Population growth undercuts many gains.
Maybe that’s about to stop.

When you discuss projects to improve the environmental, financial and social environment, the Elephant in the Room is population growth. Efforts to provide energy, food, water, minerals, and reduce poverty have seemed doomed since Malthus. Improvements just get diluted among so many more people.

Gloom and Cheer were discussing this the other day.

Cheer: But it never happens! Those gloomy predictions have proven false over and over again, despite all the population growth we’ve seen.

Gloom: But there has to be a limit. Earth reached its

first billion in 1800
second in 1930   (130 years later)
third in 1960        (30 years)
fourth in 1975      (15 years)
fifth in 1987         (12 years)
sixth in 1999        (12 years)
seventh this year (12 years)

A billion more every decade or so!

Cheer: But we can decide to stop growing . . .  Look at China. Breeding rapidly in the 70’s, today population growth has leveled off.

Gloom: Yes, with Big Brother in the bedroom, forced abortions, infanticide, forced sterilizations! The Chans and the Wongs didn’t make personal decisions over the past 40 yeas; the One Child Policy was top-down coercion.

Cheer: OK, but haven’t you heard? Personal decisions by the Smiths, the Garcias, the Kowalskis, the Najjars – they will change over the next 40 years. Fred Pearce lays it out in The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, published last year. We don’t have to mandate anything.

Pearce says that better healthcare, urbanization, TV, feminism, and other factors have been helping families decide they need fewer kids – to the point where the world’s population should be falling by the end, perhaps even the middle, of this century. Heck, at less than 1.5 children per couple, the Italians will be gone by then!

And just because Pearce was interviewed on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show doesn’t mean it’s a joke. Pearce is backed up by others.

Gloom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even a stable population doesn’t mean CO2 emissions will fall. Or consumption. Or demand for food and water, or any other predicted dangers. The world still wants growth.

Cheer: At least population growth isn’t going to contribute for much longer. The playing field’s going to stop tilting against us, and all those good personal decisions we humans are beginning to make will begin to pay off.

Hey, come on, you should join our neighborhood garden project. Soon there will be more tomatoes per capita.

Gloom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.