Posted: Apr 16, 2012 9:43 am
MacIver wrote:I used to be really worried about overpopulation. But now I think it may not be as big a problem as I once did. The real problem is over-consumption.
I'd quibble with this and say both overpopulation and overconsumption are symptoms of an deeper cultural/psychological problems. Our whole relationship to the rest of the biosphere is unfit-for-purpose. Regarding both overpopulation and overconsumption, we haven't even reached the point of seriously discussing these things. They are effectively taboo, even in the developed world.
Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.”
But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.
Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. As I show in my new book, Peoplequake, half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia.
I thought we were talking about sub-saharan Africa.