By Ande Jacobson
We’re seeing some disturbing reports of late that are born of a faulty thesis. We’re seeing manufactured panic over birth rates declining, but there are already over 8 billion people on the planet which is unsustainable over the long haul. As I wrote in January 2023, too many people combined with humankind’s bizarre focus on infinite growth on a finite planet rather than working toward a sustainable steady state is truly a crisis. So what do we do? We create the opposite crisis over the ideal mix of people on the planet based on greed, misogyny, xenophobia, and tribalism. Instead, we should be embracing a long term decrease in the human population to reach a level that is more in tune with our global environment and conducive to long term success under more equitable and comfortable living conditions for all.
The panic over a hypothetical shrinking human population that hasn’t yet happened, and isn’t even projected to happen for decades to come, is misplaced. With over 8 billion people alive today, resources are stretched thin. More people create more ecological havoc on the planet that’s already stressed due to the damage humans have wrought as we’ve advanced technology, consumed the planet’s resources, and grown in population. The manufactured crisis over the human population shrinking, reflects the insecurity of certain populations in the developed world panicking over the fact that racial, economic, and cultural demographics are changing outside of their control. Of course the concept of race is a human social construct rather than one driven by biology. The human need to identify, quantify, and package everything into neat boxes of “us” and “them” overrides the science showing that the characteristics we attribute to race have no biological foundation.
A more productive endeavor would be retooling human society to reach an ecologically sound and sustainable steady state rather than predicate everything on infinite growth and trying to force a particular socially defined “racial mix.” Targeting a slow reduction in population overall, not by force, but by normal evolution would improve the environment. Allowing everyone complete freedom over whether to have children or not, and if they choose to have children, letting them decide for themselves how many they want would improve the environment for not only humankind but also for every other species sharing the planet with us. Additionally, rather than working so hard to extend the human lifespan, we should instead focus more on making the quality of our lives better and give people more control over choosing their end points. In many ways, we already live too long such that there are often four or five generations of a family alive at one time creating exponential population growth, but much of the later years are spent in various forms of deterioration. While some people would choose to live as long as possible no matter their condition, others wouldn’t, and everyone should be allowed to make that choice for themselves rather than being forced into some religious or cultural purgatory no matter their wishes.
The other prong of this crisis that does a lot of damage is trying to force the developed world to grow faster rather than looking to parts of the world where populations are naturally increasing. Instead of forcing the developed world to have more babies to match the developing world’s expanding population, we need to instead focus on educating the world’s population to understand how to have control over their own reproduction, to give everyone a choice of when and how much to reproduce rather than letting anyone’s ignorance drive population growth. More than that though, we need to stop panicking over any population decrease in the developed world. No person should ever be forced to reproduce no matter where they are born or where they live.
The better solution is to give all people educational and employment opportunities to use their skills in a productive way to allow them to live more fulfilling lives. We also need to make immigration easier, not more difficult. We need to let people voluntarily relocate to where they can thrive should they desire to move. There will always be needs for workers across the planet, and it shouldn’t matter which country one comes from or what they look like. We need to recognize that at their core, all people are really the same. They have the same basic needs. And given the opportunity, they have great potential to learn new skills. We need to make those opportunities available.
Granted, with the restrictions in many societies, offering education and employment opportunities might be a hard sell. Trust would have to come first, and breaking through human tribalism and lack of trust of those from other cultures is a difficult task. Asking societies to embrace change is also a challenge, but change is not something that can often be avoided. The climate crisis we face is real and is driving migration from less hospitable environments to those more conducive to human comfort. As critical resources for human survival become scarcer, more migration results. Economic instability is also forcing migration. The need for physical safety too drives migration and change as people flee areas rife with physical violence from war or other less formal conflicts.
As the population shifts across the globe, communities clash over cultural and religious differences causing disputes and more competition for resources. As all of this is happening, the population continues to grow, just not necessarily among the dominant culture in any one area, and that dominant culture can change.
Worrying about the human population shrinking in all of this is not only misplaced, it’s harmful. There are too many people, not too few. The goal should be to make people aware and able to thrive, and just maybe over time make the human population cooperative, stable, and in balance with the environments in which we live. A lofty goal to be sure, but it would be far better than the war, greed, and the oppression we see in various regions today.
References:
https://agoodreedreview.com/2023/01/15/too-many-people/
The Population Bomb, by Dr. Paul Ehrlich
The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ – a story of where we came from and where we might be going
Common Myths
Preparing the world for the next pandemic
Climate Change May Make Pandemics More Common
Doctors explain what it’s been like to provide reproductive care post-roe in America
https://www.reuters.com/world/global-fertility-rates-decline-shifting-population-burden-low-income-countries-2024-03-20/
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/gender-pay-gap-statistics/
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real/
A Good Reed Review 