From the Bookshelf of The Transition Movement…

Population momentum

This is a very interesting phenomenon. It means that whilst people are having fewer children, population statistics can continue to rise, because of the increased length of time that the elderly are living. For instance in China, where the one-child policy came into force in 1978 - the population continues nevertheless to grow. It won't be until the last wave of "baby boomers" pass on that statistics will start to drop.

How many people in the world?
1950 - 2.5 billion
2014 - 7 billion


Reasons populations have increased

Vaccine for smallpox
Vaccine against rabies and anthrax
Pasteurization which extended the shelf life of milk
The use of surgical disinfectant
Combating the Yellow Fever virus
Mosquito control programmes
Vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus and polio
The invention of antibiotics.

Life expectancy averages over the world

1800 - 40 years.
2014 - 80 years.

Issues to do with populations that are decreasing

1) Who will fund the pensions of the elderly? The ratio of old people to working people may change drastically.
People will have to save more money for their own retirement, and make do on a reduced income.

2) Who will look after the elderly?

A simple equation, proved time and time again

More education = lower birth rates.

Threats to the world that are affected by levels of population

Food production
In the next 50 years we will need to produce as much food as has been consumed in our entire human history. Today geneticists, biochemists, crop breeders and plant physiologists are racing to improve wheat yields faster than expanding populations can eat them.

Water availability
Places like Pakistan, Australia, India and Israel are already feeling the strain.

Global warming.

Rising sea levels and over fishing.


Agriculture
This is the biggest threat to our planet. "It's the biggest source of greenhouses gases, emitting more than all the factories and power plants together, and more than all our cars, trains, boats and airplanes combined" (Jon Foley). The culprits are de-forestation, methane belched by cattle and rice paddies, fertilizer manufacture, and an insidious by-product of over-fertilization - nitrous oxide, a heat-trapping gas 300 times as potent as C02. Our intensively farmed crops also need high levels of pesticide usage.

Examples of the unique situations facing different countries

Puerto Rico:
When it was a US colony, many women of child bearing age were sterilized. Often they weren't told it was a permanent procedure. Feminists cite it as proof of the colonial power's sexism and racism, but the reaction of most Puerto Rican women is just to shrug. For decades now they mostly live in cities, want jobs and want to stop having children after two children - or even fewer. Peurto Rico's fertility rates has now dropped to 1.62 children per woman. Many of them are now voluntarily sterilized as their preferred form of birth control.

Costa Rica:
There has been an incredible reversal in birth rates.
1960 - 7.3 children per family
2011 - 1.93 children per family.

USA:
Population today....................................................315 million
Population expected by 2050.....................................................439 million

Iran:
When Ayatollah Khomeini took over in 1979 from the Shah of Iran, a remarkably thorough family planning campaign was put in place, and the population dropped drastically. Then there was the Iran/Iraq war, and everything changed. In its place was put a campaign for every fertile Iranian woman to help Iran build a "Twenty Million Man Army". The legal marrying age for girls was dropped from eighteen to thirteen. Later it dropped again to nine. The birth rate soared. In spite of deaths in war, the 1986 census counted 50 million Iranians; a doubling in two decades. This was the highest rate of population increase that the world had ever seen.
Then again the wheel turned. After the war the country was nearly bankrupt, and to feed, house and employ everyone would far outstrip their capacity. A huge campaign took place to encourage people to have fewer children.

In 1989 Imam Khomeini died.

Twelve years later, the Iranian minister of health would accept the UN Population Award for the most enlightened and successful approach to family planning that the world had ever seen. They had used brigades of people of horseback to go to the farthest reaches of the country - taking every form of birth control to everyone in the country - and all of it was given away for free. Their general health provisions were excellent too.

Now, since 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative, has been elected president of Iran. In 2006 he proclaimed that Iran's family-planning programme was un-Islamic, and he called for women 16 or over to leave universities, get married and get pregnant.... but thousands of women have protested against his ideas.



India:
In 1977 a coercive mass sterilization programme in India tumbled the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Before 2025, India will surpass China as having the biggest population in the world.

Pakistan:
Pakistan is now one of the fastest growing nations on earth. Its numbers have tripled since 1970, to 187 million. Unable to generate jobs to keep up, especially for millions of frustrated young men, it's also among the world's most unstable places.

Brazil:
The world's biggest Catholic country, yet most women only have two children now. They are choosing to have smaller families.

Italy:
The birth rate is down to 1.4 children per fertile woman. This is one of the world's lowest birthrates. Interestingly they also have one of the world's highest percentages of women with doctorates, which ties in with the repeated experience that education lowers the number of children that women want to have.
Yet Italian public schools aren't full of empty desks, because of immigrant children from Africa and Asia.

Spain:
In 2001 Catholic Spain had the world's lowest birthrate.

UK:
This is set to become the most populated country in Europe. By 2035 the number of centenarians will have increased eightfold. The UK population is growing. This is mainly due to immigration.

Europe:
This is due to have a huge drop in population. Fred Pearce in his book "Peoplequake" feels the future is dire. He has a chapter called "Winter in Europe". He warns that "a birth dearth is about to plunge the continent into a tailspin of ever-declining numbers. Demographically, Europe is living on borrowed time."

China:
Even with it's one child policy, due to population momentum, China's population will keep growing for another generation. In 2012 China added another 7 million people to its population every 7 weeks.
Around 2030, China's numbers should peak just below 1.5 billion. Even an easing of China's birthrate rules isn't expected to change the modern preference for small families. The population will then drop drastically, as member of the transitional generation between high fertility and low fertility pass away.

