Authors: Patrick Coffin
The Population Bomb
is nothing if not earnest in its pessimism—think Chicken Little with a PhD and a bullhorn. It’s remarkable that a book with so many accidentally hilarious predictions would remain so influential. It opens with this gem: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
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How tenderly Dr. Ehrlich regards his fellow human beings: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. … We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival.”
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Ehrlich the theory, Hitler the practice.
Today, the fear of overpopulation has saturated the public imagination. Its unspoken endgame scenario is like a Hollywood disaster movie featuring millions of people crowded together on tip toe along the coasts and around lakes, angling not to fall into the water; pandemics brought on by massive malnutrition, civil wars over food rations, and masses of urban refugees fleeing into ever-crowded desert regions. Unless “something” is “done” “soon,” Montana will one day wake up as Manhattan. Or something like that.
I jest, but only partly, for this line of thinking has been granted sacred cow status by school and college textbooks, and is echoed by almost every media outlet.
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(It has a cousin, too: the ubiquitous evolution tableaux in which a tadpole becomes a fish, a lizard, an ape, a caveman, and then upright homo sapiens, as if Darwinian theory is 100 percent correct.)
This new orthodoxy defines the goals of many inter-related political organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the Population Institute, the Sierra Club, The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and Zero Population Growth (ZPG).
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Few myths have friends in such high places: efforts at halting the spread of wretched humanity have been the official policy of the United States since the Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
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If you have no idea it’s a scam, or at best a mistaken theory, the fear is easy enough to buy into. However, if old age homes start outnumbering nurseries, and casket sales outstrip those of cradles, then the human race would indeed be on a collision course with disaster.
Birthrates around the world are falling steadily and, in many industrialized countries such as Great Britain and most of Europe, have been doing so since the end of World War II. Demographer Ben Wattenberg wrote about this in his 1987 book
The Birth Dearth
and, more recently, in
Fewer: How the New Demography of De-Population Will Shape Our Future
. He notes:
For the last 650 years, since the time of the Black Plague, the total number of people on earth has headed in only one direction: up. But soon—probably within a few decades—global population will level off and then likely fall for a protracted period of time. The number of people on earth will be headed down, “depopulating.” Why?
Birthrates and fertility rates ultimately yield total population levels. And never have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places, so surprisingly
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(italics his).
Of course, to say that birth rates are falling in most countries is not to deny that the overall population of the world is increasing. It is. The rub is that the rate of new persons being born has already started a vast slowdown. In general, parents in most parts of the world are electing to have fewer and fewer kids.
If that sounds counterintuitive, policy journalist Philip Longman provides an analogy of a train chugging uphill:
If the engine stalls, the train will still move forward for a while, but its loss of momentum implies that it will soon be moving backwards, and at ever-greater speed. So it is when fertility rates shift from above to below replacement levels. The equivalent of the hill is death itself, which is always pushing against any increase in human population. The equivalent of the engine is a fertility rate that consistently produces more births than deaths … specifically, when women born during a period of high fertility (such as the 1950s in the United States) wind up having fewer children than their mothers, population size may well still grow because of the large number of women of childbearing age. But in the next generation, the pool of potential mothers will be smaller than before, and in the generation after that, the pool become smaller still. By then the momentum of population growth is lost, or more precisely, is working in the opposite direction with compounding force.
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And what is that magic fertility replacement rate? It’s 2.1 children, a statistical way of saying that a human population base can only maintain its current level over an extended time if each set of parents have two kids to replace themselves, plus “more.” (The 0.1 accounts for infant mortality and for offspring who die before childbearing age.) There will always be people who stay single, couples with no children, and couples with van-loads of children, but the population must maintain an average family size of slightly more than two children to sustain the replacement level.
Since the 1950s, when five- and six-kid families were commonplace (a fact well known to anyone who was an adult at the time), the average family size has dropped dramatically.
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The anecdotal evidence of this drop is everywhere. Today’s ideal is two kids, preferably a boy and a girl because that’s so cute. In magazines, on billboards, and on television, advertisers spend millions of dollars projecting the two-child family as the image of choice.
In the United States, Canada, and most of Europe, young parents violate an unwritten taboo when they have a third or fourth child, drawing the gossipy stares and
tsk-tsks
of those whom one perceptive mom has called “the fertility police.”
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Usually it’s in the form of well-meant ribbing (“Hey, do you guys know what you’re doing?” “They have pills for that, you know,” and so on), but the barbs can be downright rude.
