Kirsten Stade
Human population is in the news, but not for the reasons we are used to. At one time, our growing population was seen as central to wildlife extinctions, resource depletion, pollution and environmental destruction. But today, we are more likely to hear that there are too few of us, not too many. As women across the world have gained greater reproductive choice, birth rates have declined.
This is a positive development in large part due to a decline in teen pregnancy, but you would never know it from news coverage of the topic that ranges from anxious to apocalyptic. The birth rate "crisis," we are told, will have dire consequences for our economy and especially for seniors. Lost in the conversation are the many positive aspects of an aging society, which is the result of people living healthier and longer lives, and common-sense realities like reduced needs for infrastructure and lower ecological impacts. Also lost is the fact that our population still grows by 80 million people every year, from places in the world where women and girls lack reproductive choice and face powerful pronatalist pressures, whether to carry on a family line, grow a religious denomination, or fuel economic growth with more consumers and cheap labor.
And the consequences are dire. Among them is global warming, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns is driven by both population and economic growth. In fact, increased emissions from population growthhave canceled more than three quarters of the emissions saved through energy efficiency and renewables over the past three decades.
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