Monday, April 07, 2008

Unsustainable Levels of Overpopulationism   [Mark Steyn]

My book, whose title escapes me, comes out in paperback this week, and after a year and a half on the promotional trail I occasionally wonder if perhaps my message isn't a little over-familiar. But then I read something like this (to which Tim Blair responds with his customary pith). Alison Bashford is worried:

The world population is 6.6 billion. This far exceeds early 20th-century predictions that it would reach about 3.9 billion by 2009. And yet overpopulation barely registers now as a public issue.

Well, maybe that's because, of the G8 nations, three - Russia, Japan, Germany - are already in net population decline, and Italy's about to join them. Maybe that's because 17 European nations are already at or below what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility (1.3 children per couple) - a point from which no society in human history has ever recovered. Maybe that's because in its most recent analysis the U.N. Population Division reported:

The indigenous populations of most countries in the rich world will either stagnate or decline…. The 2006 population revision predicts the steady depopulation of vast areas of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as a result of high levels of emigration and birth rates running persistently below replacement levels. Bulgaria’s population will fall by 35 per cent by 2050; Ukraine’s will plummet by 33 per cent, Russia’s by one quarter, whilst Britain’s population will rise from 60 million to approaching 69 million by 2050—almost entirely because of immigration. The expected global upheaval is without parallel in human history.

How can a supposedly respected historian and The Sydney Morning Herald publish a piece on the "overpopulation" problem and not know any of the above?

Professor Bashford provides an answer when she looks back to her overpopulationist heroes - chaps like John D Rockefeller III and the Australian statistician Sir George Knibbs — and then starts twittering away about how unfortunate it was the great overpopulation movement got detoured into beastly areas like eugenics. But, if you're going to be an overpopulation scaremonger like Professor Bashford, some sort of "ethnic profiling" surely goes with the territory — because the "global" crisis is not evenly distributed. Certain countries — Afghanistan, Yemen and whatnot — have 6, 7, 8 kids per couple — while Spaniards have a perfectly inverted family tree: four grandparents have two kids and one grandchild. It's not possible for Europeans to depopulate any faster than they're doing, but it's certainly not unreasonable for your average Yemeni mom to cut down a wee bit. Nevertheless, Professor Bashford can't bring herself even to mention this discrepancy, lest she sound as culturally judgmental as poor old Rockefeller in his enthusiasm for targeted Puerto Rican population control.

The good news is the Spaniards, Italians, Romanians, Ukrainians et al are committing societal suicide. The bad news is there may not be enough of them left to man the European branch of the Overpopulation Crisis Center.     

04/07 01:09 PMShare