Montgomery Fellow Dottie Lamm spoke about the connection between slowing population growth and empowering women to an overflow crowd in the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences Thursday night.
A columnist for the Denver Post since 1979, Lamm served as a delegate to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo last fall.
In her speech, she warned the world's population is growing considerably faster than ever before, saying, "We are living at a time that is totally unprecedented."
Environmental degradation and high global unemployment have changed the focus of the population problem, she said. Whereas two decades ago only wealthy, industrialized states sought to slow population growth, now "everybody is beginning to see this as a problem," she said.
The U.S. is also a "huge part of the problem" of strained resources, Lamm said. With five percent of the world's population, Americans inflict 20 times more environmental damage than less developed countries.
Lamm said equality in education and other fields between men and women is an important stepping stone towards solving discrimination problems.
"If you get girls equal with boys, you have wiser, more productive women," she said.
Lamm said some of the reasons women want to have large families include religious reasons, the economic benefits of new children, a preference for male children, more status for women or as tools to prove their husband's virility.
Lamm asserted that empowering women to make their own reproductive decisions is one of the keys to lowering population growth.
"Most women want to have fewer children," she said.
Lamm said the focus of efforts to improve women's standing is to show their abilities to enhance society."The emphasis is not on being a victim anymore," she said.
World population growth is far outstripping increases in food production, and is also contributing to refugee problems around the world, Lamm said.
"As I speak, there are 23 million people looking for somewhere to go," she said.
Due to "population momentum," small reductions in the birth rate now will translate into slower population growth years later, when the generation enters into child-bearing years.
Lamm's speech, called "The Road from Cairo to Beijing: Population Pressures/Women Power (The Crucial Connection)," was introduced by College Provost Lee Bollinger.
Lamm and her husband Richard, the former governor of Colorado, are the Montgomery Fellows for this summer.
Lamm serves on the foundation board of the National Abortion Rights Action League, is a presidential delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women and a board member of the Center for Population and Development Activities.
She will also be a delegate at the fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September.
In his introduction, Bollinger invited Lamm to speak at Dartmouth again, after she has attended the conference.
The Montgomery Fellowship was established in 1977 by Kenneth Montgomery '25 and his wife Harle, to "provide for the advancement of the academic realm of the College ... making possible new dimensions for, as well as extraordinary enrichments to, the educational experience" at Dartmouth, according to a College press release.
Fellows visit the College for periods of three days to three terms, depending on how long the fellow can stay, the endowment's resources and whether they are able to teach courses.
