In its hard-fought campaign to preserve the planet the Sierra Club is engaged on two major fronts. One task force is involved in the necessary work of the moment, shoring up dikes and bulwarks against the pressures of a rising flood of humanity; the other is engaged in trying to stop the "rain." These two efforts are totally linked. Loosing on either front ultimately looses the war.

This "build dikes-stop the rain" analogy sounds stretched because everybody knows mere humans can't control the rain--not even Indian rain dancers. But in the real life case we actually can stop the "population rain." It is a demonstrated fact. For the first time in known history, human beings, through their own will have succeeded in reducing their rate of growth and have done so even at a time when death rates were also dropping. The corner on world population growth rate was turned sometime during the eighties when annual rates of increase were as high as 1.7% and population doubling time was as low as 39 years.

Today, our annual rate of increase is 1.4% and doubling time is 45 years. Even more impressive is the fact that World-Wide, during the last 30 years, the number of couples using contraceptives has increased from less than 9% to 55% and fertility (roughly the number of children per family) has fallen from about 6 to 3. In many European countries fertility is now below 2 (replacement level). In Italy and Spain it has dropped to 1.3.

The fact that many nations are serious about checking growth is indicated by the consensus reached at the 1994 UN Population and Development Conference in Cairo where more than 170 nations approved a 20 year plan of action aimed at stabilizing human numbers at 7.8 billion by the year 2050. So the will, at least in embryonic form, is there. And the means, effective contraception, has long been in our possession.

The bad news is that even though growth rate numbers are coming down they are not shrinking fast enough to offer us the prospect of early relief. We find ourselves in a real "horse race" between time and environmental survival.

Adding to the "bad news" is the fact that the United States, once the worlds leader in funding overseas family planning services, is now cutting back on foreign aid funding at the time when it is most needed. It has been estimated that more than 300,000 couples in the poor nations of the world who want to control the size of their families, cannot do so because they lack the means. It would be nice to hear that other wealthy countries are stepping in to fill the funding gap left by the United States, but that is generally not the case.

In his recent speech in Atlanta, Ted Turner got it right. He said, "There is no smart growth, only dumb growth." As members of the Sierra Club, we are left in a "cliffhanging" situation wondering how much more "dumb growth" we can handle and still be effective in protecting the wonderful abundance, diversity and beauty of our natural world against the increasing threats of consumption, habitat loss, extinctions, fossil fuel burning, water and soil depletion and a host of other man-caused evils. Plainly, these are times that call for us to give the best that is in us.