EDITORIAL When System Boundaries Open

Well-meaning people often assume that maximum personal liberty is an unqualified desiratum and should be the goal of political and economic policy. This assumption lets one applaud rights and privileges but reject corresponding obligations and duties. Yet both sets of relations are integral to viable social systems. Here, I suggest that they also are integral to sus- tainable ecological systems.

Seminal thinkers in sociology have long said that unlimited personal liberty is not in the best interest of the individual so relieved of constraint. Totally exempt from interpersonal, community and religious ties, one falls into a condition of anomie, which Durkheim relates to a heightened risk of death by suicide. Development of the complete self, on the contrary, de- pends upon social linkages and identities of all kinds (Parsons et al., 1961).

Ecology and demography now join sociology in revealing weaknesses in natural systems that maximize personal liberty. The liberty in question is one of the greatest of all: the freedom to move at will from one's territory or community. Examples, below, suggest that the openness of a system, in- cluding the freedom to move away, leads both to lessened commitment to preserving the quality and Iongterm carrying capacity of the local environ- ment, and to the collapse of incentives to limit fertility.

Goldman (1995), for example, traces the crumbling of sustainable ag- riculture in certain parts of Africa to the emigration of able-bodied men. In the mountainous terrain between Nigeria and northern Cameroon, terrac- ing to preserve soil has been abandoned because of shortage of male labor. Opportunities for immigration to urban areas and the surrounding plains are held responsible: "The critical change was the opening of the system's boundaries. Once it became possible to carry out lower intensity agricul- ture and other activities elsewhere, the opportunity costs of high labor in- vestment in intensive terrace-based agriculture became too difficult to sus-

Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 17, Number 5, May 1996 �9 1996 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 369

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tain" (p. 323). In other areas, eg., Zaire, fallow periods in the cycle of shifting agriculture have been shortened, not from shortage of bushland, but because a man's strength is needed for the heavy labor of clearing land that has lain fallow for a full recovery period. The hard work of maintain- ing soil fertility has been abandoned because here, too, the men--and viable local communities with them--have largely gone (pp. 323-324).

Theirs are the sins of omission. But why sins? Why should persons not have liberty to move, so long as the destination is welcoming? Why should one not grasp opportunity? Indeed, whether closed systems are more life- enhancing than open ones may be the fin du si6cle conundrum.

For all their appeal, open systems also invite abuse. For example, counting on nearly unlimited international mobility, multinational corpora- tions and wealthy entrepreneurs can "develop" one niche then move on to the next profit opportunity. V.S. Naipul (1989) states that the element of society most upsetting to him is "'cynicism.' He explains cynicism as 'Fouling one's own nest at home and feathering another abroad . . . bred perhaps by this availability of emigration abroad, which is very demoraliz- ing. People are able to create a mess at home, build dreadful skyscrapers in cities like Bombay, yet buy nice apartments for themselves in foreign coun- tries that are better organized'" (cited in Abernethy 1993, p. 163). Citizens of the world are patriots of nowhere. The few are able to ruin successive ecological niches, while moving on.

Not only the wealthy claim a right to leave where they are, to go where they please. The poor and the economic refugees who cross interna- tional borders sometimes assert a moral claim and have made immigration law into a much disputed area of public policy.

Emigration--leaving--affects not only those who move and persons at their destination, but also those who remain to occupy niches which neighbors and relatives have vacated. Recent findings affirm, as first sug- gested by Kingsley Davis in 1963, that high fertility is facilitated by having a safety valve for excess population. Since poverty is bred in the first place by overpopulation, regions cannot escape poverty while preserving a cycle of high fertility, relief via emigration, high fertility, greater population pres- sure, and more emigration so long as places to go can be found.

An anecdotal example of the linkage between emigration and fertility is an account by Hebe Lutz (1995), serving with the Foreign Nurses Asso- ciation, of a conversation with a Nepalese elder. Lutz's informant sponta- neously observed that the new practice of the young moving away from their birth village was creating the impression of limitless space and oppor- tunity, and was a factor in rising fertility rates. Davis (1963), giving exam- ples from both late nineteenth century Ireland and early twentieth century

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Japan, concludes much the same: emigration expands a country's ecologi- cal niche and, thus, allows high fertility rates to persist.

