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The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet's Surprising Future Paperback – April 5, 2011
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Over the last century, the world’s population quadrupled and fears of overpopulation flared, with baby booms blamed for genocide and terrorism, and overpopulation singled out as the primary factor driving global warming. Yet, surprisingly, it appears that the population explosion is past its peak—by mid-century, the world’s population will be declining for the first time in over seven hundred years. In The Coming Population Crash, veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce reveals the dynamics behind this dramatic shift and describes the environmental, social, and economic effects of our surprising demographic future.
- Print length312 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBeacon Press
- Publication dateApril 5, 2011
- Dimensions0.75 x 1 x 8.75 inches
- ISBN-100807001228
- ISBN-13978-0807001226
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Review
“[Pearce] weaves the views of many of the world’s top demographers together with first-hand reporting from the slums of Mumbai and ghost towns of east Germany to bring to life what could easily have turned into a drab bit of statistical analysis. It doesn’t.”—Danny Fortson, Sunday Times (London)
“[A] fascinating analysis of how global population trends have shaped, and been shaped by, political and cultural shifts . . . Highly readable and marked by first-class reportage."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Fascinating [and] optimistic.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Demography is destiny. But not always in the ways we imagine. It underlies much of our world, shifting the tectonic plates on which our civilization is built. Never has that been more true than today. Wherever we look, population issues are among the most toxic headline-grabbers. From Gaza to Grozny and Rwanda to Afghanistan, baby booms are blamed for war and genocide. Festering slums burst into tribal violence in Kenya. Teenage terrorists lurk in refugee camps and overcrowded madrassas. Migrants from poor, overbreeding states are flooding Europe and North America. Overpopulation is the unspoken driver of environmental destruction. Millions of environmental refugees will soon be fleeing from spreading deserts and drowned deltas, as China’s billionplus inhabitants undermine all efforts to halt climate change.
The stats seem scary, too. The world’s population is approaching seven billion—four times what it was a century ago. Never have there been so many mothers, and with half the people in some countries under sixteen years old, there are billions more baby-makers in the pipeline. Meanwhile, the world’s masses are on the move. Some 200 million people go to bed in a country different from the one they were born in.
No wonder the language is bleak. Dickensian. Malthusian. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s Armageddon. We fear an overpopulated world teeming with the dispossessed and the alienated, the fanatical and the fascist, the wetbacks and the snakeheads, the Humvee-driving superpolluters and the dirt-poor deforesters. Surely we are racing to demographic disaster.
And yet slamming on the brakes seems almost as dangerous. For meanwhile, the insurgency of the old is looming. We are all living longer, healthier lives. Life expectancy has doubled since the 1950s. Back when I was born, 150 babies out of every thousand died before their first birthday. I could have been one of them. Now only fifty die. Should we cherish or fear this? Is good luck for the world’s babies bad luck for the planet? It is sometimes said that more than half of all the people who have lived on the earth are alive today. This is nonsense. Just under 7 billion of the total human roll call of 100 billion are alive today. But what may well be true is that half of all the people who have ever managed to reach the age of sixty-five are alive today.
But don’t despair. There is something you may not have guessed— something that may save us all. The population “bomb” is being defused. Only gradually, because the children of the greatest population explosion in history are still mostly of childbearing age, but it is happening. They may be having seven children in Mali, and six in Afghanistan, but half of the world’s women are now having two children or fewer—not just in rich countries, but in Iran and parts of India, Burma and Brazil, Vietnam and South Africa. Mothers today have fewer than half as many offspring as their own mothers. This is happening mostly out of choice and not compulsion. Women have always wanted freedom, not domestic drudgery and the childbirth treadmill. And now that most of their babies survive to adulthood, they are grabbing it.
This book is the story of the peoplequake, the dramatic convulsion of the world’s population that began with the Industrial Revolution and continues today. It is the story of how the tectonic plates of human population are shifting, and what this means for us and future generations. We see those plates shifting in the mosques of Iran and the slums of Mumbai; the vodka shops of Moscow and the killing fields of Rwanda; the demographic battlegrounds of Israel and the laid-back saunas of Stockholm.
If you are over forty-five, you have lived through a period when the world population has doubled. No past generation has experienced such an era—and probably no future generation will either. But if you are under forty-five, you will almost certainly live to see a world population that is declining—for the first time since the Black Death, almost seven hundred years ago. And it may happen soon. Demographers pre dict that, as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the global recession that began in 2009 will encourage people to give up on babies for the duration.
The future will be a different world in other ways, too. The average citizen of the world today is under thirty. Before he or she dies, the average will probably be over fifty. In parts of aging Europe, there are already fewer than two taxpaying workers to support every pensioner. Book your places now for the global old folks’ home. But the quake is not just about numbers. It is about age and sex and women’s rights and war and migration; about the rise and fall of nations and, some fear, the end of the family. It is about environmental limits and climate change and the fertility of soils and minds.
