Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  Then, in 2008, the river actually dried up. Dazed, they stood on the lovely bridges at night and saw no reflection, only darkness. This, they figured, would finally mobilize people. Except, like the scientists’ group, Green Message, they found their NGO accused of being Western spies. News columnists called them hoodlums for wanting to steal water from thirsty people in Qom and Yadz.

  “We have an address where people can electronically sign the petition to save the Zāyanderūd, but now they block any e-mail that has the word petition in it,” says the nature lover.

  “School principals now say we need authorization from the Ministry of Education in Tehran to talk to children about the environment,” says the dentist.

  “When we hand out our magazine, Cry of the Earth, we get hassled by men demanding to know who we are,” says the hydrologist. She stands and paces. “We get hauled into police headquarters and grilled about our environmental pamphlets. We say: ‘We’re glad you asked. They’re about recycling, tree-planting, water conservation, and solar energy. Very dangerous.’ We tell them that their city, the most beautiful in Iran and one of most beautiful in the world, is now one of the most polluted. And that their river is dying and the climate is changing and WHAT DO THEY INTEND TO DO ABOUT IT?” She sits down, reddening.

  “Even in Pakistan NGOs can freely contact people,” says the dentist.

  They fear that their country has become unhinged. “A new subway is tunneling under Esfahan’s most gorgeous historical buildings. We keep telling them the vibrations will crack, or even collapse the monuments,” says the architect. “But their ears do not hear.”

  The one thing that Iran’s authorities have done right, all here agree, is to create the health care and family-planning system. Of course population must be controlled—the land is bursting. Except for the group leader, who is the oldest present and mother of three, the others have two or fewer. “But we’re not allowed to do anything else useful without their permission.”

  And now, even permission to control their bodies and decide reproductive matters for themselves is suddenly in doubt.

  Just recently, rumor has it, the Ayatollah Khamenei said that people shouldn’t worry about a population crisis until Iran has 120 million people, or 150 million. Maybe then, he added, it will be time to think about the consequences.

  “What?” exclaims the dentist. “He’s the one who issued a fatwa about tubal ligations and vasectomies! During my rural service, one day I saw fifteen women get their tubes tied. This is the mentality that Ahmadinejad has put in his head. Can’t anyone see what the pressure of all these people is doing?”

  “This is the countdown for the Iranian environment,” says the group’s leader, her fingers twisting the ends of her pale green hijab. “Once again, women will have to pay.”

  When the Esfahan women met that night in 2011, Ramadan had just ended. Life in Iran resumed, only with more difficulty: the West, pressured by Israeli and impending American electoral politics, applied ever harsher economic sanctions to try to dissuade the Islamic Republic from developing a nuclear program. Outside the country, it was believed that Iran was building atomic bombs; although the International Atomic Energy Association had found no evidence of attempts to develop nuclear weaponry since 2003, Iran resisted giving inspectors full access to military facilities for verification. Within the country, however, where dying rivers were dammed to squeeze every kilowatt from diminished rainfall, the nuclear program seemed to be about what Iran insisted it was: making energy.

  Although Iran had designed the world’s most enlightened and effective family-planning program, it still had decades to wait until the immense baby boom generation of the Iraq war years began to die off and numbers returned to sustainable levels. In the meantime, its 75 million people and its industries demanded electricity, and Israeli rhetoric was goading Iranian hawks to call for nuclear arms as well as power plants. A breathless world wondered if these two enemies would spark a firestorm worse than even the heat of the unmoored climate.

  Another Ramadan came, and the Supreme Leader made the rumor official. The family-planning policy, declared Ayatollah Khamenei, “made sense twenty years ago. But its continuation in later years was wrong.”

  “Population control programs belonged to the past,” the health minister told the press. Effective immediately, funding for family planning was removed from the national budget, and applied to encouraging larger families. The Ayatollah’s new goal for Iran was 150 to 200 million people. A bill was introduced in Parliament to return the legal marriage age for girls to nine.

  Speculation over what changed his mind included fear of another war requiring a mighty army, this time with Israel or even America. Some guessed it was a signal to the West that Iran wasn’t bothered by its sanctions, but rather was abundantly prepared—for abundance. But the Ayatollah himself gave a more prosaic and parsimonious explanation: Demographers, he said, calculated that if the birth rate stayed the same, by 2032 Iran would face a declining, aging population. That would mean more medical and social security costs for seniors, and fewer productive younger people to pay for them. After twenty-plus years of birth control, it was time for a new policy for the next twenty.

  President Ahmadinejad’s earlier calls for women to be more fruitful had been fruitless, and many doubted that the new policy would have any abrupt effect. With unemployment and inflation soaring under the West’s sanctions, income was down and couples were even postponing marriage, let alone children. Besides, even if birth control were outlawed, the Revolutionary Guards’ smuggling apparatus would doubtless leap into the breach. The Guards and the Ayatollahs were locked into a symbiosis that neither could easily break: the clerics’ increasingly unpopular regime depended on the Guards’ protection, and purchased their loyalty by turning a blind eye to their limitless enrichment.

