The Anglosphere, especially right wing media and influencers, obsess about supposed immigrant-led population growth in the developed world, while claiming high fertility and exponential growth; not true it’s a reflection of better human health and increasing longevity.
However, these dynamics are still misrepresented or ignored in media, politics and public narratives based on the eugenics based ideology of Bob Malthus, Francis Galton, Madison Grant and John Tanton; the latter via ZPG Zero Population Growth supported by Rockefeller Bros. Fund.
There is an increasing body of research, knowledge and awareness of population and demography in nations and globally thanks to Jack Caldwell, Fred Pearce, Wolfgang Lutz, Hans Rosling, Sanjeev Sanyal, then recent years Bricker & Ibbitson (‘Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline’); outside of the UNPD, right wing and faux centrist media, think tanks, politics and influencers.
Following is the link to the online version, Beacon’s review and a Guardian review of the same.
Google Books: The Coming Population Crash and and Our Planet’s Surprising Future – Fred Pearce. Beacon Press 2010
Beacon Press
‘A leading environmental writer looks at the unexpected effects and possible benefits of a shrinking, graying population
Over the last century, the world’s population quadrupled and fears of overpopulation flared, with baby booms blamed for genocide and terrorism, and overpopulation singled out as the primary factor driving global warming. Yet, surprisingly, it appears that the population explosion is past its peak-by mid-century, the world’s population will be declining for the first time in over seven hundred years. In The Coming Population Crash, veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce reveals the dynamics behind this dramatic shift and describes the environmental, social, and economic effects of our surprising demographic future.’
Guardian Review
‘Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash by Fred Pearce
Alok Jha on why Malthus was wrong to fear a population explosion
Alok Jha – Sat 27 Mar 2010
Thomas Malthus has a lot to answer for. As the young cleric performed birth and death rites at the end of the 18th century, he began to notice that there were far more christenings than funerals. The insight led him to write his “Essay on the Principles of Population”, a dark warning against the perils of unchecked human reproduction. Overpopulation was a looming threat because the masses were on a treadmill of sex and procreation, he argued. Eventually, the world would run out of food. People would die of starvation. It was nature’s way of keeping populations in check.
This “dark and terrible genius” may have been right to pinpoint the idea that population was a potent economic force, says Fred Pearce, but he was wrong about almost everything else. And yet Malthus’s ideas persisted among the elites for hundreds of years, spreading a fear of population time bombs and seeding ideas for eugenics programmes up to the last half of the 20th century.
By the 1950s, “population controllers” were everywhere, wringing their hands in NGOs and United Nations agencies, worrying about the coming Malthusian population catastrophe, looking to the poorest parts of the world to curb the population growth. Mass US-funded family planning programmes were targeted at a number of countries, with foreign aid and even trade sometimes dependent on meeting western targets. In India, the government put pressure on citizens to get sterilised, while China’s one-child policy led to brutal forced abortions.
But the population-controllers’ predictions of world famine in the 1940s and the 1980s never came true. Why? As the numbers grew, so agricultural technology improved. Norman Borlaug won a Nobel prize for developing high-yielding varieties of dwarf wheat in the late 1960s which, if fed with water and fertiliser, would grow large heads without falling over. By the mid-1970s, wheat and maize yields had doubled in places such as India. Some environmentalists have questioned whether this green revolution was such a good thing, tying so many of the world’s peasant farmers to mechanised, energy-guzzling farming practices, and Pearce sees their point. “But would they prefer billions starving?” he asks. Even today, whenever famines occur, the problem is rarely an absolute shortage of food but an inability to buy it.
Yet warnings about overpopulation and impending famine persist. Pearce doesn’t buy it. The global population replacement level, the number of births required to keep population stable, is 2.3 babies per couple. But thanks to increased access to contraception and improving education for women, actual birth rates have been dropping around the world. In the 1950s, it was between five and six; by 2008 it was 2.6. At the current rate, the world’s fertility rate will be below replacement level soon after 2020. “Future historians are likely to record two great social trends in the last half of the 20th century,” writes Pearce. “The dramatic decline in fertility and the transformation of the role of women in society. These two events are clearly linked.”