Uganda:
One of the world's highest fertility rates. Many men have multiple wives. The 33 million current Ugandan population is expected to triple by 2050. The population has doubled in the last 17 years.
Women are pro contraception but the men are not. 41% of them lack access to birth control. Local tradition accords respect to men with lots of children. The Ugandan president believes that China and India's success is due to their large populations, and he wants this for Uganda too.

Nigeria:
The highest population in Africa - 166 million. By 2040 Nigeria is expected to double its population to 333 million - a number that will vastly transcend its agricultural capacity.

Niger:
Only a quarter of the population can read. The only thing that checks Niger's high fertility rate is the 50 year life expectancy.
Until 2007 just 5% of Niger women used contraceptives. There is still tremendous resistance. Many people regarding it as an effort to lower their population so that they won't be able to defend their land. Many want more children, not less.

Japan:
Japan is the first country to reach the end of its demographic transition - when high mortality and high birthrates both turn to low. Japan's first shrunken generation - born in the late 40s early 50s - is now entering retirement. It has one of the highest life expectancies in the world 79.4 years for men 85.9 years for women.
It's population is due to plunge downwards. The US Census Bureau projects that by 2040 there will be one Japanese centenarian for every new Japanese baby. In 2006, for the first time since World War II, Japan recorded more deaths than births.
Japan doesn't welcome immigrants, so it is not going to bolster its population in this way. It deeply values its homogeneous population. Fewer than 2% of Japanese residents are foreign born.
Japan, with its falling population is the big experiment in the eyes of the world. Can they maintain prosperity without growth? For many years economists have based their ideas on ever-growing economies and populations. More people = bigger (cheaper) labour pools, and more consumers to buy products. The trouble is, on a finite planet - an economy dependent on constant growth is no more perpetual than a chain letter or a pyramid scheme, which always needs more and more people buying in. Eventually there aren't more people, and everything collapses. Now Japan is approaching the time when it will have to experiment with a different philosophy.

Russia:

The birthrate here is falling rapidly. Until recently it had the fastest-falling birthrate in the world. It's population has dropped by 5 million.

This lowering of the birthrate started in 1991, with the collapse of communism, and the Soviet Union's cradle-to-grave assurances of work, education and shelter. Even more significant than the low birth rate is the poor state of Russia's health.

It has the fastest-growing levels of HIV in the world. By 2020, up to 10% of the population could be infected. It also has a high incidence of heart disease and fatal injuries - and these are linked to the Russian addiction to vodka. This too has got worse since communism ended.

Russia's life expectancy is lower than Pakistan's, which is lower than most of Africa.

Countries with very low birth rates

Italy
Spain
Hong Kong
Macau
Singapore
Japan
Taiwan
China.

Contraception

Half the world's pregnancies are unintended.
This shows that often contraception does not work, and we perhaps need to look at forms of contraception that will work. It also shows the importance of the morning after pill.

Abortion

Experience suggests that there is no such thing as an absence of abortions. They just happen legally (and safely) or illegally (and very dangerously). For instance Addis Ababa legalized abortion in 2006... (Dr. Malcolm Potts) "Before that seventy percent of the hospital beds - orthopaedics, neurology, everything - were occupied by botched abortions. In less that a year after legalization, those beds were emptied. The fertility rate there is now 1.8, because they're offering responsible access to contraception and safe abortion."

Organisations concerned with limiting populations

Population Action International
The Population Institute
Zero Population Growth.

Problems with expanding consumption

Growing consumption does not help the world. Even in countries where the populations are dropping, this sometimes results in more wealth, and therefore more consumption. Resources in all sorts of fields are becoming more limited, and in future we need to be more respectful of this.
The richest 7% of people are responsible for 50% of carbon dioxide emissions. The poorest 50% are responsible for 7% of the emissions.
"The next two billion people on earth will do a lot more damage than the last two billion" says Paul Ehrhich (author of The Population Bomb) "Those of us already alive have already plucked the lowest-hanging resources. Like wringing oil from rocks, from now on acquiring things we use will be much harder, involving much more energy and leaving much bigger messes in our wake."

Books on Population

Peoplequake by Fred Pearce (a more optimistic view)
The Empty Cradle:How falling Birthrates threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It by Philip Longman.
Shrinking-Population Economics: Lessons from Japan by Akihiko Matsutani.

The Catholic Church and papal infallibility

In 1870 Pope Pius IX and his advisers realised that, bereft of their Papal States, their territory reduced to less than half a square mile, with only a thousand or so citizens (nearly all male, as today) their power was essentially gone, unless........
Thus Vatican 1, which sealed the notion of papal infallibility. The authority of God Himself was infused in the Pope. Power restored. But papal infallibility was a sword that cut two ways. If the Pope's teaching were infallible by virtue of being Pope, then the teachings of all Popes were infallible. Overturning precedent was not an option.

The Church's ossified stance re....
Contraception
Ordination of women
Ordination of married men
Acceptance of homosexuals

The Church has little choice (in changing these things), because it has painted itself into an ever-tighter corner.
e.g., an overwhelming majority present at the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control (69 people versus 10 people) advised Pope XI to relax the sanction against artificial birth control. But as Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II) would write for the dissenting opinion....
"If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches.... It should likewise have to be admitted that for half a century the Holy Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned."