Few people have as much sympathy as I do for the people of Haiti, especially for the children, for I saw their desperate plight years before the earthquake. Led by the U.S., many nations have now committed to solving Haiti’s problems. The fact is that the immediate relief problems and earthquake casualties would be much less with a smaller population. The size of population now, with the scale of the problems it creates, leads to an increasingly chaotic situation. More population exacerbates any efforts needed to solve humanity’s problems, anywhere, be they immediate or long term.

We state we will rebuild Haiti to better than before – buildings to resist earthquakes, and feed everyone an adequate diet. A growing population makes this an endless task. People, politicians especially, have little grasp of realities. Promises are made with no basis of fact. Haiti can never be self-sustaining without a huge reduction in population. I have been there and seen 9.2 million people jammed into an area half-mountainous, only a bit larger than Malheur County, Oregon (9,926 square miles), and the worst erosion I have ever seen in the 70-plus countries I have visited. When I saw Haiti more than 20 years ago, even then nearly all aspects of what might be a life-sustaining environment had been destroyed from overpopulation. Bill Clinton, U.S. special envoy to Haiti, wants to re-forest Haiti – nice trick with virtually no topsoil left, and it takes 40-plus years to grow a forest even on fertile soil. In the meantime what do people use for fuel – other biomass sorely needed to impede erosion and to be put into Haiti’s impoverished dirt? The reason forests are now 98% gone is that when I was there, even then people were left to digging out tree roots to make charcoal for fuel.