The Population Bomb: Has It Been Defused ?  

Yale's "Environment 360" periodical has an interesting article on population - The Population Bomb: Has It Been Defused ? (via Crikey).

The “population bomb” is creeping back onto the environmental agenda. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Paul Ehrlich wrote his book of that name and the Club of Rome produced computer simulations of a resources crisis in Limits to Growth, population was the number one environmental issue. Only strict birth control could prevent doomsday.

After the scandals of India’s forced vasectomies and China’s draconian one-child policy, such views became too hot to express in progressive circles. But they didn’t altogether go away, and now more and more people are blaming the “p-word” for climate change and rising oil and food prices.

“New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears,” warned the Wall Street Journal back in March. “Philippines Population Climbs; Food Problems Loom,” Reuters offered the following month. The online magazine Slate summed it up neatly with a recent headline: Global Swarming. And in an accompanying piece on this page Paul and Anne Ehrlich return to the barricades citing the twin perils of overconsumption and overpopulation.

The Ehrlichs are sometimes ridiculed because Paul’s original book predicted hundreds of millions of deaths from famine in the 1980s, when we were bailed out by the Green Revolution. But they are right to question the new orthodoxy that technological fixes will always save the day. For myself, I fear that when the Wall Street Journal talks about a revival of Malthusian fears, it reflects a tendency to excuse those guilty of overconsumption, while instead blaming the poor for their poverty and our planetary predicament.

At the heart of this debate is some recent — and very good — news: The population bomb is being defused at a quite remarkable rate. Women across the poor world have confounded the doomsters and are choosing to have dramatically fewer babies. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, well, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.

You may not have noticed, but for some time now the average number of babies being born to each woman has been in decline in most of the world. A generation ago, the world fertility rate was around six kids per woman. Today it is 2.6, which is getting close to the level needed just to maintain the current population long-term. Allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, that is around 2.3.