Population Matters-USA – working for a sustainable world

I attended an international family planning meeting in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, in 1984. At that time we were living just a short plane ride away in Puerto Rico.

The meeting was full of people from different countries speaking different languages and was an excellent opportunity to make connections in the family planning world. One person was outstanding.

I was chatting with someone one afternoon and mentioned that I was tired and was headed back to our hotel to take a nap. “You should stay and listen to the next speaker, Malcolm Potts. He is amazing, mixing a lot of knowledge with a bunch of British humor”.

I took their advice, and was not disappointed. Dr. Potts was a world leader in family planning. He died this spring at age 90.

Potts was an innovator. He helped to start the first clinic in Cambridge, England, that offered birth control to young people. He was also the first director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. He collaborated with Dr. Karman, a psychologist, to develop a simple technique for treating miscarriages and performing early abortions. It uses a flexible cannula with vacuum created by a syringe, thus it is especially useful in places where there is no electricity. Although I learned the Karman method long ago, only by reading it in an obituary of Malcolm’s did I realize that he had aided in its invention.

Potts told me how he had helped with another innovation. The work of Henry David, a psychologist, is often quoted to help justify abortion. David studied children born to women twice denied abortion for the same pregnancy. He followed these kids for 20 or more years. The studies unequivocally showed that the children of unwanted pregnancies did not do as well as matched controls. Potts told me that it was he who suggested David study unintended pregnancies in Prague, Czech Republic, because they had stringent laws limiting who could have an abortion at that time.

In 1984 I interviewed for a job where Potts was the director. It had been called the “International Fertility Research Program”. Potts had realized that the name was long and might prejudice some people against the organization, so had it changed to the more copacetic “Family Health International”.

More recently Potts was the inaugural director of the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability, and held an endowed chair at the Berkeley School of Public Health. He was an admired professor and used his imagination to innovate: his nonprofit, OASIS, advances education and choice for women and girls in the African Sahel. He also cofounded a company that is trying to bring birth control pills to the marketplace without the need for a prescription.

My favorite saying of Potts dates from the era when tobacco was sold in vending machines: “Birth control pills should be available in vending machines and cigarets only by prescription.” His wish has come partly true—now cigaret sales are much more restricted and reproductive health materials are available in vending machines. Many college campuses have machines that dispense condoms, pregnancy tests, emergency contraceptive pills and now, even Opill, the new over-the-counter birth control pill without estrogen (see photo above).

Potts was a pioneer in lowering barriers to reproductive health care. For instance, he set up a clinic at a central train station in India to perform vasectomies because people feared hospitals. He was known for this sort of imaginative, out-of-the-box thinking.

One of his coworkers, Alisha Graves, stated that Potts believed “We really have to trust that women are doing the best things for themselves and their families.” It took me years to come to the same conclusion.

“Alfie & Me” is a many-layered joy to read! Its main story is as delicious as they come. An orphaned baby screech owl is found and fostered by a human family who have the knowledge to sustain her. Even though there is much love in this story, there are also times of stress and doubt. Will Alfie (the owl) grow up to act like a wild animal? If she does, will she fly away and leave her human family? Will she survive living in the wild? Worse, will she not take to the wild life and have to remain a pet for the rest of her life?

The story of Alfie is the honey in this literary pastry. There are two other parts to this baklava book, however—chopped nuts, and thin, crisp layers of filo. The nuts are the real meat of the story. Compared to the sweet story of Alfie, these tidbits of philosophy, history and religion are more serious reading. The “Me” of this book, Carl Safina, trained as an ecologist, with work on sea birds. I am amazed that a biologist should have such deep knowledge of Eastern religions, Greek philosophy and other aspects of the origins of our modern society. He regrets the turns of events that have allowed modern humanity to have so little respect for the planet upon which we depend. He is especially troubled by Plato, who set the stage for the destruction of our planet which we are now experiencing.

Safina writes about the three forces that are destroying our world. They are: loss of biological diversity; human overpopulation; poisoning of our air and water—and of ourselves. It was refreshing for me to read someone who is so knowledgeable and who shares my concerns so strongly and eloquently. You will have to read the book to fill in the details of how Plato set us up for failure. You will also learn what these three horsemen of the apocalypse are doing to destroy us and the rest of the natural world.

Filo dough is the final component of this delicious book. It forms the structure of the baklava that holds it together and gives it shape. At first it was a bit disconcerting to me to go instantly from owl to Plato, but then I got used to it. After all, the book’s subtitle is “What Owls Know, What Humans Believe”.

The book documents a relatively short period of time, about a year during the early COVID pandemic. It also takes place in a small geographic area in New York state—mostly in Carl and Patricia Safina’s yard, plus a little surrounding territory with woods and neighbors’ yards. There is also the stop sign on the street in front of the Safina home, and several other landmarks that I’ve gotten to know well. It is a territory sized to a small species of owl, but also a friendly space that we get to know from Safina’s fine descriptions. This is the compact but complex space describing “what owls know”.

The scope of the philosophizing, however, is much broader than the owl territory. It covers millennia, its physical dimensions vary from subatomic particles to the universe, and it heads from the concrete to the spiritual. This vast breadth of subjects explains “what humans believe” in the subtitle. A recurring theme of the book is that our species has had the liberty to fabricate lots of ideas that explain the mysteries of our human experience, while animals cannot afford to indulge in this sort of nonsense.

“Alfie & Me—What Owls Know, What Humans Believe” puts Carl Safina in the same league with top nature writers/philosophers such as Rachel Carson, Ed Abbey and Robin Wall Kimmerer.