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(original citation: Cornell, Tricia. The World's Most Pressing Environmental Problem. Minnesota Law & Politics. October 2000. 24-26.)

The World's Most Pressing Environmental Problem If overpopulation isn't tamed soon, David Paxson warns us to say goodbye to the good life By Tricia Cornell

As the 1980s rolled to their close, David Paxson, then working as a financial planner, had a conversation with his pastor. "What is it that you are willing to die for?" his pastor asked. "Well, it's certainly not financial planning," Paxson remembers thinking. He had worked on the issue of overpopulation at the Center for Population Studies at the University of Minnesota after college. That, he decided, was an issue worth devoting his life to, if not dying for. So Paxson did what few people do: He quit his lucrative job and decided to devote his life to service. He founded World Population Balance, a nonprofit organization dependent almost entirely on private donations, in 1990.

From the very first day, Paxson had his work cut out for him. In the 1970s, books such as Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb brought the issue of overpopulation to popular attention. They also included some dire predictions, including the deaths of 10 million starvation victims a year throughout the 1970s. By the time the late 1980s rolled around, most of these predictions had not come true and the world (or the media at least) had turned its attentions to other issues.

But just because those dire predictions failed to come true did not mean that the dangers of overpopulation were nonexistent. Many environmentalists consider overpopulation to be the number one environmental danger in the world today, and the perils it poses to the world today are at least as scary as those discussed in the '70s.

But don't ask David Paxson about worst-case scenarios for global population growth. The current situation is bad enough, he says.

"Right now, with 6 billion of us on the planet, the destruction that we're doing all over the planet ... the destruction levels we're creating right now are overwhelming," he says. "Let's say we stay at 6 billion for the next 20 or 30 years. [Even now] look around the planet and look at the rates of destruction of the forest, look at the loss of fish in the ocean, look at the loss of forest cover, look at the loss of topsoil -- 7 percent every 10 years we're losing our precious topsoil -- and water is already a problem. And that's at only 6 billion."

Paxson speaks with the quiet conviction of a northern pastor and the patience of a kindergarten teacher. His World Population Balance is still championing a cause that seems to have slipped off the radar for much of the world. Paxson comes armed with reams of informational materials and a few props. Even his tie -- minutely inscribed with tiny cartoon people, crowded shoulder to shoulder -- carries his message. He has devoted the last 10 years of his life to educating people about the dangers we, in our multitude, present to the ecosystem and to ourselves.

The organization focuses on education of the general public here in the United States. Paxson believes that there is enough scholarly research being done out there it's just a matter of getting it to the people who can make a difference -- which includes everyone. He says he's noticed a staggering ignorance of the problem: People who believe that the U.S. population is actually declining or others who believe that technology will bail us out when things get dire.

When he speaks to the public, Paxson usually brings along some props. Among these is a metronome that ticks at 150 beats per minute. That represents the rate at which the net population of the earth is growing. Two point five steady ticks per second usually gets people's attention, he noted. Two thousand years ago that metronome would have paused four minutes between ticks.

The 6 billionth resident of our planet was born sometime in October 1999, while the United States is home to 275 million people. The population of the world will double in about 40 years, that of the United States in about 70 years. While the rate of growth has slowed since it peaked in the 1970s, population growth still tops 78 million people per year. Anti-overpopulationists (or "cornucopians," as Paxson calls them; they in turn refer to his kind as "doom-and-gloomers") contend that the world's resources are unlimited: Throughout human history new technologies have replaced the old, shifting our resource needs and preventing us from ever using anything up. Many also contend that rising crop production has easily outstripped population growth in many years, and that a smaller percentage of the world's population lives in poverty than 100 years ago.

Hogwash, Paxson says. A larger percentage of people may have lived in poverty 100 years ago, but today about 2 billion people -- more than the world's population in 1900 -- struggle just to survive. That, in any context, is too many, says Paxson. Indeed, the "Green Revolution" has increased crop production in many parts of the world -- notably in Indonesia -- but these areas are now suffering the consequences of plowing up more land and planting two or three crops a year on the same plot. Technological advances may have kept us from exhausting copper supplies when we switched to fiber optic telephone cables (a favorite example of the cornucopians), but technology hasn't halted the loss of 200 species per day.

Paxson, however, is guardedly optimistic. "If I were a black rhino, knowing what I know, I'd be horribly pessimistic. ... Before this experiment is done ... we're going to wipe out many other species," he says. But, he adds, as more people become aware of the dangers and the power that they have to exacerbate or help solve the problem, he expects improvements. He and many of his colleagues believe that it is not unrealistic to shoot for stabilization of the world's population during the next hundred years, followed by a slow, steady decline during the next hundred years, eventually reaching 3 billion or so.

But that doesn't mean that David Paxson is going to sit back and hope that this happens automatically: He puts about as much stock in best-case scenarios as he does in worst-case scenarios.