Are we doomed?

Is there any reason to expect that companies can be encouraged to improve their records and pursue cleaner technologies when the administration is changing every four or eight years, and environmental policy with it?

The reason companies are not going to switch over to environmentally dirty policies -- despite the current American administration being less friendly to the environment than its predecessor -- is because companies are not answering just to the government but to the public, and the American public still cares about environmental issues. For example, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Our current federal administration is eager to develop oil in that wildlife refuge. But I talk to my friends in the oil industry and they tell me they, the oil companies, are not eager to operate in the wildlife refuge, even if the government lets them, because they recognize that the public is so hostile to it.

What difference does it make to the companies what the public thinks?

The most direct difference is public boycott, when things go really bad, as after the Exxon Valdez spill. Another problem is that companies recognize that they have to go through a long and expensive public approval process, and if the federal government wants to approve drilling in Alaska's wildlife refuge, the public has ways of delaying it, and if the public is not convinced that the oil companies' methods are going to be clean, the public can delay it for a long time.

On the other hand, some of the biggest threats we're going to be facing in the coming decades are international. You spend a chapter in your book, for instance, talking about China.

China is the country with the world's biggest population and it also has the fastest-growing economy. The Chinese would like to catch up to first-world living standards but there are so many Chinese, the population is so large, and their consumption rates are, on average, so far below the First World today that if China alone caught up to first-world living standards that would double the entire world's consumption of steel, zinc, tin, lead and other major metals. So China has enormous impact on the world. When you think about that you can get discouraged, particularly when you see pictures of air quality in Beijing.

But on the other hand the Chinese government is -- let's think of the correct way to describe it -- they're not a simple dictatorship, they're not a simple democracy. But nevertheless they can make decisions and implement those decisions more rapidly than first-world democracies, and sometimes that means doing bad things quickly, but sometimes that means doing good things quickly. For example, a few years ago the Chinese government decided that lead in gasoline was a bad thing, so they just announced, "No more lead in gasoline," and in something like one year the Chinese have been able to make progress in phasing out lead in gasoline, progress that has taken 10 years in the United States and in Europe. Therefore, I'm not totally discouraged about the Chinese. When they decide they want to do something -- for example, halt their population growth with the one-child policy -- they can act fast.

You support that policy?

Well, the one-child policy, that's something for the Chinese to figure out. I would not say that I'm in support of it. It's a pretty drastic way to do it. It also has to be said that there are other third-world countries that have been able to dramatically decrease their rate of population growth without resorting to China's draconian methods.

Bangladesh is the seventh most populous country in the world, and it's perhaps the most densely populated, with 170 million people crammed into an area of a few tens of thousands of square miles. But Bangladesh has instituted population planning in a low-key, nonforced way and it has something like halved its population growth rate in recent decades. If Bangladesh can do it, any country can.

We certainly haven't been making it any easier, what with the current administration prohibiting the use of federal funds to help with family planning in other countries.

Sadly that's the case. The current administration forbids government funding going to family planning efforts elsewhere in the world, and yet overpopulation is disastrous for the countries that are overpopulated. And it's also bad for the world as a whole.

I think the administration perceives this as a moral issue, as opposed to an ecological or population issue. Perhaps you reach a certain point where you simply have to set morality aside and make tough choices?

Absolutely not, because some people say that offering family planning is immoral and others say that denying family planning to those who would like to have it, denying reproductive rights to women who do the work of reproduction, is absolutely immoral, as well as disgraceful and disgusting. One frequently hears it said, particularly among those opposed to family planning, "We in the United States should not prevent those people in the Third World from having as many babies as they want." We have this fantasy that people in the Third World don't care about population issues and would like to have lots of babies, when in fact my experience, from countries such as Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, Kenya and Tanzania, is that people in the Third World understand the dangers of overpopulation much better than people in the United States. They know about contraceptives but they can't afford the contraceptives. And the American government is making it difficult for them to get the contraceptives.

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