The choices these young people make in the next decade will determine the fate of our natural world for generations to come. If birth rates remain at current levels, demographers say the world will add more people in the next 50 years than it has in the previous 500,000 years. One reason for this is that the United States has done so little to help. While world population has climbed 60 percent since 1970, U.S. family planning assistance, as a percentage of total federal budget outlays, has declined by 40 percent. And while we joined 179 other nations in Egypt in 1994 in pledging specific support for international family planning efforts, this country has actually made good on less than one-third of that commitment.
Population growth is about more than the environment, of course.
It's also about dizzying rates of infant and maternal mortality, crushing unemployment rates and rising levels of social and economic instability in the developing world. Most experts agree that no single investment in human health, environmental protection or political stability can ever match investments made in international family planning. Yet, here we continue to act as if population growth never comes home to roost. The birds tell us a different story, however. They remind us that long before there were multinational corporations or fiber-optic cables, birds connected us to the larger world and served as barometers of environmental health.