Jennifer Thompson's List: Patterns of resource consumption

• • Excellent article relevant to the unit on population growth, decline, population policies and patterns in resource consumption (Malthus 'v' Boserup)
• In a 2007 best-seller, “The World Without Us,” Alan Weisman imagined a planet suddenly devoid of humans
• “Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?” (Little, Brown)
• “Before artificial nitrogen fertilizer became widely available, the world’s population was around 2 billion,” Weisman observes.
• this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet
• “Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization’s graph—or nature will do it for us.”
• Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798, around the time humanity was reaching the one-billion mark
• It stated that people would inevitably produce more mouths to feed than food to feed them, since population “increases in a geometrical ratio” while “subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.”
• War was one way the population and the food supply might be kept in line; another was “epidemics, pestilence, and plague.”
• “gigantic inevitable famine” would come to the rescue and “with one mighty blow” solve the problem.
• By 1968, there were three billion people on the planet
• Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” which announced that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
• “in the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
• Since Ehrlich issued this challenge, the global population has once again more than doubled, to 7.2 billion
• synthetic fertilizers, the Green Revolution, genetically modified crops. If human numbers increase geometrically, so, too, it seems, does human ingenuity.
• The latest population projections from the United Nations were released in June. If they’re correct, by 2025 there will be eight billion people on the planet. By 2050, there will be nine and a half billion, and by 2100 there will be nearly eleven billion.
• When demographers peer into the future, the key figure that they look at is the total fertility rate, or T.F.R
• Japan’s T.F.R. is 1.4.
• Japan’s population peaked in 2006 and last year declined by nearly three hundred thousand.
• Life expectancy in the country is among the longest on earth, but, even if it continues to grow, the number of Japanese is expected to keep dropping at least through the middle of this century.
• In the mountainous Nara Prefecture, Weisman visits a town whose population has already shrunk by three-quarters.
• There are lots of countries where the T.F.R. is approaching one, and even some where it’s dropped below that. Singapore’s T.F.R. is just .79. Taiwan’s is 1.1, and South Korea’s is 1.2. Most European countries have T.F.R.s under 1.5; these include Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Even in some countries where the population is still increasing at a rapid clip, owing to what’s known as “demographic momentum,” fertility rates are way down: Iran’s T.F.R., for example, is 1.9 and Brazil’s 1.8.
• But there are plenty of other countries—mostly in Africa—where the T.F.R. remains above five. Niger’s, the highest in the world, is seven. Mali’s, the second highest, is 6.25, and Somalia’s, the third, is 6.17
• They will also be home to an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s population. Nigeria, for example, currently has a hundred and seventy-four million people and a T.F.R. of 5.3. Within a few decades, it’s expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s third most populous country. By the end of the century, it will have as many people as China. (By that point, India is expected to be the most populous nation on earth.)
• Kramer, however, is not too many children; it’s too few
• In “The Other Population Crisis: What Governments Can Do About Falling Birth Rates” (Johns Hopkins), Kramer argues that countries like Singapore and Italy, where the fertility rate has dropped below replacement levels, are in deep trouble. As their populations age and ultimately shrink, low-fertility countries will have fewer and fewer workers supporting more and more retirees. This will strain their social-welfare systems.
• To compound the problem, young people, Kramer says, tend “to be in the vanguard of technological innovation,” so aging countries may suffer from a sort of app gap.
• Boosting fertility is, Kramer maintains, even harder than reducing it
• France gets high marks. The country has a variety of “pronatalist” policies, including direct grants to families with two or more children, generous tax deductions for dependents, and four months of paid maternity leave financed through the national health-insurance system. These programs appear to be at least somewhat successful, as the country’s fertility rate, which fell to a low of 1.74 in 2002, has since rebounded, to 2.08.
• Japan stands out, though as far as Kramer is concerned the country is a basket case. Its policies are notable only for their “inadequacy.” Child-care slots are limited, and tax deductions for couples with kids are too low to make a difference.
• In the United States, the fertility rate is currently estimated at 2.06. This figure puts the U.S. ahead of all European nations except France, and right about at replacement level.
• It may seem that one world can’t have two population problems: either the glass is too empty or it’s too full.

31 more annotations...