Population Doubling Times
The Worldwatch Institute, an allegedly expert group on world population growth, recently demonstrated ignorance of some basic facts about the subject. In the March/April 1994 edition of its bi-monthly publication World Watch (37), the would-be population control outfit published a table of the “Population Size, Fertility Rate, and [Population] Doubling Time” for the world’s 20 largest countries in 1993. The 20 countries were ranked according to their alleged population doubling times.
Heading the list was Italy, with a population of 58 million, a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, and a population doubling time of 3,466 years. What Worldwatch somehow missed was the fact that, at its current fertility rate, Italy’s population would never double, not in 3,466 years or even in 10,000 years. Indeed, at the rate that Italians are currently reproducing themselves, Italy as a nation will disappear from the earth in little more than a century!
Next on the list after Italy came Germany, whose population Worldwatch correctly noted is “shrinking and… will never double” at its current fertility rate of just 1.4 children per woman. Worldwatch lifted its figures from the 1993 World Population Data Sheet of the Population Reference Bureau (PRE). While that sheet did foolishly report Italy’s alleged population doubling time as 3,466 years, it did indicate that Italy’s population was about to fall: from 1993’s 57.8 million to 56.4 million in 2010 to 51.9 million in 2025.
The next four countries on the Worldwatch list will also experience population declines and, based on current fertility rates, will never double in population regardless of what silly doubling times can be calculated. Population doubling times, calculated on the basis of current population growth rates, are heavily dependent on the age-structure of the population, and are essentially meaningless for countries experiencing a total fertility rate that is well-below replacement levels.
Thus, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Russia, all dutifully listed by Worldwatch as having respective population doubling times of 217, 267, 169 and 990 years, will actually experience population declines in the next century based upon their current total fertility rates of 1.5, 1.8, 1.8 and 1.7 respectively (see “‘The Setting Sun,” POPCORN, PRI Review, March/April 1994).
Desertification and Population
According to overpopulation propagandists, one of the worst effects of human population growth has been the steady expansion of the deserts of the world. Ever on the march, steadily converting pastures and croplands into sand dunes, deserts are said to be the result of man’s mistreatment of the land, primarily due to the intense agricultural and livestock operations needed to feed the burgeoning human population. As overpopulationists Paul and Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren put it, “Human activities…have produced a great increase in the amount of desert and wasteland…Today the Sahara seems to be advancing southward…its advance aided by overpopulation of people and domestic animals.”1
The Worldwatch Institute expanded on that theme in a report “Spreading Deserts — The Hand of Man.”2 Citing a number of desertification studies, authors Eckholm and Brown concluded that “the spread of the Sahara has probably been measured most precisely in the Sudan.”
But a recent report from the University of Lund, Sweden, published in the Swedish ecological journal Ambio, a generally pro-population control publication, took issue with the prevailing wisdom of desertification and declared it a “myth.”3 The report said “Desertification has become the scapegoat of the food crisis in Africa and other human suffering experienced by the African peoples .…” Indeed, “ever since the UN Conference on Desertification in 1977,” drought and famine in Africa have been “linked to the process of desertification…a continuously advancing desert swallowing fertile land.”
Pointing out that the “often cited desertification studies” from the Sudan were based on wrong or misleading data, the report decried the fact that acceptance of the alleged advancement of the Sahara had “spread through the scientific community as well as government agencies and development organizations, with no attempt to check its validity.”4
Utilizing data from U.S. meteorological satellites, a team from NASA discovered that the Sahara “regularly expands and contracts” according to the rainfall received.5 There was no evidence, at least in the case of the Sahara, to support the view that overpopulation and man’s mismanagement caused the desert’s advance. Since 1984, the Sahara has actually reversed its expansion and has contracted dramatically.
Accordingly, the term “desertification,” which implies that Earth’s deserts are man-made, has fallen into disfavor in the scientific community. Even UNEP (United Nations Environment Program), which long popularized the word, has now rejected it, finally agreeing that land degradation is a more useful term than desertification.
Endnotes
1 Ehrlich, Ehrlich & Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (San Francisco: WH. Freeman & Co., 1977), 149.
2 Lester R. Brown and Erik Eckholm, Worldwatch Paper 13, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC, 1977.
3 Lennart Olsson, “On the Causes of Famine — Drought, Desertification and Market Failure in the Sudan,” Ambio, Vol. 22, No. 6, Sept. 1993, 395–403.
4 Ibid, 398.
5 Tucker, Dregne and Newcombe, “Expansion and contraction of the Sahara desert from 1980 to 1990,” Science, Vol. 253, 19 July 1991, 299–301; “Satellites expose myth of marching Sahara,” Science News, 20 July 1991, 38; “Sahara Discovered to Be in Retreat,”‘ The Washington Post, 21 July 1991, A18; “The Ebb and Flow of the Sahara,” The New York Times, 23 July 1991, C4; “Mirage of the shifting sands,” New Scientist, 12 December 1992, 38–42.