  What would not continue, however, would be premarital classes, or teams of surgeons flying into the hinterlands to perform free contraceptive surgery for millions of Iranians who otherwise couldn’t afford it. No more free IUDs, pills, or injections.

  After years of being able to decide how many children to have, the vast majority of Iranian couples had determined they wanted no more than two. But that was no longer convenient for Iran’s military-industrial theocracy.

  And if Iranian women wouldn’t choose to have more children, the regime, by withholding the means, would henceforth be making that decision for them.

  [Author’s note: “Use our names!” members of the Women’s Society against Environmental Pollution insisted when I met with them in Esfahan. Later, however, circumstances in Iran deteriorated, especially with regards to the national family-planning program they cherished, so I’ve withheld their identities. This is entirely my decision, and neither a reflection on them nor on their courage.—AW]

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 13

  Shrink and Prosper

  i. Contraction

  “I will do my best,” promises the little white bear. “I will carry you,” it continues in the politest Japanese, “as though you were a princess.”

  The bear’s sex is unclear, its voice falling in the range that overlaps tenor and contralto. From its gracefully tapered waist, suggestive of a female nurse, it bends forward over a man—far from a princess—who lies on a hospital bed in a large windowless room. The bright green floor is polished so highly that it reflects the bear’s round ears, big black eyes, crinkly smile, and smooth white skin.

  It extends two slim paws. One forearm slides under the patient’s knees, while the other reaches under his back. Behind it, Susumu Sato, a young engineer with an unruly crew cut and black-rimmed glasses, reaches to touch a spot on the polar bear’s left triceps, and it moves closer. Three men who are watching audibly inhale. Gently, the bear lifts and straightens until the patient is suspended over the floor, cradled in its arms.

  “Is it all right?” asks Sato. A silver ballpoint protrudes from a penholder on his left sleeve.


  “Quite comfortable,” the man replies. To be snug against the bear’s well-padded chest is, in fact, oddly comforting.

  The bear’s name is Riba II, meaning Robot for Interactive Body Assistance, Second Edition. According to its inventors, it is the world’s first robot that can lift a human in its arms. Now it pivots on rollers concealed in its wheeled base—no rear paws—and glides soundlessly over the shiny green floor to a waiting wheelchair. On its shoulders are tiny blinking green lights. “They’re just decorative,” says chief engineer Shijie Guo, who follows anxiously behind, his hair falling onto his forehead. Now comes the hard part, but RIBA II is the least nervous creature in the room—and it actually does seem like a creature, and not just in the Shinto sense that everything contains a spirit. Almost tenderly, the bear sets its human cargo onto the chair. Its right arm carefully lowers his legs, then slides away. Sato presses a rubber sensor on its left forearm. The bear straightens up.

  “I’m finished,” it announces.

  Everybody in the room exhales and claps. They are in the Nagoya Science Park, where RIBA II was built jointly by RIKEN, Japan’s oldest scientific research and development firm, and Tokai Rubber Industries. Since 1929, Tokai Rubber has mainly made automotive parts, such as hoses and wiper blades. But Japan is the first country to be facing the inevitable fate of other developed nations, and its industries are shifting accordingly. Already, more than 60 percent of the world’s industrial assembly robots are from Japan, and the reason is no accident.

  Riba II and author, Nagoya Science Park, Aichi Prefecture, Japan

  PHOTOGRAPH BY JUNKO TAKAHASHI

  What the Ayatollah Khamenei fears for Iran is already happening in Japan: a country with below-replacement growth is now reaching the end of the momentum that kept its numbers rising for two generations after its fertility plummeted. In Japan’s case, however, there was no intentional program to curb runaway population growth. Like Iran, it had just suffered through a terrible war, albeit one of its own making.

  In 1931, Japan, a mountainous country with only 15 percent of its land suitable for agriculture, found itself in an unprecedented situation: Its population had grown to 65 million, far more than it could feed. It was already importing soybeans from Manchuria, the Chinese region bordering Korea, which also had iron and coal that resource-poor Japan needed. With China weakened by internal strife during the early Mao years, the temptation to invade was irresistible.

  As Germany would soon similarly conclude about its neighbor Poland, Japan saw thinly settled Manchuria as a place to move surplus population. But one invasion led to another, and by 1937, Japanese expansionism had pushed deeper into China. In 1941, bent on controlling the entire Asian Pacific, it attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.

  Four years later, Japan’s dreams of empire were dead. Its defeated soldiers returned to their wives, and predictably, a baby boom followed. Unlike the victorious United States, whose armaments industry had pulled it out of the Depression, Japan’s economy was wrecked. Nevertheless, over the next five years its wartime population of 72 million spurted to 83 million.

  The country that couldn’t feed itself two decades earlier now had millions on the verge of starvation. By the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Japanese mothers desperate to feed their children were seeking illegal abortions, with the usual percentage of unfortunate outcomes. Until then, legal abortions involved a complicated process to verify an emergency. Now, faced with a nationwide emergency, in 1948 Japan passed the Eugenic Protection Law, legalizing contraception, abortion, and sterilization for health reasons.

