Mother Jones Magazine-- STOP BLAMING THE POOR

This Earth Day, Tell Mother Jones (and everyone else) to End the Population Panic

I want Earth Day to be a time for people to think and take action about the absurd global inequalities that force the poorest nations and the poorest people in all nations to carry the heaviest burden of pollution, food and water insecurity, and climate change-related disasters. I want people to think about what governments, industries, institutions, and systems are responsible for this mess.
Mother Jones, which I thought I could count on to support me in this view, decided to go a different route.  Their newest issue instead focuses on the "population crisis" and the dangerous myth that poor, brown people and their babies are the biggest threat to our planet.

I was in a bit of disbelief at first and was somewhat relieved to see quotes like "Mention population, and discussion goes straight to the teeming Third World masses--never mind that an American's carbon footprint is 23 times that of an Indian" in the Editors' Note.  You'd think that with a beginning like that the feature story might be about the disproportionate consumption levels of developed countries, right?


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Nope. The feature story, "The Last Taboo," was all about the "teeming Third World masses."  This seems to be a theme throughout the reporting: acknowledge that poor people of color in the developing world don't consume nearly as many resources as rich folks in the developed world, but then go back to fear-based talk about the "population bomb" and how best to bring down poor people of color's fertility rates.  The result is that the article misses perfect opportunities to investigate what forces are really at work here.
For example, the author mentions that Kolkata (nearly the entire article is focused on India) has a fertility rate of 1.35 (the average number of children born to a woman), which is well below the global replacement average - where the earths population stabilizes and births and deaths match up.  In fact 1.35 is well below the US fertility rate of 2.1 (2008) as well.  Kolkata's population is not growing from births, but from the migration of people from the countryside.  The author then launches into a long description of all the natual resources it takes to sustain this growing city and some of the ways that foundations and governments are seeking to bring poor women's fertility rates down even further.  At no point does she bother to investigate why all these people are moving to the city!  Could it be because they lost their land due to debt to multinational corporations like Monsanto?!?!  Because one of their family members committed suicide because of the mounting debt and GMO crop failure?!?!  How is Prince Charles willing to talk about this and eff-ing Mother Jones isn't?!?!

The article is long and there are many more places where the author choses to avoid challenging the racism, classism, and free market-fundamentalism that really keep the developing world poor and polluted.  Instead, she decides to fall into the same tired patterns of fear-mongering about population and poor, people of color's fertility.  I encourage everyone to read the article and let Mother Jones know what you think.  You can do that here.

My letter to the editor is copied below.  Please feel free to lift anything from it or throw some critiques out there.
Dear MoJo,
I was incredibly disappointed with your cover story, "The Last Taboo."  It's a relief that most people in a panic over the "population crisis" are no longer calling for forced sterilizations, but the new solutions--micro-lending and literacy programs--still have the same goal: controlling the fertility of women in the developing world.  Why is controlling these women's fertility still our goal, even after you admit that the average American mom with two kids has a carbon footprint equal to that of 136 Bangladeshi moms and their 337 kids?  At no point does this article bother to examine whether population might not actually be the problem and instead focus in on the real drivers of pollution and food and water shortages.  Bill Clinton recently took responsibility for helping to destroy Haiti's economy and food production through free trade agreements.  But this article forgoes any investigation into the ways that developed countries, multinationals like Monsanto, or international lending institutions like the IMF may have created the crises that India and other developing countries face.  It seems you missed the real question: who's to blame for global poverty?  And you missed the real answer too, because it's not poor people and their children.

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 Draft example for Letter to Mother Jones:

I found your article on Population in May/June issue not only uniformed and limited, but absolutely violent-- implicitly violent.  I would hope that you may take the time to publish a more accurate version, apart from the Malthusian perspective that you have adapted to fit your argument. This argument is made because we all would like to be environmentally friendly all the while not having to deal with difficult questions and HARK..... personal sacrifices. No matter how much we can laugh at and separate ourselves from the "tea party crowd" we may not be so different from them in terms of allowing ourselves to be influenced by external realities, such as consumption and US trade policy. I am terribly offended by this article and hope that you will print one more accurately describing the Indian situation, the reality of poverty that creates population growth, as well as urbanization (forced), and also highlight the reality of oppression and exploitation that are driving poor folks into desperate realities.

Thank you for your attention.