Pearce does not gloss over the potential environmental problems that could occur if the world were overpopulated. But, though an environmentalist to the core, he puts people before planet, pointing out that the poorest three billion, around 45% of the total, are currently responsible for 7% of carbon dioxide emissions, while the richest 7%, around half a billion, are responsible for 50% of emissions. “A rural woman in Ethiopia can have ten children and her family will still do less damage, and consume fewer resources, than the family of the average soccer mom in Minnesota or Manchester or Munich.”
Overpopulation is not the problem, he argues, but over-consumption: more specifically, over-consumption in the west. Ever the optimist, Pearce thinks we can solve this crisis if we recognise its seriousness. Today’s technology could enable us to reduce our carbon footprints by 80% by 2050 (as the British government has committed us to do).
There are a lot of statistics in this book, but Pearce’s narrative is rescued by his stories of people, whether groups of women in Bangladesh, families buying their first televisions in the slums of Mumbai, ghost towns in eastern Germany or an unexpected Somali community in Ohio. At one point he marvels at the crucibles of New York and London, these growing cosmopolitan hubs of the world, with people finding ways to live despite the obstacles thrown at them. If this is the future, says Pearce, bring it on.’
For more blogs and articles related to demography, immigration, political strategy, population growth, populist politics and Tanton Network click through:
Limits to Growth – Jorgen Randers – Club of Rome
Randers had been a proponent of the Club of Rome ideas including the promotion of the ‘limits to growth’ (debunked by University of Sussex research team in ‘Models of Doom’), resource depletion, climate and population.
However, by 2012 Randers had revised own his global population peak estimate down to 8 billion or so which concurs with more recent research of Bricker & Ibbitson presented in ‘Empty Planet’ and The Lancet peer reviewed research paper by Stein Emil Vollset et al. titled ‘The Lancet: World population likely to shrink after mid-century, forecasting major shifts in global population and economic power’ which states that fertility rates have declined much faster than expected.
Hans Rosling – GapMinder – Factfulness – Human Development – Adult Education
Time to revisit the late but great Professor Hans Rosling of Gapminder Foundation on the need to for improved skills of analysis and critical thinking, as reflected in commentary round population linkages with environment, poverty and lack of education in the less developed world, amongst educated western elites who remain ignorant of both the outside world and the developing world.
Although Rosling did not then challenge the UNPD high end of century population forecasts, they have been revised downwards due to more demographic research on the ground in developing nations.
Population Growth or Decline?
Much about population growth and fertility in the Anglo world has negative connotations or perceptions from the mainstream due to inflated (forecast fertility rates) data from the UNPD Population Division, ZPG/Club of Rome, Population Matters, Sustainable Population Australia, nativist conservatives, eco-fascists and white nationalists spruiking at best supposed environmental degradation, at worst the ‘great replacement theory’ or ‘tipping point’.
In fact during the past ten years credible demographic research and/or writing from Rosling, Lutz, Pearce, Bricker & Ibbitson et al. has debunked the idea of exponential growth in population as it is based upon inflated UNPD fertility rates, and we are headed for a peak mid century followed by a (potentially precipitous) decline.
Population, Environment and White Nationalists in Australia – US Links
Article titled ‘Green Anti-Immigration Arguments Are A Cover For Right Wing Populism’ summarises ZPG Zero Population Growth in Australia, US white nationalist links, citing Paul Ehrlich and John Tanton. A symptom of US based radical right libertarianism and eugenics, presented as liberal, environmental and science based, but in fact supported by oligarchs.
The clearest signals emerged in the US in the ’70s when simultaneously fossil fuel companies became aware of global warming due to carbon emissions (and threatened by Nixon’s EPA), ZPG was established with Ehrlich, Tanton et al., supported by Rockefeller Bros. (Standard Oil then Exxon), Ford and Carnegie Foundations (according to the Washington Post), Club of Rome promoting Limits to Growth PR construct (including carrying capacity, Herman Daly’s steady-state economy suggesting protectionism to preclude global competition etc.) hosted on Rockefeller estate, sponsored by VW and Fiat, while James Buchanan and later Koch’s et al. started promoting libertarian economics (also Friedman, Hayek, Rand and Chicago School), nativism and developing think tanks for influence in politics, academia and media (according to MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains’ and Mayer’s ‘Dark Money’), including ALEC, Heritage Foundation etc..