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The 7 Billion Person Halloween Scare
This Halloween the neo-Malthusians, many dressed up as
environmentalists, will have a big scare for us – the birth of the 7
billionth person on “space ship” earth. We will hear again of the
demographic disaster sure to befall us with yet another mouth to feed.
But a wondrous antidote to such fear mongering is one of the best books
of the last year, The Coming Population Crash,
by Fred Pearce. The book begins with a sound thrashing of Malthus and
satisfyingly exposes the historical and conceptual links between his
failed ideas and some unsavory strains of the current environmental
movement such as the Carrying Capacity Network and Sierrans for U.S.
Population Stabilization, an anti-immigrant group.
At its heart the book conveys a simple fact. The rate of population
growth has been decelerating for decades – well before the publication
in the 1970s of Paul Ehrlich’s alarmist, implicitly racist, and dead
wrong neo-Malthusian tract, The Population Bomb. It is
amazing that many environmentalists are unaware of the crucial fact of
slowing population growth, and that some react with hostility to it.
Further, somewhere between 2050 and 2100, growth will stop and then come
crashing down. It is not the sky that will be falling but the
population. From Eastern Europe to Southern Italy to Singapore, that
day has already arrived and sooner or later it will come to all parts of
the planet. In fact, it may well be that in the next century the
problem will be a population that is not large enough to be optimal; but
that will be for the 22nd century humans to decide and act on.
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