Stephan: When I was a young futurist back in the late 1960s and early 70s, the big concern was over-population.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, and one of the icons of the environmental and population movements is one example. In a 1969 Ramparts magazine article “Eco-Catastrophe!” Ehrlich predicted, among other misses, that the oceans would be dead from DDT poisoning by 1979, US life expectancy would drop to 42 years by 1980 as the result of pesticide-induced cancers, and the US population would decline to under 23 million by 1999.10 In his 1974 book, The End of Affluence, Ehrlich saw the President dissolving Congress “during the food riots of the 1980s,” and suggested that because of these food shortages, the United States would feel compelled to use agricultural poisons to such an extent, causing so much damage to the environment, that a horrified world might launch a nuclear attack on the United States to stop Ameri- can pesticide pollution.11 Pretty scary stuff; and, oh yes— dead wrong.
Here is another confirmation that over-population is not going to be the defining issue envisioned 50 years ago.
Sperm counts in Western countries have dropped by more than 50 percent since the 1970s. At the same time, men’s problems with conceiving are going up: Erectile dysfunction is increasing and testosterone levels are declining by 1 percent each year.
“The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival,” warns Mount Sinai fertility scientist Dr. Shanna Swan in her book, “Count Down” (Scribner), out Tuesday. “It’s a global existential crisis.”
Dr. Swan should know — she’s been researching fertility for thirty years. She studied a miscarriage boom in Santa Clara, Calif., in the 1980s, which she eventually linked to toxic waste dumped into the drinking water by a local semiconductor plant. She moved on to sperm rates in 1997 and they’ve been her “canary in a coal mine scenario” since. In 2017, she sounded the alarm with a meta-analysis of 40,000 men that showed that sperm count fell a whopping […]
This may be a godsend to the earth and even to humanity in the long run.