Will these be the five billion straws that break the camel's back? One more near-doubling - four or five billion more people - will nearly double that strain. The bad news is that there are six billion of us already, a number the world strains to support. The good news is that we won't grow forever. Even so, this is a case of good news, bad news.
Let's trust that the planet's population really will double only one more time. Let's trust that we have rounded the turn and we're in the home stretch. Even if it dropped to 2.5 children per woman and then stopped falling, the population would still reach 28 billion.īut let's trust that this time the demographers have got it right. If fertility remained at current levels, the population would reach the absurd figure of 296 billion in just 150 years. UN mid-range projections assume that women in the developing world will soon average two children apiece - the rate at which population growth stabilizes. All that matters is how often individual men and women decide that they want to reproduce. It is not horrors like the civil war in Rwanda, which claimed half a million lives - a loss the planet can make up for in two days. It is not AIDS that will slow population growth, except in a few African countries. Turks have used contraception at about the same rate as the Japanese, but their birth rate is twice as high. Ninety-seven percent of women in the Arab sheikhdom of Oman know about contraception, and yet they average more than six children apiece. For each example there is a counterexample. Experts confidently supply answers, some of them contradictory: "Development is the best contraceptive" - or education, or the empowerment of women, or hard times that force families to postpone having children. If it is relatively easy to explain why populations grew so fast after the Second World War, it is much harder to explain why the growth is now slowing. How much difference did this make? Consider the United States: if people died throughout this century at the same rate as they did at its beginning, America's population would be 140 million, not 270 million. In Sri Lanka in the late 1940s life expectancy was rising at least a year every twelve months. Vaccines and antibiotics came all at once, and right behind came population.
Although the Industrial Revolution speeded historical growth rates considerably, it was really the public-health revolution, and its spread to the Third World at the end of the Second World War, that set us galloping. The reasons for our recent rapid growth are pretty clear. The population has grown more since 1950 than it did during the previous four million years.
The increase in human population in the 1990s has exceeded the total population in 1600. There is no way we could keep going as we have been. But the rate of growth is slowing it is no longer "exponential," "unstoppable," "inexorable," "unchecked," "cancerous." If current trends hold, the world's population will all but stop growing before the twenty-first century is out.Īnd that will be none too soon. The world is still growing, at nearly a record pace - we add a New York City every month, almost a Mexico every year, almost an India every decade. If this keeps up, the population of the world will not quite double again United Nations analysts offer as their mid-range projection that it will top out at 10 to 11 billion, up from just under six billion at the moment. Even in Bangladesh the average has fallen from six to fewer than four even in the mullahs' Iran it has dropped by four children. In the past three decades the average woman in the developing world, excluding China, has gone from bearing six children to bearing four. Population growth rates are lower than they have been at any time since the Second World War. New demographic evidence shows that it is at least possible that a child born today will live long enough to see the peak of human population.Īround the world people are choosing to have fewer and fewer children - not just in China, where the government forces it on them, but in almost every nation outside the poorest parts of Africa. At least at first blush the news is hopeful. To try to answer this question, we need to ask another: How many of us will there be in the near future? Here is a piece of news that may alter the way we see the planet - an indication that we live at a special moment. Is this really necessary? Are we finally running up against some limits? So special that in the Western world we might each of us consider, among many other things, having only one child - that is, reproducing at a rate as low as that at which human beings have ever voluntarily reproduced.
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