Credit: www.scienceandsensibility.org
Population is the third rail issue for environmentalists. Even the founder of Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson, was concerned that it was being ignored. A guest writer on MNN wrote:
Nelson had become deeply disappointed with the wholesale retreat of the environmental establishment from advocating limits to population growth. Rather, a new generation of more pragmatic (expedient?) campaigners preferred to prattle on about safer and sexier topics.
Perhaps sexier is the wrong adjective, but population is definitely an issue we tend to avoid because it’s so intertwined with the hot-button issues of abortion, birth control and immigration.
The problem is that in many countries, the fertility rate is declining below the replacement rate. Japan has been going through this for years; the Russian population is crashing; and now Europe, according to the Guardian, needs many more babies to avert a population disaster. “The net effect is a ‘perfect demographic storm’ that will imperil economic growth across the continent.”
Spain is in crisis, with its population shrinking rapidly, as is Portugal. The problem isn’t just that the […]
This is possibly the number one “catch-22” problem in the world as a whole. We CAN NOT overpopulate the earth, the way we have been, yet we must have enough people to sustain the capitalist system we live in which depends upon the young to help the old in their declining years. I was “neutered” (tubes tied) after my first child. I did later marry a wonderful woman with four children, two of which needed a father figure in the family for needed support, but I, knowing what I do now about this world, would not bring another child into the world because it seems overpopulated already. I have no solution, except immigration is a “default” option which can help, in my opinion.