Cairo Conferees Linking Growth, Environment : Population: ‘We simply cannot have a replication of the American lifestyle around the world,’ a delegate says.

CAIRO — Jacqueline Hamilton, trying to explain the links between population and the environment, has frequently drawn on her childhood in Southern California as an illustration.

She remembers the small housing development she grew up in, surrounded by orange groves and avocado trees as recently as 1972. Friends coming to visit had to be directed by describing natural landmarks and curves in the road. Now, she says, there’s a Wal-Mart less than a mile from her mother’s house, and a freeway connector passes a quarter of a mile away. The old creek has been lined with concrete. The groves are gone.

It is an image familiar to many Southern Californians but vividly illustrative in this Egyptian metropolis, where a U.N. conference on global population is trying for the first time to draw clear links between population growth and the environment.

“One of the great values of this process is that it finally makes the specific link between people, how they live and their consumption patterns, and how many of us there are,” Hamilton, an official with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Sunday.

As draftees at the International Conference on Population and Development recessed Sunday amid a deadlock on more controversial reproductive issues, environmental organizations said the conference has already produced important gains that go beyond a 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which did not address the issue of population.

An environmental action program agreed on at the Cairo conference calls for population issues to be considered in all new development projects; special strategies to eradicate poverty and promote employment for the rural poor, and modification of consumption patterns that are eating away at the environment.

“The broad, central core of our objectives was to make sure that we achieved broad, international understanding of what ‘carrying capacity’ really means and what it means for public policy,” said James Hayes, director of the original 1970 Earth Day, president of a Washington-based environmental foundation and a member of the U.S. delegation to the conference.

“Carrying capacity is ordinarily thought of as the number of any species that a biological system can support in perpetuity. But the crucial dimension that’s often ignored is that it’s not just numbers, but numbers times their impact. With the American lifestyle, the world’s carrying capacity is only about 2 billion people. We simply cannot have a replication of the American lifestyle around the world,” Hayes said.

“This conference has recognized that, both implicitly and explicitly, and that’s the first time that has happened at a United Nations conference. It is an extraordinary achievement.”

It is generally accepted that present levels of population growth cannot be sustained without great damage to the environment. But the plan under consideration in Cairo this week also goes far to recognize that consumption patterns play an equally important role.

Although the United States has only 5% of the world’s people, for example, it consumes 25% of the world’s commercial energy, 27% of its aluminum and more than 20% of its tin, copper and lead.

Natural Resources Defense Council officials say that the 55 million people born in industrialized nations during the 1990s will pollute the world more than the 895 million born in the developing world.

Environmental groups had pushed for specific policies in the conference’s final document that would seek to lower consumption among rich nations and improve conditions among poorer ones.

They had sought statements encouraging nations to adopt energy-efficient standards for new construction and equipment; water cleanup programs; policies making manufacturers responsible for the wastes they generate and for wasteful packaging, and strategies to make sure the price of goods reflects their full environmental cost.

Martin Brauen, a member of the Swiss delegation, called the policies adopted “a very weak, useless formulation.”

He said the delegates were too consumed by a controversy over abortion policies to focus on environmental issues. “All we talk about is abortion, and finally when we wanted to discuss the responsibility of the North, the chairman said we must hurry up. There is something wrong about that.”

But U.S. officials said the conference adopted each one of the American environmental team’s goals.

“Rio specifically promised a future consideration of population and the environment. This is the fulfillment of the Rio promise,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), an observer at both international conferences.

Environmental groups sought to secure financing to carry out the conference’s stated objectives, estimated to cost about $17 billion a year.

“Our top priority was to ensure that there was adequate funding language in the document to make the Cairo document actionable,” said Ray Pingle, a Sierra Club volunteer from Irvine.

He said it is not enough for countries to merely say they will increase their funding as much as they can.

“We think incrementalism isn’t going to work anymore. Just donating more money than they did last year isn’t going to do it. This is a critical time, and if we don’t come up with enough funds to control population growth immediately, the population is going to triple, and the world just can’t sustain that,” Pingle said.

“This is an important issue for us, because we really believe that virtually all the other battles that we fight to save the environment will be lost in the long term if we don’t stabilize the world population.”