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

by Alan Weisman

  Following a trip west of the capital, Niamey, where I was kindly received by the Fulani tribal village of Bongoum, David Boureima drove us east to the Maradi region. My thanks to Maradi Sultan Al-Haji Ali Zaki for his frankness and hospitality; the villagers of Bargaja, especially chief Al-Haji Rabo Mamane; his wives Hassana and Jaimila, and his son Inoussa; chief Noura Bako and the villagers of Souraman; chief Haji Iro Dan Dadi and the villagers of Madarounfa; Maradi mayoral candidate Moktar Kassoum; and Imam Raidoune Issaka and his brother Imam Chafiou Issaka. In the district of Dakoro, thanks to Secretary General Insa Adamon, who approved my entry and offered us an armed escort; nurse Halima Dahaya of the Korahan Health Center; Mahmoud Dou Maliki and Omar Mamane Sani of Contribution a l’Education de Base; the people of the village of Mailafia—and special thanks to the schoolchildren of Dan Dawaye village. Finally, I wish to thank Tahoua region Sultan Al-Haji Manirou Magaji Rogo, and Mayor Abdoulaye Altine of Madaoua for welcoming me to his inaugural town council.

  I am grateful to Nadeem Ahmad Niazi at Pakistan’s Mission to the United Nations, who helped me secure a journalist visa to his country, and I am indebted to veteran Karachi journalist Shahid Husain for his companionship there. I also thank the University of Karachi’s Pakistani studies director Syd Jaffar Ahmed and sociologist Fateh Muhammad Burfat; Tanveer Arif and Naeem Munwar Shah of the Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment; demographer Methab Karim of the Pew Research Center; Dr. Nikhat Saeed Khan of Pakistan’s National Committee for Maternal Health; the———family in Lyari Town; Jalil Abdul Ibrahim and Nazreen Chandio of the Lyari Resource Center; Lyari Lady Health Workers Asma Tabassum and Nazaqat Chandio; Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed of the Health and Nutrition Development Society; Dr. Sonia Poshni, Dr. Hamid Ali, and Dr. Capt. Liaquat Ali Shaikh of the Civil Hospital–Karachi; and Moach Goth Cemetery caretakers Khair and Nadeem Mohammad.

  Heartfelt thanks and condolences to the families of slain leaders Abdul Ghani and Haji Abu Bakar of Karachi’s Fisherfolk Development Organisation, who asked me into their homes amidst their mourning. Thanks also to NPR correspondent Julie McCarthy; to the villagers of Haji Qasim, Mahar, Ahmed Jat, and Ahmed Khan Zour in the Indus Valley; to Shaikh Tanveer Ahmed of the Health and Nutrition Development Society; and to Imam Qari Abdul Basid of Thatta’s Shah Gehan Mosque. Finally, my deepest respect and gratitude to Principal Afshan Tabassum, her staff, and students at The Citizens Foundation’s Vohra School, and to vice-president Ahson Rabbini for TCF’s extraordinarily hopeful work. In one of the most difficult places, they are an example to everyone of how much of the world’s ills education can solve.

  Judy Oglethorpe and Lee Poston of World Wildlife Fund kindly arranged for me to meet, in Kathmandu, Shubash Lohani and Bunu Vaidya of WWF’s Eastern Himalaya Ecoregion Program, who took me to Nepal’s Terai region. Many thanks to them and to their colleague Tilak Dhakal; to Moti Adhikiri of the wonderfully named Old Age Home for Livestock and Vulture Conservation Centre; to Bardia National Park ranger Barbadia Echar and ornithologist Gautam Paudyl; and to the many people I spoke to in the Terai villages of Lalmatiya, Madhuwan, Dhallapur, and the Khata Corridor. Thanks also to Dr. Navin Thapa, director of the Family Planning Association of Nepal.

  In India, I am grateful to hydrologist Kanwar Jit Singh of the Punjab Agriculture Department; botanist R. K. Kohli of Punjabi University; Dr. G. S. Kalkat of the Punjab State Farm Commission; farm leaders Balbir Singh Rajewal, Biku Singh, and Labh Singh; and widows Gurdial and Sheela Kaur. Thanks to many anonymous women in Kaithal and Ambala districts in Haryana state who spoke to me about illegal ultrasounds and sex-selective abortions. My guide in both Punjab and Haryana was award-winning Tribune correspondent Geetanjali Gayatri of Chandigarh, whom I cannot thank enough.

