Fred Pearce - The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planets Surprising Future

The Coming

Population Crash

And Our Planets Surprising Future

Fred Pearce

Beacon Press, Boston

Also by Fred Pearce

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner

Earth Then and Now

With Speed and Violence

When the Rivers Run Dry

Deep Jungle

Keepers of the Spring

Global Warming

The Dammed

The Big Green Book

Green Warriors

Climate and Man

Turning Up the Heat

Acid Rain

Watershed

to Jack Caldwell,

most humane of demographers

Contents

Preface

I was brought up in Lenham, a village in the middle of Kent in England. On my final day at the village primary school, I walked down Honeywood Road, where I lived, and past the imposing Honeywood House to the vicarage, where I received a small cash award, the Honeywood Prize. It paid out from a trust set up more than three hundred years before by the villages most famous inhabitant, Mary Honeywood. The money was meant to buy tools for whatever trade I chose: that of a carpenter, say, or a blacksmith. So I bought a few pens and a compass and protractor for my future studies, and forgot all about it. Only later did I discover that Mary Honeywood is most famousnot for her house or her road or her prize, but for her fecundity. When she died in 1620 at the age of ninety-three, and her body was placed in Lenham churchyard, Mary Honeywood left behind 16 children, 114 grandchildren, 228 great-grandchildren, and 9 great-great-grandchildrena total progeny of 367. That looked like a world record until February 2010 when a Jewish woman in New York, Yitta Schwartz, died with her family claiming she left behind 15 children, 200 grandchildren, and, altogether, more than 1,000 living descendants.

Introduction

Demography is destiny. But not always in the ways we imagine. It underlies much of our world, shifting the tectonic plates on which our civilization is built. Never has that been more true than today. Wherever we look, population issues are among the most toxic headline-grabbers. From Gaza to Grozny and Rwanda to Afghanistan, baby booms are blamed for war and genocide. Festering slums burst into tribal violence in Kenya. Teenage terrorists lurk in refugee camps and overcrowded madrassas. Migrants from poor, overbreeding states are flooding Europe and North America. Overpopulation is the unspoken driver of environmental destruction. Millions of environmental refugees will soon be fleeing from spreading deserts and drowned deltas, as Chinas billion-plus inhabitants undermine all efforts to halt climate change.

The stats seem scary, too. The worlds population is approaching seven billionfour times what it was a century ago. Never have there been so many mothers, and with half the people in some countries under sixteen years old, there are billions more baby-makers in the pipeline. Meanwhile, the worlds masses are on the move. Some 200 million people go to bed in a country different from the one they were born in.

No wonder the language is bleak. Dickensian. Malthusian. Its Sodom and Gomorrah. Its Armageddon. We fear an overpopulated world teeming with the dispossessed and the alienated, the fanatical and the fascist, the wetbacks and the snakeheads, the Humvee-driving superpolluters and the dirt-poor deforesters. Surely we are racing to demographic disaster.

And yet slamming on the brakes seems almost as dangerous. For meanwhile, the insurgency of the old is looming. We are all living longer, healthier lives. Life expectancy has doubled since the 1950s. Back when I was born, 150 babies out of every thousand died before their first birthday. I could have been one of them. Now only fifty die. Should we cherish or fear this? Is good luck for the worlds babies bad luck for the planet? It is sometimes said that more than half of all the people who have lived on the earth are alive today. This is nonsense. Just under 7 billion of the total human roll call of 100 billion are alive today. But what may well be true is that half of all the people who have ever managed to reach the age of sixty-five are alive today.

But dont despair. There is something you may not have guessedsomething that may save us all. The population bomb is being defused. Only gradually, because the children of the greatest population explosion in history are still mostly of childbearing age, but it is happening. They may be having seven children in Mali, and six in Afghanistan, but half of the worlds women are now having two children or fewernot just in rich countries, but in Iran and parts of India, Burma and Brazil, Vietnam and South Africa. Mothers today have fewer than half as many offspring as their own mothers. This is happening mostly out of choice and not compulsion. Women have always wanted freedom, not domestic drudgery and the childbirth treadmill. And now that most of their babies survive to adulthood, they are grabbing it.

This book is the story of the peoplequake, the dramatic convulsion of the worlds population that began with the Industrial Revolution and continues today. It is the story of how the tectonic plates of human population are shifting, and what this means for us and future generations. We see those plates shifting in the mosques of Iran and the slums of Mumbai; the vodka shops of Moscow and the killing fields of Rwanda; the demographic battlegrounds of Israel and the laid-back saunas of Stockholm.

If you are over forty-five, you have lived through a period when the world population has doubled. No past generation has experienced such an eraand probably no future generation will either. But if you are under forty-five, you will almost certainly live to see a world population that is decliningfor the first time since the Black Death, almost seven hundred years ago. And it may happen soon. Demographers predict that, as during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the global recession that began in 2009 will encourage people to give up on babies for the duration.

The future will be a different world in other ways, too. The average citizen of the world today is under thirty. Before he or she dies, the average will probably be over fifty. In parts of aging Europe, there are already fewer than two taxpaying workers to support every pensioner. Book your places now for the global old folks home. But the quake is not just about numbers. It is about age and sex and womens rights and war and migration; about the rise and fall of nations and, some fear, the end of the family. It is about environmental limits and climate change and the fertility of soils and minds.

The story opens with Bob Malthus, a morose eighteenth-century vicar spooked by two revolutionsthe French and the Industrialcounting his stunted parish flock and imagining our demographic doom. From the Irish potato famine to Rwanda, the story follows the evolution of Malthusian fears of overpopulation. It tracks the terrifying logic of the twentieth-century eugenics scientists and the concerns of their birth-controlling successors who imposed coercive family planning in China, India, and elsewhere. It catches up with the new centurys migrants and refugees and pensioners and, diminishing in number though they are, the babies of our planet.

It explores how demography drove the rise of the Asian tiger economies and Chinas economic miracleand how it will soon undermine them both. It charts shrinking Europe, and how by midcentury Russia could have fewer people than Yemen. It follows the declining power of Catholic and Islamic clerics alike to lay down the law in the bedroom. It takes the political temperature of the youth bulge creating mayhem in the Middle East.