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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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At six billion plus today, the earth’s human population will reach more than nine billion by 2050, according to estimates. If this many people consume energy at the current rate in the developed world, the planet will need more than double the amount of power it consumes today. But energy is just one issue that humankind will have to tackle to create a sustainable future. The root cause of the looming energy problem—and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health—is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.
High fertility rates in areas of the developing world that can least cope put tremendous pressure on freshwater and sanitation needs and fuel economic and religious tensions. In response, these countries ramp up their energy production via the only means available to them based on their resources—means that tend to either pollute the environment or contribute to global warming.
For instance, India, Somalia and Sudan have large positive birth rates. The latter two countries struggle to provide adequate food and water resources, and India increased its energy consumption by almost 50 percent between 1992 and 2001. (In contrast, Japan, France and Russia have negative birth rates, and the U.S. is slightly positive.) Indeed, a United Nations study published in August reported that Asia currently does not have the means to feed the extra 1.5 billion expected to live on that continent by 2050.
Empirical work indicating that providing schooling for women and girls will address these problems includes study after study showing that educated women have fewer children, are wealthier and are less likely to accept fundamentalist extremism. If we want a safer world, we should consider the utility of spending dollars on educating young people as an alternative to troops and weapons.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan today the Taliban have created thousands of madrassas, where children from poor families with no access to education can receive food and what passes for learning (but what is in fact quite the opposite). At the same time, they restrict access to education for women. In Gaza vulnerable young people are recruited early on to religious extremist training camps. I am not naive enough to believe that building schools and providing access to safe and secure environments for learning will alone solve our problems—we will need to create economic opportunities as well.
Moreover, in paternalistic societies where women have few rights, effecting change will be an uphill battle. For example, the government we are now supporting with troops and infrastructure in Afghanistan has recently passed legislation that food can be withheld from women who do not have sex with their husband and that women cannot go out of the house without their husband’s permission. In countries of this sort that now receive significant support from us, we need to make the empowerment of women a higher priority. As difficult and slow as the process might be, the education of women in such countries is a necessary first step to giving them the opportunity and motivation to begin to control their own destiny.
The long-term goal of reducing poverty, religious fundamentalism and overpopulation will be impossible to reach until we free women around the world from the enslavement of ignorance. More fundamental is the fact that education is a basic human right that has been systematically denied too many women for too long.
This article was originally published with the title How Women Can Save the Planet.
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19 Comments
Add CommentLet's start right here in the U.S. where education in the US has declined precipitously. Rather than increasing education, as is needed around the world, we are heading towards joining them in ignorance and fundamentalism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYawn. This is just the same tired old Population Bomb mantra from Erlich dusted off and regurgitated for modern consumption.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf we suffer from famine and disease in the coming years, it will be the result of socialist government policies and not population.
Why doesn't anyone realize that before you can educate a person you have to make sure they -want- to be educated?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFundamentalists cannot be educated because they actively resist any idea that challenges their carefully constructed house of cards. Which is the root of this whole awful mess.
I disagree. Why don't you educate the edcuated masses in the 'developed' world to use less energy first. And what exactly do u mean by 'education' reducing fundamentalism? The war that the western world is waging against islam looks like fundamentalism from another angle to me. How different is an american soldier who just wants to kill the 'enemy' iraqi to a muslim who wants to wage jihad? not so different.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEverything's fine, but as soon as we speak of religion, we come to an area where science is uniquely unqualified to proffer an opinion or viewpoint. I'm religious, as are most scientists. If Scientific American makes a statement about abortion or contraception, they must be aware that this flies directly in the face of many religious believers. And there may be a very good reason, from the standpoint of human evolution or cultural diversification, why the humanistic point of view on birth control may be detrimental to the human race. Think about it.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood and relevant article. Mr. Krauss, thank you for writing this! I have no doubt that (better) education for women, especially in the developing and undeveloped world, is the most efficient and effective way in making the world safer and greener.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the comments above me:
- galaxy-man is implying that educating women won't work because they don't want to be educated. When one has a daughter of school age in the west, do they ask her first if she wants to be educated, or is the school enrollment a natural process. What we want is for them to have options other than religious schooling or no schooling at all.
