| Description |
downward, and, more specifically, that the transition of societies from their traditional agricultural base to modern industrialized economies will bring with them the emulation of Western family-size patterns. It is certainly true that growth rates are now declining, but there is no compelling evidence that they will decline to the level of zero population growth, approximately two children per woman. In many countries there is active resistance to the importation of Western ideals. Yet even if Western ideals were adopted, this would not fully solve the problem, since Western lifestyles bring with them much greater rates of consumption. Furthermore, our view is not very long: even projections of global capacities for food production rarely look beyond a population of 10 billion, whether they think a population of this size sustainable or not, and there is little attention to longer-term population growth beyond 2100, or 2150, or 2200, or three or four doublings, or more. To be sure, even the classic Malthusian agrees that population growth will not continue beyond a certain pointâ€"whenever the carrying capacity of the site has been reachedâ€"but this is by no means a benign process. Rather, "leveling off"â€"or, more likely, precipitous declineâ€"occurs, in the Malthusian prediction, through means that cause acute distress to individuals: vast starvation, increased vulnerability to diseases compounded by malnutrition, collapse of transportation and heating systems due to exhaustion of natural resources, subjection to killing pollution, exacerbation of tensions over land and resources, perhaps leading to war, and a host of other causes compounded by overpopulation. Alternatively, as one might imagine a feminist prediction, "leveling off" could also occur through selectively or universally imposed nonvoluntary population programs of the kind now enforced in China, or worse, where any real reproductive freedom becomes a thing of the past. If we have enough of one, of course, we won't get the other; but neither is an outcome we can accept. Of course, it is also possible that "leveling off" could occur as the product of benign processes, but it is important to be clear about what these might be. Neither education nor changes in distribution nor development nor readjustment and curtailment ...10... |