The story opens with Bob Malthus, a morose eighteenth-century vicar spooked by two revolutions—the French and the Industrial— counting his stunted parish flock and imagining our demographic doom. From the Irish potato famine to Rwanda, the story follows the evolution of Malthusian fears of overpopulation. It tracks the terrifying logic of the twentieth-century eugenics scientists and the concerns of their birth-controlling successors who imposed coercive family planning in China, India, and elsewhere. It catches up with the new century’s migrants and refugees and pensioners and, diminishing in number though they are, the babies of our planet.
It explores how demography drove the rise of the Asian tiger economies and China’s economic miracle—and how it will soon undermine them both. It charts shrinking Europe, and how by midcentury Russia could have fewer people than Yemen. It follows the declining power of Catholic and Islamic clerics alike to lay down the law in the bedroom. It takes the political temperature of the “youth bulge” creating mayhem in the Middle East.
Most of all, it investigates the baby boom generation, born during the late twentieth century as world birth rates for a while reached double the death rates. The baby boomers are now adults, driving the global economy. But soon they will grow old.
And as the baby boomers start to die, global deaths will exceed global births. One way or another, their fate will be the fate of us all, for the boomers changed the planet. They were born into a world of resource abundance and will leave behind a world of profound resource scarcity. They brought us peak population, and with it peak oil and peak mining and peak trade and peak pollution. They will leave behind peak temperatures, too.
Have they done so much damage to the planet that the worst environmental nightmares are about to come true? Was the British government’s chief scientist right to say in early 2009 that we face a “perfect storm” of food, energy, and water shortages by 2030? Was the Gaia scientist Jim Lovelock right to argue in his ninetieth year that the result will be “death on a grand scale from famine and lack of water . . . a reduction to a billion people or less” by 2100?
Many believe so. But haven’t we heard such fears before? Malthus, of course. But also William Vogt, the forgotten hero of the environmental movement, who captured the world’s attention with similar warnings in 1948, and Paul Ehrlich, whose Population Bomb repeated those warnings in 1968. None have come true—yet. So could the techno-optimists be right that our ingenuity will see us through to a new age? This is the first time in history that we have been able to foresee with some certainty a decline in our numbers. It means that if we can accommodate the imminent population peak, survival on planet Earth ought to become easier. That is not a cause for complacency. There are some choppy waters ahead, for sure, especially over climate change. We will need all our ingenuity to get through that, and to find ways to feed the eight or nine billion people who will inhabit the earth by 2040. But it could be a cause for hope as well. Optimism, even. Should we look forward to the benefits of a return to center stage of the tribal elders? Might the final legacy of aging boomers be a greener, happier, and more frugal world?
Product details
- Publisher : Beacon Press (April 5, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 312 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0807001228
- ISBN-13 : 978-0807001226
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 0.75 x 1 x 8.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,956,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #501 in Demography Studies
- #2,743 in Human Geography (Books)
- #3,210 in Environmental Economics (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Fred Pearce, author of The New Wild, is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. He has reported on environmental, science, and development issues from eighty-five countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist since 1992, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. Pearce was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and CGIAR agricultural research journalist of the year in 2002, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2011. His many books include With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, and The Land Grabbers.
Photo Copyright Photographer Name: Fred Pearce, 2012.
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As it turns out, population control has been naturally occurring on its own. In countries all over the world, birth rates are on the decline as woman choose to have 0 to 2 children, which is near or below replacement rates. The reasons are not by design, it just sort of happened, a result of increased affluence and urbanization brought on by the green revolution of the 60s, and increased access to and awareness of birth control. Given a choice, women don't want big families, they'd rather invest resources in a few healthy children and pursue their own life interests. The numbers tell the story and Pearce's book is full of page after page of amazing perspectives that totally changes how one sees the world. In short, most likely we will reach "Peak Population" by 2040, that is, the total number of humans on the planet will peak at around 8 billion and then begin to decline, rapidly. There are already some days on planet earth when more people die than are born.
Pearce has written a fascinating and optimistic book, we really need it in this time of gloomy predictions about the future. Demography very well may be the saving grace of the human race. Or I should say, women may save the day by choosing not to have big families. My only complaint is he doesn't look at the potential downsides of a declining and aging population - on market economies, tax bases, standards of living, etc.. and what conditions in the future could cause a reversal of increased birth rates, such as what happens during baby booms. Nothing is assured, but assuming the macro trends stay in place - globalization, urbanization, woman's liberation - the population problem, and conversely environmental and resource problems, may just have a good chance of resolving themselves with time, and we may look back on this period as an overpopulated transition to a more stable and gentle older age.