Similarly, John F. May (1995) suggests that mid-twentieth century poli- cies of dispersing the Rwandan population to undeveloped agricultural land and neighboring countries attenuated land hunger and, thus, encour- aged higher fertility rates than would otherwise have occurred. The Rwan- dan fertility decline was delayed to the late 1980s, beginning only as lands that were colonized twenty years earlier began to lose their productivity, the economy faltered, and further population dispersal became impossible. The government began to support family planning programs, and the peo- ple embraced them, when it became evident that no better alternative than fertility control was in the offing.

In the CARICOM countries (the former British West Indies) fertility rose with post-World War I1 expansionism including the development of tour- ism, planning for independence, and massive emigration to Great Britain. Fertility rates were declining rapidly by the early 1980s (Guengant, 1985) after the emigration option closed and it had become clear that job cre- ation was not keeping pace with population growth.

Systematic controlled comparisons within matched West Indian com- munities show high fertility during the 1970s and 80s in just those pockets where there was a tradition of emigration, whereas a precipitous fertility decline was occurring specifically in those communities where emigration was not seen as an escape valve (Brittain, 1990; 1991). Similarly, nine- teenth century English and Welsh villages from which many emigrated had continuing high fertility; in contrast, fertility declined rapidly in similar communities which absorbed their own young (Friedlander, 1983).

Even if only a few of the large number who consider emigration will actually make the move, the prospect of moving to greener pastures ap~ pears to be one factor supporting large family size. In addition, some coun- tries make export of labor a way of life and appear to depend significantly on the foreign exchange earnings and remittances that emigr~s send home. High fertility rates persist in many such countries, eg., the Philippines, In- dia, Pakistan, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

What incentive have people to limit fertility or conserve if their hopes are not pinned on their own community, but rather on some distant land where they hope to be? Why fix the place one is leaving? Altruistically motivated environmentalism is probably rare (Low & Heinen, 1993), al- though practitioners wish to believe that it is common.

Many observations suggest that most people most of the time will limit fertility or conserve under only the narrowest of circumstance: when it is in their self-interest to do so. The more that fertility control and conservation

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"cost" in terms of present benefits foregone, the greater must be the com- pulsion or the certainty of enjoying future benefits. If, as Kingsley Davis (1963) suggests, fertility control is the least desirable alternative for coping with population pressure, particularly in the premodern world without safe and discrete means of contraception, it will emerge late, and only as other options vanish. Yet fertility control happens, just as conservation happens and managing local environments for sustainable production happens. These adaptations take physical or psychological effort or both. They come about, mostly, when sullying one niche and moving on to the next no longer c a n happen.

Virginia Abernethy

REFERENCES

Brittain, A.W. (1990). Migration and the demographic transition: A West Indian example." Social and Economic Studies, 39 (3), 39-64.

Brittain, A. W. (1991 ). Anticipated child loss to migration and sustained high fertility in an East Caribbean population. Social Biology 38 (1-2), 94-112.

Davis, Kingsley (1963). The theory of change and response in the modern demographic his- tory. Population Index 29 (4), 345-365.

Friedlander, D. (1983). Demographic responses and socioeconomic structure: Population pro- cesses in England and Wales in the nineteenth century. Demography 20, 249-272.

Goldman, Abe (1995). Threats to sustainability in African agriculture: Searching for appropri- ate paradigms. Human Ecology 23 (1), 291-334.

Low, Bobbi S. & Heinen, Joel T. (1993). Population, resources, and environment: Implications of human behavioral ecology for conservation. Population and Environment 15 (1), 7-42.

Lutz, Hebe (June 8, 1995). Personal communication, AWHONN conference, Nashville. May, John F. (1995). Policies on population, land use, and environment in Rwanda. Popula-

tion and Environment 16 (4), 321-334. Parsons, Talcott, Shils, Edward, Naegele, Kaspar D., Pitts, Jesse R. (Eds.). (1961); Theories of

society, selections by Georg Simmel (1910), George H. Mead (1934), Marcel Mauss (translation in 1954), Max Weber (translation in 1947), Emile Durkheim (translations in 1949 and 1951). NY: The Free Press.