We should welcome signs of a shrinking population

[dArKeR]

What is regarded as good news and bad news is a changeable thing. Thirty years ago, when anxiety about rising population and diminished resources was fresher than it is today, figures showing a flattening out of population growth in many countries, including our own, would have been seen as a boon.

Today, on the left-hand page of a newspaper you can read about John Prescott's plans to rim Dickens's moody estuarial lands with houses, about proposals for yet another London airport, about Britain's vanishing oil and gas, about threatened birds and sick seals, about nuclear power stations in France bubbling away like so many dangerous cafetieres -- all demonstrating the stress rising human numbers place on the environment and society.

Yet, on the right-hand page of the same paper, news about the slowing down of population growth in Europe, North America and Japan, presaging an easing of the very pressures just fearfully related, is also gloomily presented. The demographic transition, in this latest manifestation, is seen as a threat rather than a relief.

http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=19083

Repuke Capitalism immoral and only interested in more sales receipts.

http://darkerxdarker.tripod.com/

[Kolesar]

1. I like this idea for leading to sustainability

"A small organisation, the Optimum Population Trust, had some publicity recently with its suggestion that Britain might be best served if it had a population of 30-million or so."

The US should try to reverse our population trend also.

[wtmusic]

2. The US should start

by reversing our consumption trend

[Paschall]

3. Quite

The 60s-70s fears about the global population explosion were apparently based on the assumption that use of resources would rise in correlation with population. US consumption of resources has skyrocketed, while the population has grown only modestly. Today, the US represents only 5 percent of the world's population, yet it uses 25 percent of the world's resources. Clearly population growth is not the greatest threat to the planet.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. The two seem to go hand in hand.

Imagine the pressures on resources when China has another 300 million cars on the road and India has 600 million with air conditioning.

But, without much increased population, has anyone looked at the Rio Grande lately?

Population is wildly out of balance all over the world, with Africa and parts of the Middle East having high youth populations, while Europe and Japan have high elderly populations. Russia has gone to negative population growth. Immigration ultimately plays a large part in helping this balance, but is a patchwork of cultural and political problems.

The UN and a few groups utter their periodic Jeremiads about all this, but no one seems all that sure just what can be done. We could probably feed a global population of 10 billion if we solve the water problem, but most of those 10 billion would lead pretty miserable lives.

Needless to say, US standards of living would suffer with the competition for resources. Europeans are a bit more self-sufficient than we are, and wouldn't suffer quite as much.

Population balance poses all sorts of economic, social, and ethical problems. Take Japan where the birth rate is low and they are living longer-- to balance the population, you have to take in immigrants or kill off the oldsters. Neither option is acceptable to them.

Europe, when they had full employment, was perfectly happy with immigration and "guest workers." It worked very well and kept things going. Same here, but then there's those downtimes...