Of the two generally agreed upon root issues underlying negative environmental impact, increasing population and increasing consumption, Pearce concludes that “consumption is the greater peril.” This view exposes Pearce’s bias that population is not really a problem, in part because the world birthrate has been decreasing and, in part, because of our ability to solve problems via the technological solution. (And, there is a third part that I will get to momentarily.) There is reason to doubt his assessment, though. Philip Cafaro relates in his essay, “Human Population Growth as If the Rest of Life Mattered,” “Given the difficulties of getting 300 million Americans to curb their consumption, there is no reason to think we will be able to achieve sustainability with two, three, or four times as many Americans”.
Pearce illustrates his point by an example of how a family in Ethiopia that has ten children may do less damage globally than an average sized American family as Americans are by far the largest consumers. While it may be true that rich developed countries have a greater global impact, poorer, more densely populated countries can have a significant local impact. Look at the destruction of the forest of the Amazon and Madagascar. Also, consider that a more people from poorer nations immigrate to more develop countries (particularly the U.S.) their inevitable increased consumption will now contribute to an even greater negative environmental impact.
Quoting Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who has worked in West Africa, Pearce relates how 200 million trees had been planted in Niger in the last decade amid increasing population—“The idea that population pressure inevitably leads to increased land degradation is a much-repeated myth. Innovation is common in regions where there is high population pressure.” In addition to Niger, he provides an example of reforestation in Costa Rica also in the setting of a growing population to demonstrate that population growth and the environmental protection are not incompatible. This amounts to what has become popular among certain politicians to talk about “sustainable growth”—a clear oxymoron. What is not clear is what has been lost with the loss of habit. There is only so much abuse that an ecosystem can absorb before it begins to break. And, even with land that has been protected, the future is uncertain. In an essay in Life on the Brink, there is mention of how a track of wilderness was saved only to be lost to development several decades later when the pressures of increased population became too much. Recently, “the U.S. Senate debated a bill to waive—in the name of Homeland Security—the Wilderness Act and other environmental laws on all wildlands (including 32 million acres of designated wilderness) within 100 miles of our Northern and Southern borders” (Wilderness Watch). What the government giveth it can taketh away.
Additionally, Pearce argues for the economic necessity of a growing young population to provide the labor for a vibrant economy, necessary as well in helping to support the former generation as it ages. But what happens when this “younger” generation ages? Will we need an even greater base to support them in retirement? Pearce does not move beyond the infinite growth in a finite world paradigm, which is a major factor in the consumerism that he beliefs to be such a concern. In fact, the mantra with our current economic paradigm, which we hold sacrosanct, is ever increasing growth through consumption and disposal and requires an ever growing population (or innovative ways to get the existing populous to buy more). Changing to a steady state economic paradigm that recognizes the finiteness of the world, would also require population that is stable. Many environmentalists recognize this; Pearce does not appear to.
In the end, I failed to share Pearce’s optimism. Something just didn’t feel right. After contemplating what it was about his position that made me uncomfortable I came to the conclusion that it was his highly anthropocentric point of view. With his liberal egalitarianism he sees much of the world as a resource to be used for the benefit of mankind. “We can reduce our ecological footprints while keeping, if not every aspect of our life-styles, then at any rate those parts of our lifestyles that make our lives truly worth living.” The first Green Revolution was able to feed an unprecedented number of people; Pearce trusts that a second one will lead us into the future. Decreasing water supply will be remedied by desalination plants. Politically, he essentially argues for open borders, regardless of the effect on the environment, which many environmentalist have documented as being potentially being profound given the numbers of migrants coming across the borders.
For me, the antidote to Pearce’s anthropocentrism can be found in Life on the Brink: Environmentalist Confront Overpopulaton, edited by Cafaro and Crist. In this book is a range of essays written by numerous environmentalists whom I view as having a more realistic assessment of humankind’s impact on the planet and the potential future in store as opposed to Pearce’s somewhat idealized egalitarian vision of where the world is headed.
We may be able to support several billion more people but at what cost? William Ryerson writes:
“Now that we have entered the ecological age, the goal of humanity should be to sustain a reasonable number of people on the Earth, in comfort and security. Instead, we are recklessly pursuing and experiment to find out how many people can be supported in the short term, without regard to the impact on future generations of people or the consequences for other species….
“It is clear our life-support systems are being overused. Otherwise, we would not have rising CO2 levels, rising global temperatures, falling water tables, falling grain production per capita, degrading soils, disappearing forests, collapsing fisheries, growing energy shortages in many countries, and massive species extinctions.”
At best, some of the richness of the natural world is lost; at worst, the ability of our ecosystems to remain competent may be lost. Only time will tell what “surprise” the future will have in store for the planet and us.