  A year later, with the crisis unabated, the law was extended to permit abortions and family planning for economic reasons. Thus, Japan cut off its postwar baby boom. Birth rates soon hovered near replacement. The country’s economy struggled back. In the 1950s, the phrase “Made in Japan” was mocked by the victors across the Pacific as synonymous with cheap, but the victors kept buying. Gradually, Japan’s humble industries evolved into electronics and automobile manufacturing that earned billions and restored its respect. Wealth financed education, including for women, and fertility rates dropped further, to under 1.4 children per female.

  Which is why RIKEN and Tokai Rubber are making robots—specifically, a nice white teddy bear robot that can carefully cradle elderly people in its padded arms, soothe them with courtesy and a secure embrace, and move them from bed to chair and ultimately to the most critical challenge: the bathroom.

  “We have to do this,” says chief engineer Guo, “because there is a double problem to solve: Soon Japan will have many more old people who have trouble moving by themselves, and many fewer young people available to help them. There is already a shortage of geriatric nurses. It is hard to lift people forty times a day while working two shifts in twenty-four hours. Half of elderly caregivers complain of back pain. We’ll need robots for all the jobs people don’t want to do, because there will not be enough workers.”

  So far, Riba II takes a minute and a half to pick people up from bed and deposit them in the wheelchair. “A human usually takes ten seconds. We have to get under a minute to be acceptable.” After lifting, nurses say that dealing with adult diapers is their hardest task. Guo took a class in how to clean up geriatric patients. “It’s a tough one,” he admits. Then there’s communication: much R&D has gone into what the robot should say to people. “It has to talk, to make the patient feel safe. This one can identify voices, but only recognizes some simple words. But we plan for it to greet people, to do therapeutic massage, even to sing to lonely old people.”

  Whether technology can meet such human psychological needs remains to be seen, but something has to deal with the larger demographic dilemma that Riba II was invented to help solve. Western Europe is watching closely to see what will happen here, because Japan is the first to reach the end of its demographic transition—when high mortality and high birthrates both turn to low. Japan’s first shrunken generation—born in the late forties and early fifties, when Japanese severely curtailed their reproduction—is now entering retirement, and members of the generation before them are entering their final years.

  With nearly the world’s highest life expectancy—until the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that hit Fukushima and surrounding prefectures killed twenty thousand people in one day, it was the highest—its elderly population will continue to boom. (Japan’s 79.4 years for men and 85.9 years for women is only slightly behind Hong Kong.) The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2040 there will one Japanese centenarian for every new Japanese baby. But long before that, as the large generation that preceded the demographic downsizing passes on, Japan’s numbers will suddenly plunge.

  This demographic destiny cannot be reversed, and has already begun. In 2006, for the first time since World War II, Japan recorded more deaths than births. Its population peaked at just over 128 million. Since then, it has fallen each year; by 2012, it was at 126.5 million and dropping. Before 2060, even if life expectancy continues to rise, Japan will be back to around 86 million, which was its population in 1950.

  There is a quick fix to looming labor problems like Japan’s, one that another country whose population is already declining—Cuba—is contemplating. Cuba’s 11 million are diminishing due both to emigration and to low fertility rates resulting from a high percentage of female university graduates, plus decades of economic difficulty, universal health coverage, and legal abortion to back up family planning. To shore up its contracting labor force, Cuba is considering wooing immigrants from nations with even less favorable economics, such as Haiti.

  Likewise, immigrants should fill Europe’s labor breach in coming decades. Despite below-replacement birthrates, in 2012 Germany’s population actually grew by nine hundred thousand, mainly due to immigration from eastern Europe made possible by EU membership. But Germany’s first wave of immigrant labor—thousands of Turks, imported after the Berlin Wall cut off the supply of East German migrants—has been less easy to absorb. Today
, there are 4 million Turks in Germany, a source of unresolved cultural tension and tightened immigration policies. In 2010, German chancellor Angela Merkel told a meeting of Christian Democratic Union Party youth, “At the start of the ’60s we invited the guest-workers to Germany. We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn’t stay, that one day they’d go home. That isn’t what happened. And of course the tendency was to say: let’s be multikulti and live next to each other and enjoy being together, [but] this concept has failed, failed utterly.”1

  The Cold War that cleaved Germany shortened its postwar baby boom, and the advent of birth control pills nearly halved birthrates on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 only seemed to further depress fertility. Even tempting couples with €2,000 a year for having a second child hasn’t made a difference. German working mothers complain that with inadequate day care, school days that end as early as 1:00 p.m. make it even more complicated to have children. The result is rock-bottom birthrates, and a population aging as fast as Japan’s.

  Should the rise of xenophobic political parties continue, European immigration rates could lower. But immigration so far has never been an option for Japan, which deeply values its largely homogeneous population: fewer than 2 percent of Japanese residents are foreign-born. One rationale offered for robot nurses is that they aren’t burdened with cultural differences or unpleasant wartime histories that elderly Japanese might associate with East Asian health-care workers. Although some Japanese accuse their country of racism, most agree that shared cultural values are why Japanese society functions so smoothly, why its cities are so orderly, and why crime in Japan is so low.