7 Billion Dollar Baby

Structural Account

Written By: Chris Graham

Topic/Article Title: The World at Seven Billion.

Author: Mike Gallagher

Subject: The world population reached 7 billion (give or take) on October 31, 2011

Word Count: 2,605

URL: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15449959

News Source: British Broadcasting Company (BBC) News Magazine

“The World at Seven Billion” was written by Mike Gallagher and published by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) on October 27^th, 2011. The article was written in anticipation of the soon expected birth of the world’s seven billionth human being. The article was published in the online version of the BBC News Magazine and maintains a very subjective position on the issue of population control and class struggle. Though the article doesn’t read with the sort of personal bias that one might expect with an Op/Ed piece, its clear positioning on one side of the issue is characteristic of an article that would be best at home in a periodical (“News Magazine”) in that it presents a more sensationalized account of the issue and is free from the restrictions of presenting news that is fair and balanced.

The articles form reiterates the subjectivity of its content. At the top of the article is a photograph of 11 newborn babies lying in a hospital room. The infants are in such close proximity to one another that they appear squeezed into the frame. The photograph acknowledges both the issue of birthrates and fertility with regards to world population as well as the global crowding that has resulted. Though the article is longer than many of the mainstream media reports on this benchmark in population growth, its language and structure remains concise and direct. The article still manages to flow like shorter articles more characteristic of mainstream news sources. With very short, quick reading paragraphs, the article is broken into sections using bold headers. These sections have titles that sing with extremism: “Us and Them,” “Population Scare,” “Emergency Measures” and “Total Control,” to name a few. Toward the start of the article Gallagher discusses Thomas Malthus’ 1803 essay on population and his belief that humans will always reproduce faster than agriculture will develop to meet their needs. He firmly believed that letting the starving starve was truly best for the populous as a whole. This shrewd undertone is carried through by Gallagher’s references to biologist Paul Erlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” The book presented a bleak outlook on the future of human beings on earth, deciding that the decline of our species was imminent and there were some populations that were beyond the possibility of reform. The article concludes with a direct quote from Erlich in which he reverses his position on effective methods of population control and wishes instead to focus on the owning class rather than the huddled masses.

The article also contains sidebars that describe sterilization practices in India as well as China’s one-child policy, the latter being titled “China: We will not allow your baby to live.” What follows is a description of the both the Chinese government’s policy that forced women to abort their pregnancies, regardless of how far along, as well as India’s movement to sterilize hundreds of thousands of impoverished men.

Structural Account

Written By: Lindsey Piechowski

Topic/Article Title: How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion? – And Where Do We Go From Here?

Author: Elizabeth Leahy Madsen

Subject: The world population reached 7 billion (give or take) on October 31, 2011.

Word Count: 1132 words

URL: http://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2011/10/how-did-we-arrive-at-7-billion-and.html

News Source: NEWSECURITYBEAT: The blog of the environmental change and security program. As replicated above the name of the blog I followed is NEWSECURITYBEAT and is written in all capital, bold, green font on the page. As one reads the subheading referring to “environmental change”, the green font choice stands out in relation to the ‘green’ movement. Directly across from the title is the affiliate that owns the blog. NEWSECURITYBEAT is a facet of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In researching the WWICS website it claimed to be a “living memorial to our 28^th president” as a place where “preeminent scholars and experts research topics of national and international relevance”. The center uses social media, broadcast media, publications in print and online, as well as public meetings and outreach events, to “engage in the global dialogue of ideas”. NEWSECURITYBEAT references these member-experts of WWICS as the basis of credibility for their arguments and statistics. Along with the UN Population Fund and Division, The Washington Post, Measure DHS, Japan Statistics Bureau, as well as Boling and Carl Haub: Tracking Trends in Low-Fertility Countries: An Uptick for Europe", Population Reference Bureau. With this being noted, the first image we see is the following graph, located directly below the title in the post.

