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5: “The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People”: Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction
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5 “The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People” Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction sabine höhler My fellow citizens: It is with a heavy heart that I bring you the findings of the council. After deliberating in continuous sessions for the last four months in unceasing efforts to find a solution to the devastating problem of overpopulation threatening to destroy what remains of our planet, the World Federation Council has considered and rejected all halfway measures advanced by the various regional scientific congresses. We have also rejected proposals for selective euthanasia and mass sterilization. Knowing the sacrifices that our decision will entail, the World Council has nevertheless reached a unanimous decision. I quote: “Because it has been agreed by the nations of the world that the earth can no longer sustain a continuously increasing population, as of today, the first of January, we join with all other nations of the world in the following edict: childbearing is herewith forbidden.” To bear a child shall be the greatest of crime, punishable by death. Women now pregnant will report to local hospitals for registration. I earnestly request your cooperation in this effort to ensure the last hope for survival of the human race. ZPG: Zero Population Growth ZPG, released in 1971, deals with the rigid measures for population control that a densely populated Earth might require in the future. In the effort to ensure the survival of the human race the World Council rules that having children will be strictly illegal for the coming thirty years. Set in a thickly polluted American metropolis, the movie tells the story of the young white couple Russ and Carol, who, upset with having to make do with a surrogate robot 100 Brav e Ne w wo rl ds & l aNds o f t h e fl ie s baby, secretly give birth to a child, whom they hide carefully from friends and neighbors. However, the young family is discovered by a neighboring couple, itself with a strong desire for a child. A fight about proprietary rights results in blackmail and betrayal, and finally in the disclosure of the child to the authorities . The family is arrested, their elimination imminent.1 Around 1970, scenarios of population growth and restrictions on reproduction were explored not only in works of fiction. “zPG—Zero Population Growth” was also the name of a US activist group founded in 1968 to raise public awareness of the “population problem.” The group sought to confront the white American middle class with its lifestyle of using up far more than its global share of natural resources and adding more than its share to environmental pollution. zPG meant to secure a birth rate of 2.2 to achieve a desired replacement rate of 1:1 and to thereby realize the dream of a numerically stable population—zero population growth. The initial mission was to encourage citizens to reduce family size: “Stop at Two,” “Stop Heir Pollution,” and “Control Your Local Stork” were some of zPG’s slogans advertised on bumper stickers, flyers, and posters, in public service announcements, magazines, and organized protest marches. zPG also founded its own “Population Education Department” that produced classroom texts, and a video titled World Population that was used as an educational tool in public exhibitions, museums, and zoos. The organization did not confine its actions to showing movies and handing out condoms. It also urged changes in population policy and abortion legislation, and it opened vasectomy clinics.2 Among zPG’s founding members was the biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose popular book The Population Bomb (1968) briefly boosted group membership to more than thirty thousand in its first year.3 Drawing on his studies of animal populations, Ehrlich warned about the impending destructive “explosion” of the human world populace. He became one of the founders of population ecology, which emerged from population biology by extending the realm of the natural sciences to the study of human societies in relation to their environments.4 As the historian Matthew Connelly aptly put it, “Political problems were assumed to be biological in origin, potentially affecting the whole species.”5 The “natural laws” of population growth leveled individual and social differences . People were aggregated into comparable numerical entities to make them “accountable”: commensurable for the sake of statistics and responsible for their reproductive behavior. The ecological and governmental calculus of allocating contested earthly living space along the lines and divides of biological, [54.205.179.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05...