t get married, “it’s very scary and disorienting for parents to wonder what’s going to happen to them as they get older.”
From there, the film heads to small-town Morinville, Alberta, to follow Denise, a pro-life activist who travels to New York City for a conference on population at the United Nations. “The conventional notion would be that we’d follow somebody that’s pushing for increased funding for family planning,” says Yu. But telling Denise’s story provides a different perspective on the “forces and opinions and philosophies that are at play in the global conflict over family planning in places with high birthrates.”
We watch as Denise tries to sway nail technicians, cab drivers, and diplomats to her anti–birth control, anti-abortion point of view. “I know a lot of people will not agree with Denise,” says Yu, but “she’s choosing to speak up and get involved…. It’s interesting to see how effective she can be.”
Denise hammers home the point that we should be eliminating poverty—not children—which is difficult to argue with, but it’s obvious it’s an infinitely more complex issue after you spend time in Kampala with Gladys, a journalist who started a newspaper column about children who’ve been abandoned in the city.
Yu decided to tell Gladys’ story because it forces us to consider, “What if you’re a child born to a woman who didn’t have a choice about having you?” and “What does the future look like to a child who’s born into this situation that’s not planned or wanted?”
We see how Gladys, who Yu describes as “one of those larger-than-life people,” has built relationships with the local police and social service agencies to reconnect children who are left in hospitals or on the side of the road with family members. It’s a sharp contrast with Bao’s story. He’s worried about being seen as “leftover man,” Chinese shorthand for a perma-bachelor, while the children in Uganda have simply been left behind by their parents.
Yu hopes that after watching Misconception viewers will start asking the right questions. “Fixation on the numbers becomes an excuse not to look at the underlying causes” of both falling and rising fertility rates. In places with falling birthrates, Yu says, we have to ask ourselves “about the opportunities for women in particular cultures—do they have the support they need to work, and raise a family, and do everything else in daily life?” In places in the developing world where women have multiple children, we have to remember that they use fewer resources.
“If you live in the U.S. and you have one child, your footprint is five times bigger than similar families in Mozambique,” says Yu. “The problems of the world aren’t on the shoulders of people having ‘too many kids.’ Everyone has a role in this—whether it’s a smaller, wealthier family that consumes a lot or a larger family that has more kids than can easily be handled by the parents.”
16 Comments on "Why Controlling the World’s Population Might Not Be About Numbers After All"
Kenz300 on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 2:20 pm
The world adds 80 million more people to feed, clothe and house every year………….
Endless population growth is not sustainable……….
Too many people and too few resources……
If you can not provide for yourself you can not provide for a child.
Wrap it up…… access to family planning services needs to be available to all that want it.
ghung on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 2:40 pm
“Denise hammers home the point that we should be eliminating poverty—not children…”
In the real world, eliminating poverty equates to increasing consumption. This whole discussion wouldn’t be an issue if current and future consumption weren’t an issue; the core predicament. As the article points out, developed countries with lower/declining birth rates are also the highest per-capita consumers.
Meld on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 3:07 pm
well that was a waste of time
Boat on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 3:27 pm
ghung
I agree. I am afraid it will take climate change or world war to cull the heard.
Plantagenet on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 3:43 pm
Amazing how ignoring the numbers once again leads to a completely incorrect result.
peakyeast on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 3:45 pm
Damn.. These people are dangerous retards. They dont use their brain in a useful manner – rather as a disguise that they use emotions and religious indoctrination as a way of planning the future
Northwest Resident on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 3:56 pm
ghung — A collapse of the global economy would also go a long, long way toward culling the herd. Just stopping access to medications and medical maintenance services will cull millions right in here in the USA. Stoppage of just in time delivery will set off riots and lead to widespread starvation, along with thousands of little battles over scraps of food — that culls another hundred million or more. Worldwide, with no fossil fuel fertilizers and no exports of grain or other foods from major exporting countries, we’ll see billions culled in no time at all. Who needs war or climate change to cull the herd when mass starvation and riot-related deaths will do most of the culling instead?
yellowcanoe on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 4:02 pm
A rising living standard and providing more opportunities to women has dramatically reduced the birth rate in developed nations and this has been promoted as the solution to population growth in the rest of world for many decades now. However, given that we are reaching resource limits the opportunity to do this is gone. I’m not convinced it was ever a realistic goal — raising living standards is one thing but giving women a more equitable position in society is extremely difficult if religion or local custom says otherwise. For example, Saudi Arabia is unquestionably a wealthy society but they have made very little progress in giving women equal rights. As a result, Saudi Arabia continues to have a fairly high birth rate.
