Recently, I began a talk with the following words: “My wife recently gave birth to our ninth child. Now the question I want to put to you is this: Is little Chiara [the name is Italian for Claire) part of the overpopulation problem, or is she part of the depopulation solution? That is, is the chief demographic problem in the world today too many babies, or is it too few babies?” I spent the next hour laying out the facts of falling birthrates world-wide, and finished to enthusiastic applause.
The occasion was a conference called ‘“Medicine in the Millennium,” sponsored by a branch of the Florida Medical Society. The audience was mostly doctors, but there were a sprinkling of other profession — alas, among them a biology teacher from a local high school. Instead of joining in the applause, this fellow leaped up to pose a question. “If you believe that the world is facing depopulation, then how come the world’s population is still increasing?” he asked in a “gotcha” tone of voice.
Primarily because of rising life expectancies, I responded. Global life expectancy has increased from 45 years to about 65 years since World War ll. The developed world, which started higher, now averages life spans of 75. With each passing year life spans continue to grow, adding to the world’s population and postponing the day of demographic decline.
Every country in which women average less than 2.1 births per lifetime must eventually begin to decline in population, I went on. About fifty percent of the world’s population is already below this mark, with much of the rest close behind. The dramatic increase in life spans has delayed this impending decline, but that it will eventually happen is a mathematical certainty.
“What we are not seeing is population stability,” I concluded. “The population train is losing its forward momentum, but instead of coming to rest at the station of Zero Population Growth — the Holy Grail of the Population Controllers — it will begin slipping backwards, at an accelerating speed, in the decades to come. Italian demographer Antonio Golini recently predicted that Italy’s population will fall by one-third over the next thirty years, and continue to decline at an increasing rate thereafter. I like the Italians. I’m going to miss them.”
The audience laughed, but the biology teacher wasn’t finished with me yet. In fact, he was more agitated than ever. “But isn’t an increased human population going to drive many species to extinction?” he insisted.
That doesn’t follow either. I responded. Protecting the environment is not a zero-sum game. The birth of a baby does not mean that an animal will die. The birth of at million babies — here you can choose your number — does not mean that one species will go extinct.
There is a much more complex calculus at work. Our ability to protect the environment rests in large part on our economic strength. Population growth stimulates economic development, producing a higher standard of living and the willingness to protect the environment. Our overall economic strength is the product of the size of our labor force and average productivity. Though it may seem paradoxical, the larger our population, the greater our ability to protect the environment.
Urbanization and industrialization also concentrate a larger population into a smaller area, further reducing the human “footprint” on the environment. The US in 1900 was 60 percent rural, today it is 75 percent urban. Vast tracts of land east of the Mississippi, once farmed, are now reverting to forest, providing habitats for countless species. In 1900, for instance, there were far fewer deer in Virginia than there are today, even though the human population was much smaller, because so many people depended on the deer population for meat.
This radical environmentalist sat down again, obviously unconvinced. He would probably continue to miseducate hundreds of students each year in the local high school. But most of those in the room went away with a different perspective on the “population problem.” And a videotape of my talk, I was told, will be shown to groups around the state during the coming months and years. The trip was worth it.
