Population

7 billion: Understanding the demographic transition

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The term “Demographic Transition” describes the movement of human populations from higher initial birth rates to a stabilzed lower one, and seems to be a general feature of most societies over the last several hundred years.

The demographic transition is not a product of wealth or cheap energy in large quantities – we can see that by viewing the history of demographic shifts in Europe and the US. Instead, it is mostly about enabling people to make different reproductive choices, and supporting those choices – it requires no coercion, no high energy infrastructure, and is comparatively cheap to achieve.

Revisiting population growth: The impact of ecological limits

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Demographers are predicting that world population will climb to 10 billion later this century. But with the planet heating up and growing numbers of people putting increasing pressure on water and food supplies and on life-sustaining ecosystems, will this projected population boom turn into a bust?

World population approaches 7 billion

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Bill Ryerson of the Population Media Center in Shelburne, Vermont spoke about how to think about population and population control as the world passes seven billion souls in October. His prescription for reducing world population: provide women everywhere with good health care, including contraception. The Population Media Center also produces soap operas and other media that include women who go to school or take other paths than getting married and having kids while a teenager. Ryerson said Vermont could feel dramatic effects of overpopulation, with environmental refugees streaming here from drought-stricken parts of the country.

Sustainable shrinkage: envisioning a smaller, stronger economy

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More than two decades after the Brundtland Report, it’s past time to abandon this linguistic sleight of hand and rally around a new, shocking but this time realistic slogan: sustainable shrinkage! Within this new perspective, we can get on with saving species, restoring wastelands, improving efficiency, putting our life-support systems on sustainable bases—in short, finding solutions. But we’ll do so with a new urgency and clarity, conscious that if we are to survive on our little planet in some reasonably civilized way, human activity (and its impacts) must shrink. If we don’t shrink it, Gaia will shrink it for us, catastrophically.
(Ernest Callenbach is author of the prescient novel Ecotopia.)

European debt crisis and sustainability

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Humans seem to be reaching a new bottleneckrelated to oil limits and financial crises that grow out of these oil limits, with the current example being the European Debt Crisis. Depending how this and other debt crises work out, it seems possible that human population will decline. If this should happen, it could lead to a reduced problem with species extinction.

The shrinking pie: The end of “development”?

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Throughout the past two centuries economic growth has translated to an increased capability to support more humans with Earth’s available resources. More energy, more raw materials, more jobs, more trade, better sanitation, and key medical advances have all contributed to higher infant survival rates and longer life expectancy in general.

Review: A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

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User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.