Originally published 30 November 1992
The books we read as children stay with us all our lives.
Among the books in my parents’ library were the popular works of Hendrik Willem van Loon, published in the years between the World Wars. Those books made an indelible impression on my mind.
Van Loon was a man of encyclopedic interests. The volumes in our house included The Story of Mankind, Van Loon’s Story of Art, and Van Loon’s Geography. With folksy wit and a genius for simplification (all too often, oversimplification), van Loon reduced eons of history to pithy paragraphs, illustrated with his own charming, slightly loony drawings.
Recently, the Geography fell into my hands from a library shelf and it all came flooding back — those rainy Saturday afternoons nearly half a century ago, curled up in a chair with van Loon’s cutesy condensations of history.
Page one has a drawing of a packing crate teetering on the brink of the Grand Canyon. Van Loon writes: “If everybody in this world of ours were six feet tall and a foot and a half wide and a foot thick, then the whole of the human race (and according to the latest available statistics there are now nearly 2,000,000,000 descendants of the original Homo sapiens and his wife) could be packed into a box measuring half a mile in each direction.” He issued a challenge: “If you don’t believe me, figure it out for yourself.”
I remember accepting the challenge. I knew just enough arithmetic then to scribble out the calculation. It came out exactly right. All of the people in the world would fit into a box that could be tipped into the Grand Canyon.
In Van Loon’s drawing, the box looks tiny, teetering on the brink of the chasm. It was easy for the boy in the chair (and presumably other readers) to imagine that the human impact on the planet was slight, reversible, and manageable. In the first illustration of his Geography, van Loon underplayed the most important geographical problem of our time.
The exploding human population.
Today, world population stands at 5.5 billion, nearly three times what it was in 1932, the year Van Loon’s Geography was published. At the present rate of growth, the population will double by the year 2025, and again by the year 2050. Within a century, there will be 100 billion people on Earth.
A hundred billion people would fill a box almost two miles on a side. If the box were placed in the Grand Canyon, it would tower over the rim.
A hundred billion people is about two persons for every square mile of the Earth’s land surface, including those parts of the land that are presently covered with ice, mountains, forests, and deserts.
It is probably fair to say that most scientists find these numbers alarming. It is difficult to grasp how the planet can sustain so many people. Our natural resources — topsoil, ice-age groundwater, fossil fuels, and mineral resources — are being rapidly depleted. With more and more people competing for fewer and fewer resources, social conflicts are sure to arise. New technologies and sources of energy will be invented, but at what cost to the environment?
In 1973, when he was a member of the US House, George H. W. Bush wrote: “In a world of nearly 4 billion people, increasing by…80 million more, every year, population growth and how to restrain it are public concerns that command the attention of national and international leaders.” It was clear, he said, that curbing the world’s fertility would be one of the major challenges of the 1970s.
As President, George Bush has given no sign that the world’s fertility commands his attention. In a proclamation announcing World Population Awareness Week in 1991, he expressed the opinion that population growth, in and of itself, is a neutral phenomena: “Because people are producers as well as consumers, population growth can also be a sign and a source of strength.” If overpopulation is a palpable cause of human misery in undeveloped parts of the world, the President suggested that the problem is due in large part to the failure to adopt market-oriented policies.
Ah, yes. Thank you, Mr. Bush, for the economic equivalent of van Loon’s drawing of the half-mile box teetering on the rim of the canyon — simplistic, trivializing, and just plain wrong. It remains to be seen if the Clinton administration will do better.
Growing population contributes to problems as diverse as famine, air and water pollution, ozone depletion, global warming, the destruction of rain forests, extinction of species, and epidemics such as AIDS. Fertility control is not for the Third World alone. Developed, market-oriented countries use most of the planet’s resources and do most of the polluting.
There are no simple solutions to the problems of population growth. Governmental efforts to check fertility run counter to individual freedom, to our natural desire for children, to the religious beliefs of many people, and — in some respects — to the imperatives of a market economy. But to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, as our government has done for the past 12 years, is sheer lunacy.
For all his half-baked science, chauvinistic politics, and loony illustrations, Hendrik Willem van Loon knew, even in 1932, that unchecked population growth and depletion of natural resources were serious problems, demanding serious solutions. His Geography ends with a plea for “planetary-planning” that sounds remarkably relevant to our time.
As a boy, I quickly forgot van Loon’s last-page plea for wisdom and restraint. It was the first-page drawing of the teetering box that all these years has stuck in my mind, a drawing that minimized the dangers of unchecked fertility. That’s what’s wrong with simplistic formulations of complex problems: they tend to distract us from the difficult work at hand.
As of 2020, the population of the world has climbed to an estimated 7.8 billion humans. ‑Ed.