I will close this chapter with some facts arranged in cheat sheet form. Commit a few of them to memory so you can give Tom, Dick, or Harry something to think about the next time they invoke the population explosion myth as a way of excusing contraception:
Fact 1:
It sounds cheeky, but the easiest way to disprove that the earth is anywhere near being overpopulated is to get in an airplane and take off from any of the world’s largest cities: Beijing, New York, Tokyo, New Delhi, London, Paris, Shanghai, Mexico City, or Toronto. After fifteen minutes in the air, look down. You will see mostly green vistas, smooth plains, rivers, and rolling hills.
Fact 2:
World population growth is slowing down at an alarming rate. United Nations figures show that the seventy-nine countries that make up forty percent of the world’s population now have fertility rates well below replacement level.
Fact 3:
Forty-six percent of the earth is still pristine wilderness, undeveloped, and nearly unpopulated. This area, roughly sixty-eight million square miles, is home to only 2.4 percent of the world’s population.
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Fact 4:
The population of the entire world, at the printing of this book, could fit into the State of Texas with each person living on almost a third of an acre.
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This fact alone disproves the image of the earth’s surface brimming with sardine-like humanity. (See Fact 16.)
Fact 5:
Africa is often held up as incontrovertible evidence that overpopulation causes poverty, or, according to the opposite theory, is caused by poverty. But Africa has only one-fifth the population density of Europe. According to estimates by Roger Revelle, former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, and research by the University of California at San Diego, the continent of Africa has an unexploited agricultural capacity to feed twice the present population of the world.
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Fact 6:
A 2005 Statistics Canada study, describing Canada’s population plunge as an “unprecedented situation,” revealed that Canada is aging so fast that senior citizens over sixty-five will outnumber children under fifteen a decade from now.
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Fact 7:
Japan recently experienced its first ever drop in overall population owing to its very low 1.3 fertility level, as seventy percent of young Japanese women now report having no interest in marrying. In the last decade, ninety theme parks for children in Japan have disappeared, and several thousand elementary schools and pediatric hospitals have closed.
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Fact 8:
While all the European nations’ birthrates have spiraled dramatically down, the German Federal Statistics Office reports that Germany has remained below the replacement fertility rate (1.36) for so long that it has reached the point of no return, a situation that can no longer be countered by immigration.
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Fact 9:
Russia’s population drops by almost 750,000 people yearly. President Vladimir Putin has called Russia’s birth dearth “the most acute problem facing the country.”
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Attempts at a remedy have included cash incentives for having more than one child (as is done in Quebec), special pensions for extra fertile mothers, and the Day of Conception, held annually on September 12 in the Ulyanovsk region. The contest provides a day off for patriotic couples to do what comes naturally—in order to win cash prizes, refrigerators, and SUVs.
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Fact 10:
By 1900, Russian women bore an average of seven children over a lifetime. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, this had dropped to 1.7.
Fact 11:
The U.S. military budget provides a surprising benchmark of how the American population at large is aging. In 2000, the cost of military pensions amounted to twelve times what the Pentagon spent on ammunition; nearly five times what the Navy spent on new warships, and over five times what the Air Force spent on new planes and missiles.
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Fact 12:
Many of the world’s most densely populated areas also happen to provide high levels of per capita wealth and economic stability, such as The Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. South Korea’s population density is 3.6 times higher than China’s, yet boasts a per capita output twelve times greater.
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Fact 13:
Executive management and economic guru Dr. Peter Drucker, author of over thirty books on economics and business leadership, says, “the most important single new certainty—if only because there is no precedent for it in all of history—is the collapsing birthrate in the developed world.”
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Fact 14:
George Orwell said that some ideas are so dumb that only an intellectual could believe them. Lizard expert and ecologist Dr. Eric Pianka is an intellectual. The University of Texas at Austin professor believes that the population of the earth could stand a ninety percent reduction, and has publically suggested that the deadly airborne Ebola virus would do the trick nicely. “We’re no better than bacteria,” he opined.
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Sadly, even the revered oceanographer Jacques Cousteau offered his own unfortunate final solution: “It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.”
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These are the public thoughts of the population scare movement.
Fact 15:
Despite having a higher average TFR (total fertility rate) than most western countries, the overall fertility rates in the United States have fallen steadily since 1801, with the exception of the post-World War II baby boom, which peaked in 1957.
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Fact 16:
Advances in agricultural science have made obsessions over food shortages moot. The Food and Agricultural Association reports that, at present, farmers use less than half of the world’s arable land. “The conversion of land to urban and built–up uses to accommodate a larger population will absorb less than two percent of the world’s land, and ‘is not likely to seriously diminish the supply of land for agricultural production,’ according to Paul Waggoner, writing for the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology in 1994.”
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Fact 17:
Most people have never thought about where their logic leads them. The next time a Chicken Little in your life plays the overpopulation card, turn it around and ask him how few people on earth would be ideal, and why.