Titled “Historical and Projected Population, 1950-2100, the graph is simple enough in tracking predicted population trends based on fertility rates. What the graph actually gives to the viewer is a visual to confirm that population is going up, no matter what fertility rates are. The brightly colored lines could be accompanied by the title alone and the visual would still read ‘population increase in the future- we better prepare’. Following the title, How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion? – And Where Do We Go From Here? the article is broken down into three sections. The first is titled Demography is Driven by Fertility and Population Momentum. This section is mainly a statistical break down of world population trends, followed by the first mention of fertility. It states that even though migration and mortality are factors in population increase, fertility is by far the one with the greatest influence. The second is Assumptions Matter. This section delved further into projected population trends should fertility rates increase, decrease or stay at replacement level. Halfway through this section there is a video post by the author, one of WWICS’s experts. She speaks of the tendency for rapidly growing populations to fall into civil conflict. The examples given are of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. The third section is Gender Matters, Too. I found this to be the most interesting section as the first two were mainly composed of statistics and projections or “assumptions”. The prose used in the article and by the blog writers in older posts read more accessible than such news outlets as the New York Times. It allowed breakdowns and definitions to be given, but in doing this produced an extremely structured view of what 7 billion people means and why we are at this number. The tone of perceived neutrality and truth that statistics and numbers often carry is shattered in an analysis of the three

sections listed above.

Analysis/Comments

How Did We Arrive at 7 Billion? – And Where Do We Go From Here?

Compared and Analyzed with

The World at 7 Billion

The view of history the blog post gave of this “milestone” is exactly what Noam Chomsky would claim as economics controlling the media, while the BBC article recognized that economic incentives were a major component of ‘population control’. The blog represented high fertility countries as bad with characteristics such as lack of education, dependence (often women upon men), no health care, ‘developing’ nations, and lack of control. Low fertility countries were represented as good because they had everything the high fertility countries did not: education, autonomy and equal rights (for women), health care, they are developed centers of industry and capitalism, and control. The BBC article uses many historical examples of failed population control that emphasized contraceptives and sterilization of both men and women. Mentioning Malthusian theory, Paul Erlich, and population control methods in India and China, the article uses these ‘great men’ of history and examples to make an argument against past, as well as current methods of population control; specifically the contraceptives argued for in the blog post. As the BBC article is written in a subject position outside of the U.S. it specifically notes that U.S. wealth is a more pressing issue than the “poverty stricken masses”. The blog post fails to mention anything touching on U.S. capitalism and wealth. Providing entire countries with contraceptives would be a huge asset to Western drug companies, as well as quell the impoverished populations who have potential to revolt. The blog post labels the ‘other’ as developing and in need. The other is also, according to the statement that women in these developing countries could be “greatly affected by the preferences of their husbands or other family members”, a woman. The women of these developing nations are being recorded in the blog’s history as the root of population increase. The ‘other’ in the BBC article is posited in Paul Erlich’s earlier writings quoting the dispensable quality attributed to the ‘others’ lives in the past. We found the BBC article to be more empathetic to the nations most affected by high fertility while also not assigning blame on account of their ‘deficiencies’ from the subject position of the developed world. The NEWSECURITYBEAT blog post wrote a less empathetic version of history in regards to ‘developing’ nations. The grand narrative of the contraceptive choice is left up to these nations, should they fail to comply history’s narrative will record their failure. The developed nations avoidance of a self-reflexive understanding of the factors of population growth only perpetuates the “neo-colonialist” ideal to fix the other. The author claims population decrease will be environmentally, socially and economically better for the world. There is no mention of the common rape that occurs in these countries. There is no mention of the imports and exports. These exports are hardly ever viably sustainable to feed their own people, nor is it mentioned where these exports are going. There is no mention of global capitalism’s hand in the ‘developing’ status of these countries. Just as history can be a history of great men, I would argue it could also be a history of great cures. Contraceptives are not THE solution to world population increase. In fact, world population increase is not THE problem. The problem resides in how food, income, and rights are dispersed globally. In a change of position, Paul Erlich now states he wouldn’t have focused his writings on “the poverty stricken masses”, but rather, “on there being too many rich people…” Culture aside for a millisecond, as humans we need to eat and we need water. History will be written that the seven billionth person in the world was a wake up call for developing nations and NGO’s. In my opinion the wake up call should be for the ‘developed’ nations of the world to realize what lives are at stake in their luxuries. The prevention of the runners of global capitalism controlling and privatizing such basic necessities as water and air should come before the prevention of more people in the world.