Environmentalists used to speak loudly and clearly about the linkages between the degradation of the planet and unchecked population growth. The alarms they signaled led some countries, like China, to resort to extreme solutions; namely stripping women of reproductive rights, imposing state mandated population limits and coercive abortion policies. Since then, environmentalists have been hesitant to pound the table as forcefully as they once did about the population growth threat, which is mounting, for fear that more countries would resort to human rights abuses as solutions. And with the absence of any public awareness effort showing the relationship between the increasing population and climate change, the religious right has entered to cast doubt that population growth is even a problem to begin with and instead argues the very opposite, that there aren't enough people on the planet, in order to justify its ideological campaigns to strip people of the right to plan their families.

So, it comes as great relief to have Robert Engelman, vice president of programs at the Worldwatch Institute and author of More: Population, Nature and What Women Want, enter onto the national stage with a new take on it all. According to Engelman, the solution to the climate change problem, wonderfully, poetically, is human rights. The way to protect our planet is to give women reproductive freedom. As Time Magazine explained in its May article about Engelman entitled, What Condoms Have to Do With Climate Change, "The key to limiting population growth, he says, is to give control over procreation to women. In society after society, even in countries where large families have always been the norm, when women take control over family size, birth rates shrink. 'They don't have to be coerced,' says Engelman. 'This will happen as long as women are in charge.'"

This certainly was the case when UNFPA convinced the Chinese Government to lift its coercive one-child policy in some of its provinces to test out voluntary family planning instead. As I write in my book,

"In 1998, the Chinese government agreed to a test. It would end its one-child policy in 32 counties (out of 2,500). The UNFPA approach was voluntary birth control. After five years, the results looked promising, The new approach helped reign in the population explosion; the number of women giving birth remained the same, and at the same rate. Also, the abortion rate fell in the 32 counties from 24 percent of all pregnancies to 10 percent, a rate lower than that of the United States. The Chinese government, impressed with the results, paid to expand the program to 800 more counties."

Naturally, giving women control of their reproductive lives is, to the religious right, worse than state mandated abortion. On the heels of the discovery that voluntary family planning offered the best solution to China's woes, the anti-abortion movement got Bush to de-fund UNFPA precisely because of its work to prove to the Chinese government that their coercive policies were not effective.

Quietly, the anti-abortion movement is undermining efforts worldwide to give people the right to plan their families, leading to spiraling population and, with that, a long list of nightmares. The Time article offers this halting prediction by General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, about what the future will be like if we don't take population growth seriously:

"By mid-century, the best estimates point to a world population of more than 9 billion. Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it."

Time continues, "The sheer increase in population, Hayden argued, could fuel instability and extremism, not to mention worsening climate change and making food and fuel all the more scarce. Population is the essential multiplier for any number of human ills." The problem is that few credit the religious right and their campaigns against agencies like UNFPA as the true source of the problem.

Many of us know, instinctively, that human rights hold the cure to most of the world's ills. Coercion and tyranny, whether waged by governments or ideologues, will always backfire. Until the environmental movement sees stopping the religious right as part of its mission too, we won't get far at improving conditions. Lucky for us, experts like Engleman are starting to make the connection.