THE HIDDEN DISPLAY IN A GREAT MUSEUM

When I visited the American Museum of National History, which is every time I went to New York City, I never saw it. This past week, I took the museum tour and the guide mentioned that over in the biodiversity section, there was an “interesting” world population display.

After the tour, which incidentally was excellent and no one should miss, I looked for the display. I could not find it. After several attempts, I asked a museum employee who had to think, and finally pointed at the direction. I still had trouble finding it, and in fact walked by it several times, and finally I saw it, almost by chance.

It was easy to miss. You could almost say that it was hidden. The “display” was really a relatively small screen up on a wall in a deserted corner. It consisted of a short video that depicted world population growth since year one. There was a map of the world totally blank. And as the number of years increased, white dots appeared – each representing a million people. The dots began to appear in Southern Asia, then in Europe, then in the East Coast of North America, then in South America.

As the years, decades, centuries moved on, you could see the entire world being covered by the white dots.

This is a great museum that seems to get better every time I visit. But it’s more than an entertainment, even an educational experience. It can be a philosophical, metaphysical experience. In the huge Rose Planetarium, faced with the incomprehensible vastness of what we call the universe, composed, we are told, of the space travelled by light since the Big Band 13 billion years ago, and the billions of galaxies within, you can inverse the effect: not how big the universe is, but how small our planet is.

And the absolute wonder of life on this planet – the incredible diversity of life so dramatically displayed in the huge biodiversity area. And, of course, the miracle of human life: the wonder of human evolution, the tiny rat-like mammals that somehow survived the dinosaur era. Talk about the understanding the vastness of our universe, how about understanding these gigantic creatures, some of them incredibly vicious, ruling this planet for some 250 million years? We, humans, have been around some 100,000 years. Literally the blink of an eye.

Now, as I looked up at the population video, I said to myself: with all the truly wondrous things in this museum, is there anything more important than this? Is there anything more important on this planet than the amazing growth in human population?

The private organization, The Population Reference Bureau, has just published the latest data on world population. In 2007, it was 6.6 billion. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was 1.6 billion.

Almost all of this phenomenal growth is taking place in what is called “the developing world” – the poorest countries that are least able to cope with exploding population. There are 80 million more people every year in these countries, compared to 1.6 million more in the developed world.

To highlight the great and growing divide between the developed and “less developed” world the PRB compares the U.S., Germany and Ethiopia. The U.S. population is 302 million: Germany 82 million: Ethiopia 77 million. Life expectancy: U.S. 78 years, Germany 79 years, Ethiopia 49 years. Infant mortality per 1,000 births: U.S. 6.5 years, Germany 3.8 years, Ethiopia 77. Children under five underweight: U.S. 1 percent: Germany zero: Ethiopia 35 percent.

Every year almost 6 million children die of malnutrition, almost all in the developing world: 16,000 a day. That’s more than the total population, the PRB reports, of Denmark.

Back to the Museum of National History. There is a fundamental message that it communicates. We, the human race, are doing great damage to this planet. Humans burn fossil fuels for energy, cut down forests, contributing to climate change that is expected to produce rising temperature, more extreme weather, facilitate the spread of infectious diseases. One of the many other videos in the museum is by the famous actress, Meryl Streep, describing how humans are producing one of the greatest periods of species extinction in the planet’s history.

Add to this that the great divide between the developed and developing world can only get deepen as the population explodes in the poor countries. And this, needless to say, has enormous political, economic, social and security consequences.

On a world map, Puerto Rico, when it appears, is little more than a dot. But we know something about the consequences of rapid population growth. At the beginning of the 20th century, this island with it limited land and resources, was already overpopulated with one million people. Improved sanitation and health services produced a population explosion. Today there are some 4 million people on this island, and another 4 million on the U.S. mainland.

It was not easy for a small number of Puerto Ricans back in early century to convince anyone that the fundamental cause of Puerto Rico’s tragic social and economic ills – not, of course, the only, but the fundamental cause – was the population explosion.

Now, at the museum, it seemed to me that precisely this was dramatically symbolized by the fact that the world population “display” was easy to miss, practically hidden away. Yet if any of the great number of people walking around feel anything like the metaphysical experience at the wonder of human life on this planet, and think about the consequences of how it is multiplying, there is no more important display in this great museum .