Sustainability, Population Control, The Philippines, and The Pope

On my piece about clean energy solutions for bringing relief to the Philippines, a friend of a friend writes:

On a somewhat related note, but completely out of our hands, a provocative thought: the one single person who could do wonders to reduce the Philippines’ need for energy is the Pope. You probably noticed that over there, any politician worth his or her salt has to have a photo taken with the Pope and posted all over the country or in the press to assert credibility, the pervasiveness and influence of the Catholic Church being so huge. I saw a fascinating documentary about a year ago about the explosive population growth in the Philippines being due to the church’s refusal to allow family planning. In selected communities where structured family planning education and pill availability were set up by a (Seattle-based) NGO, the family size dropped very fast, impact on environment dropped and overall well-being drastically improved.

Given the liberalism/rationalism of the current Pope vis-à-vis social injustice, I predict a change in Church policy on family planning in the not-too-distant future.   There are several forces that are coming to bear that are in the process of driving this change, most notably:

• As our population swells from its current seven billion to 10 billion over the next 40 years and the level of suffering associated with scarce resources continues to escalate, kind and decent people of all faiths will put a huge amount of pressure on our leaders – religious and otherwise – to rethink our old ways that have contributed to this misery.

• Apparently, a great many religious organizations are asking themselves tough questions about what it will take to remain relevant in the 21st Century.  The Pope seems like a man leading the charge in that vein.

We’ll see.  I’ve been wrong once or twice before.  🙂