  In Kerala, I am equally grateful for the skilled assistance of Ernakulam-based freelancer Anna Mathews. My thanks, too, to former Kerala finance minister Thomas Isaac; economist TK Sundari Ravindran of the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies; forester James Zacariah; demographer Irudaya Radan; Dr. Theresa Susan of the University of Kerala’s Department of Education; Dr. C. Nirmala, OB-GYN at SAT Hospital and Medical College; Swami Amitavhananda of the Ramakrishna Order; and, especially, the great Malayalam poet Sugathakumari, founder of Abhaya, an institution for distressed women.

  I was shown Mumbai and Pune by Prachi Bari, veteran fixer for the BBC and PBS. Deep thanks to her and to journalists Nandini Rajwade and Kalpana Sharma; to Pune environmental activist Ashish Kothari and to Dr. S. B. Mujumdar, president of Symbiosis University; to Mumbai artists Jayanta and Varsha Pandit; to Krishna Pujari of Reality Tours & Travel and the people of Dharavi; to Dr. Faujdar Ram, Dr. Laishram Ladusingh, and Dr. P. Arokiasamy of the International Institute for Population Sciences; to Swami Atmanandaji of the Prema Devi Ashram; to Mumbai’s Nagpada police precinct and to Madam “Rukmini” of Siddharthnagar; and to head priest Gajanan Modak and trustee Nitin Kadam of Mumbai’s Siddhivinayak Temple.

  My final trip for this book began in Japan with Akihiko Matsutani, an economist who, refreshingly in his profession, finds big opportunities in readjusting to a smaller reality. Thanks to him and to finance economist Masaru Kaneko; Tokyo architect Kengo Kuma; Senator Kuniko Inoguchi; samurai descendant Shuhei Nishimura of the anti-immigration Group to Recover Sovereignty; former nuclear engineer Tetsunari Iida, director of Japan’s Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies; anti-nuclear advocate Hiroaki Koide of the Research Reactor Institute at Kyoto University; rector Atsushi Seike of Keio University; Kazuhiko Takemoto of the Ministry of the Environment’s Satoyama Initiative; Toyooka agronomists Narita Toshimichi and Kawagoe Ynusube and rice farmer Itsuyoshi Nawate; wasabi farmers Yoshimi Kashitani and Yoshio Takeya and trout hatchery manager Osamu Nakatani in Nosegawa, Nara; and robotics engineers Shijie Guo, Susumu Sato, and Takahisa Shiraoke of the Tokai Rubber-RIKEN Riba II project.

  Very special thanks to University of Yokohama anthropologist and Sloth Club founder Keibo Oiwa, and to Mari Tokuhisa and Michiko Takizawa of the village of Shiga in Nagano Prefecture. Finally, un abrazo caluroso to my deft trilingual translator and fixer, Junko Takahashi, and her friends Yoko Nishi and Keiko———.

  In Thailand, I had audiences with three Buddhist monks: Abbot Athikarn Somnukatti Panyo of the drowning Wat Khun Samut Trawat temple; Ajaan Boonku of the Theravāda forest monastery, Wat Asokaram; and renowned Thai social humanitarian Sulak Sivaraksa. Thanks to them and to American Theravāda monk Ajaan Geoff for help contacting them and to my excellent translator and fixer, Khemmapat Rojwanichkun.

  At Condoms & Cabbages in Bangkok I enjoyed the delightful company of Thailand’s own Captain Condom, Mechai Viravaidya, and his staff at the Population & Community Development Association and at the Mechai Pattana School in Buriram. Because they’ve shown that family planning can be not just a responsibility but a source of great fun, Thailand is a far safer, healthier, and happier place. Special thanks to Mechai, his assistant Paul Salvette, school principal Amornrassamee Loipami and deputy principal Kaensri Chaikot, teachers Manapt Meechumnan and Paveena Mettaisong, and project coordinator Isadore Reaud.

  Because my own country, the USA, won’t issue visas to Iranian journalists, conversely I couldn’t get a journalist visa for my last country, Iran, although I thank Dr. Vahid Karimi of the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations for his efforts. However, I found a travel agency that specializes in the Middle East, whose agents had recently scouted Iran. My great thanks to Matthew LaPolice of Absolute Travel, who expertly arranged my trip. Because I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to interview in Iran, I invited along my wife, Beckie Kravetz, to have another pair of eyes. As it happened, we were able to talk to anyone we wanted, and the guide Absolute Travel found for us, the encyclopedic Alireza Firouzi, became my fixer, translator, and a bottomless well of knowledge of his country’s past and present. I can never adequately thank him and our driver, poet Ahmad Mojalal.

