The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia

Because overpopulation poses such a grave threat to the planet's sustainable economic future, and because voluntary measures to curb population don't work, we will soon be forced to abandon our head-in-the-sand stance and adopt some form of coercive constraints on individuals' ""unqualified reproductive rights."" Or so argues Hardin (Living Within Limits), professor emeritus of human ecology at U.C.-Santa Barbara, in a collection of accessible, if academic, essays that venture some highly unfashionable proposals. Hardin suggests that every person should be required to carry an identity card ""to put a stop to America's race toward multiculturalism,"" which he sees as a misguided movement that fosters cultural and political balkanization. He ridicules One Worlders' ideal of global government, arguing that such a system would be more likely to lead to chaos than our present multinational world of balanced antagonisms. Affirmative action, in his withering critique, is an overreaction to racism, a program that ""turned out to be racism with a different name"" and that often fails to supply the level of skills that jobs demand. Hardin also favors sharp restrictions on immigration, high tariff walls and a reversal of the current economic thinking that, he says, nurtures the illusion that perpetual growth is possible. The ""ecological economics"" Hardin embraces would force us to choose ethically among limitless demands in a world of finite resources. Throughout these blunt, open-ended essays, the author invokes a visiting, wholly rational Martian, not clouded by human passions, who surveys Earth's corrupt, self-destructive governments and offers a pro-population-control Martian sonnet, ""To Malthus."" Many readers will doubtless find some of Hardin's notions alarmist, but he airs unorthodox views that could conceivably be on the table tomorrow. (Feb.)