HARM on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 4:42 pm
“We watch as Denise tries to sway nail technicians, cab drivers, and diplomats to her anti–birth control, anti-abortion point of view. “I know a lot of people will not agree with Denise,” says Yu, but “she’s choosing to speak up and get involved…. It’s interesting to see how effective she can be.”
Yes, that’s exactly the right argument for a world of 7.3 billion people adding 80 million new hungry mouths to feed, clothe and house each year.
“Denise hammers home the point that we should be eliminating poverty—not children”
And of course there’s no relationship between those two things, right? I mean it’s not like the most unstable, dangerous and impoverished places on earth also have sky-high birthrates, right?
Good God, with innumerate fundamentalist idiots like this running around preaching pro-growth insanity, no wonder it’s so hard to get any political action around population reduction.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 4:49 pm
There are no silver bullets with overpopulation and the associated overshoot of carrying capacity. Since the whole human population dynamics are self-organizing much will unfortunately depend on nature culling the herd. This will be the primary way population will be checked. Yet, there can be a serious effort on a variety of fronts to adapt and mitigate the overshoot. We need a 1000 different approaches. I would recommend these be the top efforts. The world religions that are promoting procreation over sound population management have to start the debate on the unsound consequences of discouraging family planning and birth control. Education of women in the third would should be high on the list as it is now yet not much more effort can be made when the global economy is broke. In fact poverty is likely to increase as the global economy fails. Nations and their economist need to stop the preaching about growth and the need for population growth to support economic growth. Economic growth will not allow more population once the population is in overshoot. It must be recognized the amount of consumption and the amount of people both together produce overshoot. Both conditions must be addressed. More should be done by nations to promote small families or no families as the famous 1 child policy in China. The world paradigm has changed. We are now facing a bottleneck and a decent phase in human economic activity. We are also facing an uncertain climate which will most likely impact food production. I feel we are past the point where pain and discomfort could have been avoided. That was possible with the “Limits of Growth” study decades ago. We had a chance then but economist and politicians chose the easy route of economic and population growth. Now the younger generation will pay. We are facing the most difficult period in modern man’s history. We are in no way assured of survival as a species. A few wrong moves and a few tipping points converge and it is all over. Let us face our demons and choose a path to basic sustainability of our species in a damaged but still livable world.
kervennic on Wed, 16th Apr 2014 11:53 pm
looks likea completely useless good thinking documentary. We will see what will the net years look like..
Makati1 on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:19 am
Consider:
US 317M pop. = 1,585,000,000 3rd world consumers.
EU 733M pop. = ~ 2,199,000.000 3rd world consumers.
The real problem is 1st world excess consumption, not population in the 3rd world. The West(1,050M)consumes more than the rest of the world (6,200M)combined.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:32 am
Makati1 — Actually, the real problem is that the entire world economy was built on excessive consumption primarily by the West, and to stop consuming is equivalent to stopping the economy in its tracks. And another part of that problem is that a good portion of the 3rd world population is aspiring to become maxed out consumers, just like us. There isn’t enough to go around, and the ones doing all the consuming are locked in with no way out except collapse. And that is what will eventually happen.
Makati1 on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 10:52 am
NR, of course, but I was only pointing out the less obvious. Over consumption (greed) is killing the planet, not the population numbers. Of course collapse is unavoidable at this point and I think the sooner the better for the planet and the species homo sapiens. I would prefer collapse to world war 3 and the inevitable nuclear exchanges. At this point, either or both are possible.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 11:15 am
Just a note MAK, you compare consumption you might also compare production. The tird world produces very little to consume. Some natural resources but very little in the way of economic goods. They just by the fact of being alive are destroying their local environment by overpopulation with corresponding overshoot. The rich developed world is doing their part by over consuming. It is a one way street of doom of over populating and over consumption. So what is your point MAK besides your normal bash the developed world and showing compassion for the tird world? I prefer the balance of the reality of a dualistic predicament.
Joyce Johnson on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 12:30 pm
If you want to see an award-winning film on Population now, watch Mother: Caring for 7 Billion. It is streaming free online though April 25th for Earthday on Youtube and the Mother website.