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Today is World Population Day, designated an annual event every July 11th by the United Nations. The U.N. calls it a day to “celebrate our common humanity and diversity…[and] a reminder…to care for each other and our planet.” This is a milestone year because total world population is about to hit 7 billion people, so today the UN kicks-off its 7 Billion Actions Campaign to address 7 key areas of population planning, including urbanization, the environment, and reproductive health and rights. Empowering women and girls, reaching out to youth, and caring for the world’s elderly are also focal points. There is no great dispute about the hard numbers of population growth. However, there is a great diversity of opinions about how to use the statistics to predict the future. Population growth has been cited as a driver of a range of problems, from climate change to terrorism and wars over scarce resource. This, in turn, has made many activists into population control advocates. The history of population control around the world is a disturbing one. In the U.S., belief in its necessity fueled forced sterilization, and married the eugenics movement to the early conservationist movement. These days, brute force control is publicly unpopular, but slowing birth rates continues to be a focus of governments. Betsy Hartmann, population scholar, says concern over the sheer numbers of people on the planet is misplaced. Women in the developing world are having less than three children each on average, and, while world population is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050, experts have calculated it will then stabilize. Hartmann warns that fears of a crowded planet continue to make victims of people, especially women, around the world. In many countries, including here in the US, Hartmann has found that family planning programs are becoming, “a tool of top-down social engineering.” She has also discovered what she calls “the greening of hate” as nationalist, anti-immigrant groups push for closed borders by arguing for the conservation of resources.

GUEST: Betsy Hartmann, Director, Population and Development Program and Professor of Development Studies at Hampshire College