This is a linkpost for: https://quillette.com/2023/11/07/forget-about-overpopulation-soon-there-will-be-too-few-humans/

“Why don’t you mention the problem of overpopulation?” Whenever I give a talk about climate change and what to do about it, or about human progress during the past two centuries (or about any other topic, really), this is the one question that never fails to be asked during the Q&A. It is almost always meant to be a rhetorical one. The root cause of all our worries about climate and environment, or so the questioner believes, can be summarised in three words: too many people. Without addressing that root problem there can’t be any hope of a bright future. People beget more people, and before long you get an exponential growth curve that ends in disaster. A ticking time bomb. An explosion.

For the past few years, I have been the holder of a Chair at Ghent University dedicated in honour of Etienne Vermeersch, a Belgian philosopher renowned for many things but perhaps most notably for his early warnings about overpopulation and his advocacy for birth control. A few years before his untimely death in 2019, he expressed his “despair” at his failure to convince our political leaders to take overpopulation seriously.

Etienne was an intellectual hero of mine for whom I have huge respect, but this is the only thing about which he was dead wrong. Because there is no problem of overpopulation. In fact, before long, we will have to start worrying about underpopulation, caused by rapidly falling birth rates. It turns out that this is bad news not only for humanity but also for the planet, because more humans means more available resources and less destructive impact on nature.

Come again? More humans means more available resources? No, that’s not a typo.

First of all, some empirical facts. Global population growth peaked in the late 1960s, when the average woman had 4.5 children, and it has been declining ever since. In country after country, we have seen fertility rates take a nosedive after the death rate did the same thing. Global fertility today has fallen to about 2.3 births per woman, barely more than the replacement rate of 2.1 (the number you need to maintain a population). No country appears to be immune to this 'demographic transition', not even—despite popular misconceptions—traditional and religious societies.

Declining...

Posts

Wiki Contributions

Comments