Richard – Page 5 – Population Matters-USA

I was walking down the street in Mountain View, California when I noticed a man coming toward me wearing a white T-shirt with small black lettering: “SEEDLESS”. I wonder if he was advertising his vasectomy?

Vasectomy motivators in Northern Sumatra use humor in their presentations to men about vasectomy. Perhaps they should wear shirts with “KESIP” (Indonesian for “seedless”) on them! From what I can tell, these motivators need all the help they can get, since very few men get vasectomies in Indonesia. However, Indonesian husbands tend to be quite supportive of their wives’ contraceptive choices, even if very few men actually use a male method of birth control.

Indonesia is a mixture of more than a thousand ethnic groups speaking over 700 languages, living on over 6000 large and small islands. Fortunately, they are united by a single official language, although most Indonesians are multilingual. The motto of their National Family Planning Program is: “Realizing Quality Families”.

The country has supported family planning for decades. When we visited Bali (another Indonesian island) in 1996, we learned about banjars—the community organizations for a small village or neighborhood. The banjar serves perhaps 1,000 people, and helps its members through thick and thin. Banjar members organize religious ceremonies, dances, weddings and funerals. I was surprised to learn that each banjar also keeps track of every family’s fertility plan; the husband registers if his wife is trying to conceive, is pregnant or if they are using contraception. Although this would be considered an invasion of privacy in the USA, Balinese society does not have a problem with this openness.

The fertility rate in Bali is a bit above replacement, but is similar to the average for Indonesia. Sumatrans, on the other hand, tend to have larger families, averaging 2.5 children per woman. This is where vasectomy could really be helpful!

Only a tiny number of men in Indonesia have had vasectomies—just 3 per 1000 men. The vasectomy peak in that country was 30 years ago, with double that number. Unfortunately, this is true globally; the number of vasectomies has declined rather than increased. I am proud that the USA is one of two countries bucking that trend; the other is South Korea.

I know of two heroes who are working to change this trend—in addition to the vasectomy motivators in Sumatra. One is Dr. Charles Ochieng, whom I met at an international family planning meeting. He performs vasectomies, using the latest techniques, in his native Kenya. Another hero is Dr. Doug Stein, one of the co-founders of World Vasectomy Day (WVD). Trained as a urologist, Stein has limited his practice to male sterilization procedures. Each year he travels to a different country to train doctors there, and together they do a bunch of procedures—on WVD. This year it will be Zambia, November 24^th. WVD is not just a day—in fact, they have 9 events scheduled in Zambia, all relating to vasectomy!

When I was practicing and a patient expressed an interest in being sterilized, I would suggest that vasectomy for her partner was safer and less expensive. I just read another, unfortunate statistic: 1 in 12 women will become pregnant within a decade after tubal ligation. To make things worse, many of these pregnancies will be in a Fallopian tube. A tubal pregnancy can cause serious—even fatal—bleeding.

I am happy that WVD, Dr. Ochieng and the vasectomy motivators in Sumatra are all promoting vasectomy. They are helping put the responsibility for family planning where more of it belongs—with men.

There isn’t a shortage of water so much as a longage of people

Paraphrasing Garrett Hardin

This morning I cut down a little piñon tree. It had died during the winter, and was unsightly this spring with dead needles clinging to its branches. It had looked stressed last summer so I had watered it 2 or 3 times, as in previous summers. I guess it was given too little water, too late. This little tree was victim of our megadrought.

There was media coverage when a scientific paper on North American drought was published. Regrettably, the media lost interest in the subject which will affect so many lives. The paper’s title wasn’t prepossessing: “Large contribution from anthropogenic warming to an emerging North American megadrought”. Its two main points were correct, unfortunately. The North American megadrought has emerged. A megadrought is defined by its duration—it must last 20 years or longer. When the paper was written, the drought wasn’t quite that old. An update was published two years later, confirming the concerns of the original paper.

The megadrought started at the turn of millennium, and is still with us as of June, 2024. All of La Plata County, Colorado, is experiencing moderate drought.

The second key point of the paper is that “anthropogenic warming” is a major cause of our drought. Yes, we humans are responsible for almost half of the dryness. These two papers calculate that more than 40% of our megadrought is human caused, due to global heating.

Both articles used tree-ring data to estimate prehistoric rainfall. Since trees grow faster when there is adequate precipitation, this is a valid method to use before records were kept. There are tree-ring data for SW North America that go back 1200 years. The second paper states that the current megadrought is the worst in that whole 1200-year stretch!

Drought isn’t confined to the USA. Mexican farmers faced crop failures caused by a heat dome affecting most of the country. Canada is also suffering. There are areas of extreme drought in the Canadian west where terrible wildfires are burning.

The drought can cause a positive feedback loop with harmful results. Drying of bodies of water, such as the Great Salt Lake, exposes dry earth. Spring winds blow the dark dust onto white snow, causing it to melt sooner. This can cause deluges of early snowmelt and produce flooding—too much water at the wrong time—that doesn’t contribute to groundwater.

How serious is this megadrought? We will see more communities like Rio Verde Foothills, Arizona, where residents have practically no water source. In 2022 Severance, Colorado, realized that its water was already serving the maximum number of people and had to stop issuing building permits. Using foresight, last year Arizona stopped issuing building permits in some areas around Phoenix due to lack of water.

What can we do about the megadrought? Of course, most important is being careful with the water we have. In addition, we need to limit our carbon emissions, because our use of fossil fuels is what is causing the increase in drought. To quote the first megadrought paper: “The magnitude of future droughts in North America and elsewhere will depend greatly on future rates of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions globally.”

One of the goals of the local organization, 4CORE (Four Corners Office for Resource Efficiency), is to reduce local carbon emissions. Their programs include making homes more energy efficient, encouraging use of rain barrels to harvest precipitation, and electrification of homes and transportation. Most of all, we must recognize that arid land cannot support many people.