- William Stoertz says he is religious, "as are most scientists". You surely must be joking. Logical thinking is a prerequisite to being a scientist.
Sorry guys, but what I see in the 4 comments above me is a bunch of disgruntled men worrying about any change that would also empower women and endanger the status quo.
Instead of trying to educate women to stand up to the faith fascists (and let's face it, we have them in the West too), how about this novel concept: educating the men who come up with these stupid so-called cultural norms about women's role in the world in the first place?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's education, full-stop that will set people free. And for those of you who suggerst that science is not qualified to proffer a view point on faith, consider this - all major faiths are run by men, for men. The "rules" arising from faith, by and large continue to support the so-called arguments in favour of oppressing women.
Never mind science not being qualified to speak of religion, I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where we can tell religion to keep the heck out of science - or any other fact-based, rational way of thinking.
"I'm religious, as are most scientists."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo they're not. Where the hell did you come up with this idea anyway?
"Logical thinking is a prerequisite to being a scientist."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd yet there seems to be very little of it present among people who profess to have it.
For example, failure to realize that rants against religious fundamentalists is, itself, a dogmatic fundamentalism based grounded in a personal belief system.
"For example, failure to realize that rants against religious fundamentalists is, itself, a dogmatic fundamentalism based grounded in a personal belief system."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI guess I could have left that one sentence out, true. Nevertheless I fail to see how one can call one short sentence "rants".
How it is that you can still argue your point using the already debunked Population explosion rubric, the incresingly suspect science behind anthopogenic global warming, given the fact that most countries around the world are actually experiencing a population replacement deficit problem is beyond me. But I guess you had to write something once you sat in front of your computer huh.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDouble current energy requirements by 2050? No problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy 2020, pulsed dense plasma focus fusion generators will be providing all the power we could want at 1/20 of today's costs. They will use a fuel (boron) which is sufficiently abundant to last at 10X today's energy requirements for approximately one billion years.
I trust that by then something even better will be available. :)
Your article is a nicely aimed prose for those who believe that women should be liberalized. I don't think so. The world would turn into a mess if both the sexes have the same type of orientation. I support that women should be educated to let them live a happier life and should not be treated as the Talibans do but male should dominate the world to save it from more chaos. I also believe that we need to have more sex and that too more often but since that constitutes a crime type phenomenon, we should at least spread and increase the attraction between sexes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMiguel the skeptic, the replacment rate for a stable population is 2.1 children per women.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
Currently 122 put of 195 countries have a higher rate than that - thats 63% more than half the world's countires
Miguel the sceptic, the replacement rate for a stable population is 2.1 children per women.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
Currently 122 out of 195 countries have a higher rate than that - that's 63% more than half the world's countries
If the entire world's population was grouped into 4-person families, each with a separate house on a 4300 sq' lot, they would all fit inside Texas.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no crowding crisis or global problem. When more wealth and energy is generated (see above) there will be plenty for all.
I would like to hear more concrete ideas on how to bring economic opportunities to such places as Sudan, Somalia or Afghanistan. It takes more than American values and education to erase the trauma of generations of war, and even western education is only effective in empowering people insomuch as it instills conformity to preexisting economic structures.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(In the western world, the dark ages ended before women such as myself had our rights)
You can quibble over education and the like, but the empowerment of women or to put it quite frankly, giving women control over their birth canals and their menstrual cycles, is the ONLY thing that has been consistently shown to reduce poverty and improve all other relevant socioeconomic factors. Societies that use women solely as vehicles for producing babies are ALWAYS impoverished. There simply are no exceptions. Granted, you can't wave a magic wand over certain societies and make them grant women these basic rights, but as Krauss mentions, it should be a priority in any countries the US happens to be occupying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe population Bomb is a dud. According to the Lower Bound estimate from the UN, which has always been right so far, global population will peak at under 8bn in about 2030, then slowly decline.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, that overall trend probably factors in the effects of improved education of young women. It's the ones locked up in harems having 8 kids each we still need to worry about.