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Focus: Birds predict the price of overpopulation
Sunday, April 1, 2001
By JOHN FLICKER
For thousands of years, birds have been one of our most important early warning systems.
Birds have predicted the change of seasons, the coming of storms, the presence of land at sea and the rise of toxic levels of pollution in the food chain.
Now birds are telling us something is terribly wrong with the environment.
More than 50 percent of migrant songbirds in vast sections of the United States are in decline. In Washington state populations of barn swallows, olive-sided flycatchers, orange-crowned warblers and rufous hummingbirds have plummeted over the last 20 years. Across the nation, warblers are in decline, as are painted buntings, bobolinks and dozens of other songbirds.
Scientists now think the decline of these songbirds is due to habitat destruction, both overseas and in this country, caused by rapid rates of human population growth.
Many of "our" songbirds spend four to nine months of the year in the tropical forests of Latin America and the Caribbean. These forests are being cut to the ground at record rates. In Central America, more than 40 percent of the forest canopy has been destroyed in the last 30 years as the population of the region has doubled.
Our population in the United States is increasing by more than 2 million people a year. Suburban sprawl consumes more than 500,000 acres of forest and farmland per year -- more than 20 million acres since 1980. Put another way, this country is adding a population four times larger than Seattle's every year while suburban sprawl is consuming an area 10 times larger than the city limits.
Whether the birds are flying north or south, they are being hammered by rapid rates of population growth. But it's not just the birds.
For thousands of years every monarch butterfly east of the Rocky Mountains has flown thousands of miles to overwinter in a small forest in Central Mexico. Scientists discovered the forest only in 1975.
Now those same scientists say the last days of the monarch may be in sight.
The reason is rapid deforestation of the high-altitude fir forest where the monarchs overwinter. This forest is the only place that provides the rare microclimate necessary to keep the eastern monarch dormant until spring. Aerial photographs of the forest show that 90 percent of the trees in the region have been cleared in the last 30 years. The largest tract of forest remaining today is five times smaller than the largest tract that existed just 15 years ago.
What's happening to birds and butterflies in America is happening to wildlife habitat all over the world -- to monarch butterflies in Mexico, tigers in Asia, chimpanzees in Africa and jaguars in South America. And while many of the world's creatures are in peril now, the real trouble lies ahead.
Across the globe, more than a billion teenagers are entering their reproductive years -- the largest cluster of teens in world history. 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.
The good news is that most of these young people want to do the right thing: They want to have smaller families. Across vast parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia, however, the kind of basic family planning services that you and I take for granted are simply unavailable: The people are too poor, the family planning options not understood, the access to birth control limited or non-existent.
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.
Now, like a canary in the coal mine, they warn us of the price we may yet pay, in our own back yard, for failing to adequately fund family planning services in the developing world.
John Flicker is president of the National Audubon Society. Audubon is a partner, with Save the Children, Planned Parenthood, CARE, Population Action International and the Communications Consortium Media Center, in the Planet campaign (www.familyplanet.org). For more information, visit www.audbonpopulation.org.
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