About a year ago, pondering one of the figures from One Planet Many
People, I noticed that the entire population of humans in 1900 was about
1.6 billion. Right now, the entire population of the USA (.3 billion)
and China (1.3 billion) is 1.6 billion! Our global population is now
approaching 6.8 billion. Yep! We've got a lot of people. Considering
that about 1/3 of this 6.8 billion is younger than age 15, that means we
also have a whole lot of potential child production. It also makes
unsurprising the predictions of 9 billion people within my lifetime.
If all 6.8 billion of us were living at even the more comfortable levels
of consumption used in 1900, we might not be having environmental red
alerts screaming from all points of the planet. Since 1900, we've not
only had exponential growth in population, but we've had
hyper-exponential growth in consumption, especially as measured by GDP
and as demonstrated by the garbage in the Pacific Gyre and the
increasing size and numbers of oceanic dead zones.
The poor countries may be making the babies, but the rich countries are
creating the CO2, the ozone hole, mountain-top removal mining, and
deep-see bottom trawling. It is the rich countries that are driving the
environmental destruction and species extinctions. As Vandana Shiva
<http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/18-9> rightly points out,
developed countries are responsible for many of the environmental
problems in developing countries. Much of China's CO2 production is the
result of American demand for cheap stuff. Many people in Africa are
starving because their crops are exported to Europe.
The poor countries have made great strides in controlling their
population growth rates. How well are the rich countries doing with
controlling their consumption?
And here is the flip-side. Taiwan now has the world's lowest population
growth rate: an average fertility of one child per woman. During the
past five years and despite the fact that Taiwan has one of the world's
highest population densities, the country has talked about how it needs
more children--because who will take care of us in our old age? Who
will be the doctors and teachers and wheel-chair pushers? Who will pay
the taxes that support our pensions? Because of these sorts of
questions, even China has started relaxing its one-child policy.
So, where are our models and imagery for life in a world with negative
population growth? How do we even attain and sustain negative
population growth? Expansion and growth are easy. We do it
instinctively. Retraction is the hard part. In fact, I find it easier
to visualize a peaceful lowering of global consumption than a peaceful
decline in global population.
CL
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Cara Lin Bridgman [email protected]
P.O. Box 013 Shinjhuang http://megaview.com.tw/~caralin
Longjing Township http://www.BugDorm.com
Taichung County 43499
Taiwan Phone: 886-4-2632-5484
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