  I am deeply indebted to demographer M
ohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi of the University of Tehran, Dr. Hourieh Shamshiri Milani of Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Science, and Dr. Esmail Kahrom of Islamic Azad University for their tremendous cooperation. I am also most grateful to Iranian American author Hooman Majd, who prepped me for my travels and met us in Tehran; to Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute director Peter McDonald, who put me in touch with Iranian demographers; and to Karan Vafadari and Afarin Neyssari of Tehran’s Aun Iranian Art Foundation. More thanks to Jafar Imani at the Parvar Protected Area; ranger Jabad Selvari and superintendent Mohammad Reza Mullah Abbasi of Golestan National Park; director Ali Abutalibi at the Miankaleh Wildlife Refuge; Bamou National Park’s Hussein Nikham and Rohalah Mohamadi; Mehdi Basiri, Ahmad Khatoonabadi, and Aghafakhr Mirlohi of Esfahan University of Technology and Green Message; and especially the valiant members of the Esfahan chapter of Women’s Society Against Environmental Pollution.

  Many thanks, too, to Taghi Farvar of Tehran’s Centre for Sustainable Development and his CENESTA companions, who requested their full names be withheld, for their wisdom, work, and hospitality. Throughout Iran, from Ramsar and Rasht to Shiraz and Qom, strangers embraced us, invited us to tea and meals, and thanked us for visiting their country. We, in turn, thank them all for the warmth, music, poetry, artwork, history, and stories they willingly shared. We hope that the mistrust between our governments will soon finally be behind us.

  In my own country, president Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute was continually helpful and encouraging. An early conversation with Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society helped shape my ideas. I thank them and Lesley Blackner, Alan Farago, and Maggy Hurchalla for explaining their efforts to save southern Florida from human excess, and Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm for showing me the Everglades. Many thanks also to Rev. Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good; to University of Colorado emeritus physicist Albert Bartlett; to population specialists Malcolm Potts and Martha Madison Campbell of the University of California–Berkeley; Aijaz Hussain of University Islamic Financial; University of Georgia ecologist Ron Pulliam; and Arizona State University wildlife biologist David Brown.

  At the University of Arizona, early in my research I benefited greatly from discussions with geographer Diana Liverman, ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, and physicist Bill Wing, and from the constant support of School of Journalism director Jacqueline Sharkey and correspondent extraordinaire Mort Rosenblum. Thanks also to UA classics scholar Marissa Gurtler for kindly correcting my Latin.

  At Arizona’s Prescott College, my thanks to ecologists Mark Riegner, Tom Fleischner, Doug Hulmes, Carl Tomoff, and sustainability director James Pittman. At Tucson’s Center for Biological Diversity, I thank Sarah Bergman, Randy Serraglio, and founder Kierán Suckling.

  At Cornell University, I’m grateful to agricultural scientists Rebecca Nelson, Peter Hobbs, Norman Uphoff, and David Pimentel—and at the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, to Jon Erickson and Joshua Farley.

  At the University of Minnesota, thanks to evolutionary biologist David Tilman, grad students Jane Cowles and Peter Wragg, economist Stephen Polasky, and especially to Institute on the Environment director Jonathan Foley.

  Stanford University was a remarkable font of generous and helpful sources. Dr. Paul Blumenthal, head of the Stanford Program for International Reproductive Education and Services, gave me invaluable advice before I joined his wife, Lynne Gaffikin, and SPIRES fellow Dr. Amy Voedisch in Uganda. Economists Larry Goulder and Ken Arrow shared helpful insights on how we might achieve sustainable prosperity that would leave room for other living things. My thanks also to neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky; anthropologist Jamie Jones; population biologists Shripad Tuljapurkar and Marcus Feldman; David Lobell of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment; bio-geochemist Peter Vitousek; Chris Field of the Stanford-based Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology; research coordinator Nona Chiariello of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve; and lead scientist Heather Tallis of the Natural Capital Project.

