April 7, 2006

Population is the latest tug of war. Should there be more of us? Or fewer?

In Canada, it's puzzling to hear Stephen Harper, under pressure from his backbench MPs, say he plans to put already legalized same-sex marriage to a free vote in the House of Commons. He didn't repeat it in the speech from the throne, which just seems mischievous. But everything about Harper puzzles me. Is it necessary to embarrass oneself in public just to please MPs who will never make cabinet?

Same-sex marriage has results that you'd think would please Harper. Right-wingers love procreation, big families, families so huge that "wifey" has to stay home and knit bed sheets or the mattresses are bare. Maybe she knits mattresses. But you'd think same-sex marriage would add to the population, thus pleasing the right wing. At the moment, not only can lesbians now make good use of man-seed, but male gays can adopt or find a friendly surrogate, creating actual families.

But then I researched this Rapture nonsense (How? I watched The Sopranos, where David Chase has a Christian right storyline in which an evangelist with Satan's eyebrows latches onto Tony). It appears that extreme Christians, and they are a huge voting bloc in the United States, are looking forward to the approaching end of the world when only the righteous will be saved. There's something about them ending up in the Holy Land. They mean Israel. Something tells me Israelis won't like that.

The point is that extreme Christians want more extreme Christians. (Boy, do they want converts. Liberty University has offered a member of my family a place in law school. Right, I'll pay Jerry Falwell 30 grand a year. We were doubled over with laughter, we were shrieking.)

And along came Eric Pianka, a highly respected and much-Guggenheimed ecologist and zoologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Don't mock them; these folks bought Evelyn Waugh's library. Literally. Desk and bookshelves too. They have serious money.

Prof. Pianka stated this week that human population is out of control and we're just "breeding our brains out." He thinks, as do many people, that there should be fewer of us.

And he said that deadly disease, killing on a massive scale, would be inevitable unless humankind controlled its own growth. It's a prospect that seems unlikely. His remarks were taken out of context, so much so that bloggers had him recommending viruses rather than warning of their dangers.

Ebola would be fantastically effective, or so the word went round the Web.

Everyone's out to get Prof. Pianka now, so let's show him some Canadian fairness.

Now Pianka, who's bearded to the waist and whose academic mugshot shows him holding a metre-long lizard, is naïve when it comes to academic rivalry, the possible source of the distortions, but he's hugely popular with his students. He's a nice man, eccentric enough to have spent 10 years alone living with bison, and he's saving up for his granddaughters' education (doubtless not at Liberty University). He doesn't want billions to die. All he was doing was forecasting, which is what scientists are supposed to do. Luckily, he has tenure.

He's also right. I cannot say whether we are too many but the wealth of the richest humans sustained by the rape of the poorest is destroying our physical world. Our own Canadian climate, now very hot, unpredictable, extra-floody and overly melty, proves that. If disease doesn't get us – a swan in Scotland with avian flu, for example – global warming will.

So what does Harper do? He announces 40 per cent cuts to Canada's efforts to slow climate change, thus hastening the demise of future generations. He won't support the Kyoto accords, thus making sick those alive now. But when it comes to enlarging our population, he also won't pay for child-care spaces, meaning that your average smart Canadian woman will do the math and won't have one baby, if that. She won't be able to give the child the health and happiness it deserves without working bone-crushingly hard for long hours. That kind of work requires day care.

And why is it always put down to the woman? Men can see the child-rearing slog ahead and the anxiety of job contracts. You buy a house near work, work changes, and oil goes to $100 a barrel, so you can't get to your new job. Men worry too.

Pianka is looking to the future, for the simple reason that politicians aren't. Luckily, Austin is relatively civilized. His university is standing by academic freedom even as it vanishes elsewhere in the U.S.

My point is this: These are dire times. Never have we been at such risk. We need a sensible human with a profound interest in science and economics to lead us. I'd take David Phillips over Harper right now. David Phillips is that nice climatologist from the Meteorological Service of Canada who keeps warning us not to take weather for granted.

Now you know me. I'd take anyone over Stephen Harper. But could we have some straight talk about what Canada is facing?