  Special appreciation, once more, to that project’s founder, ecologist and Center for Conservation Biology director Gretchen Daily, whom I had the pleasure of accompanying for many discussion-, inspiration-, and chocolate-filled miles. And finally, for their cooperation, humor, indefatigable scholarship, and great prescience, my warm gratitude to the Center’s associate director, ecologist Anne Ehrlich, and to its president, population biologist Paul Ehrlich.

  I could not have written this book without the research assistance and logistic support of journalist Claudine LoMonaco—who, to my good fortune, took maternity leave from her radio work just as my travels began, making her services available to me. I am ever grateful to her and to her husband, astrophysicist Sydney Barnes, who was always there to do the math.

  My thanks to Eileen Clinton of Crowley Travel, who never failed to match air connections to my byzantine itineraries; to Susan Ware and Meeghan Ziolkowski for transcribing hundreds of hours of recorded interviews; to LK James, who compiled this volume’s lengthy bibliography; and to copyeditor Joan Matthews.

  Much gratitude—for help with this book, and for what they do—also goes to executive director Joel Simon of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and to Mohamed Abdel Dayem, Carlos Lauria, and Bob Dietz, coordinators respectively of CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, and Asia programs.

  Many colleagues, friends, and relations gave me wise advice, moral support, reassurance, sustenance, and shelter during the research and writing of this book. Thanks for all that, and for constant inspiration, to my partners at Homelands Productions: Jon Miller, Sandy Tolan, and Cecilia Vaisman, and to guest producer Sam Eaton. Deep appreciation also to Alison Hawthorne Deming, Bill McKibben, Katherine Ellison, Stephen Philbrick, Connie Talbot, Alice Cozzolino, Amy Pulley, Roz Driscoll, Alton Wasson, Karen and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler, Jim and Deb Hills, Mary and Alain Provost, Rochelle Hoffman, Peter and Zeynep Hoffman, Brian and Pahoua Hoffman, Joan Kravetz, Cindy Kalland, Jonathan and Cynthia Lunine, Clark Strand, Perdita Finn, Barry Lopez, Debra Gwartney, Tom Miller, Diana Papoulias, Francie Rich, Bill Posnick, Lynn Davis, Rudy Wurlitzer, Constanza Vieira, Mary McNamara, Richard Stayton, Nubar Alexanian, Rebecca Koch, Jeff Jacobson, Marnie Andrews, Jon Hipps, Liz Story, Ronn Spencer, Blake Hines, Dick Kamp, Barbara Ferry, Diana Hadley, and the late beloved and visionary biological anthropologist Peter Warshall.

  My thanks to Richard Norris, Jennie Howland, Maria Gallo, Beth Coates, Laleh Sotoodeh, Dan Stiefl, Fernando Pérez, Shahin Tabatabaei, and Joa Agnello-Traista, for, at various times, patching me up and keeping me going.

  My agent Nick Ellison, his foreign rights director Chelsea Lindman, and editorial assistant Chloe Walker of the Nicholas Ellison Agency have always believed in this book and in me, despite my own frequent doubts. I am forever grateful to them, and also for the unwavering support I’ve received at Little, Brown and Company from David Young, Michael Pietsch, Malin von Euler-Hogan, Carolyn O’Keefe, Amanda Brown, Heather Fain, Peggy Freudenthal, and my superb editor—now for two books and counting—John Parsley. Thank you, all.

  And finally, to my wife, sculptor, mask-maker, and theatrical artist Beckie Kravetz, thank you for seeing me through this: yet again, a vast understatement. Thank you for contributing to humanity’s collective body of fine art, which is among the greatest justifications for the continuance of our species.

  Another is our capacity for love. Thank you for yours.

  —Alan Weisman

  About the Author

  ALAN WEISMAN is the author of several books, including The World Without Us, an international bestseller translated in thirty-four languages, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Wenjin Book Prize of the National Library of China. His work has been selected for many anthologies, including The Best American Science Writing. An award-winning journalist, his reports have appeared
in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Discover, Vanity Fair, Wilson Quarterly, Mother Jones, and Orion, and on NPR. A former contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior producer for Homelands Productions. He lives in western Massachusetts.

  ALSO BY ALAN WEISMAN

  The World Without Us

  An Echo in My Blood

  Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World

  La Frontera: The United States Border with Mexico

  Bibliography

  Selected General Book Citations

  Brown, Lester R. Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

  _______. World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. London: Earthscan Publications, 2011.

  Brown, Lester R., et al. Beyond Malthus. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

  Catton, William R. Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2009.