Part 24: The 7th billion human on Earth—negative population growth

By Frosty Wooldridge

Part 24:  European model, Dependency ratios, Case of Italy

In his book, Too Many People, Lindsey Grant addresses such things as our destruction of earth’s operating systems and much more.  You may find his book at  www.sevenlockspress.com and www.amazon.com .   Grant served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Population Affairs.

After a two month break, this series continues with interviews of America’s top environmental and population minds.

“Those who are obsessed with the decline of “working age population” compared to dependents forget that they are fuzzy constructs,” said Grant. “The real question is how many of the people are employed?  Many of the so-called “working age” people are highly expensive dependents, such as college students or policemen, firemen and retired military personnel retired at or near full pay.”

Such dependency, known as “Dependency ratios” drives the unending demand for economic growth.  As we shall discover, it cannot and will not continue. It’s not sustainable.

“Let me use Italy as an example,” said Grant. “Because it supposedly faces a particularly dire future due to a declining population…the UN report said Italy would need a total of 120 million immigrants…or an overall average of 2.2 million immigrants per year.”

As anyone knows, Italy cannot support unending population growth. It’s a small peninsula. 

Specter of Black Death

“A changed point of view is slowly gaining adherents,” said Grant.  “Growth is not benign; smaller can be better, not just from the environmental standpoint but in terms of wages, the standard of living, and indeed of civilization itself.  Europe offers some historical lessons about the advantages of smaller populations and the transitional difficulties in getting there.”

If you read history, you know that “Potato Famines”; “Black Death” and a host of ‘plagues’ caused death and suffering to millions in Europe.  You read about the ‘feudal system’ with kings and serfs.  Most lived lives of paupery with no escape.  Diseases spread like wildfire.

“The horror of the Black Plague lay in its method, not its results,” said Grant. “Population growth will stop.  It will stop humanely through deliberate management of human fertility, or it will be stopped by malnutrition, rising mortality and surprises such as the AIDS plague in Africa.  Better Living standards may eventually  result from either process, but the first process offers the hope of consciously opting for a better life, while the second depends upon the descent into misery to become effective.”

At the end of his brilliant book, Grant presents readers with past scenarios.  Will we take Ireland’s potato famine as a lesson and learn from it? Will we fall to Thomas Malthus’ dire mathematical deductions concerning food production being arithmetic while human growth continues exponentially?  Will we comprehend the vagaries of unlimited growth as they affected other civilizations that collapsed as addressed in Jared Diamond’s book: Collapse: show societies fail or succeed.

“If experience is any guide, family planning would reinforce itself, because it leads to prosperity, and the prosperous tend to have fewer children,” said Grant. “The two worlds would not face each other in a zero-sum confrontation.  Perhaps both sides could welcome a moderate and managed migration to provide the bridge to Europe’s future if European fertility does not rise.  The first and critical step in the process of untying this knot of problems is to jump-start the family planning that would bring the other consequences in train.”

THE CANTANKEROUS AMERICANS

“We are in a bind,” said Grant. “Take a nation with a self-image of immense freedom; let it practice that freedom for two centuries; confront it with the dangers that our behavior poses to our own health and survival; and watch what happens.”

We take so much for granted, but that prolific use of energy, water, resources and accelerating pollution rates cannot and will not continue. 

“We don’t see the forces driving us,” said Grant.  “I have collected hundreds of news stories from all over the country complaining about sprawl and invasion of happy villages and rural areas by subdivisions and strip development and super-malls. Nobody sees that is due to population growth, mostly from immigration, changing other people’s way of life and driving them to invade your environment.  The search for a better balance requires that Americans address the root of the imbalance—growth of human populations—rather than frantically addressing one or another of the symptoms.”

The fact remains: we dance around the inevitable dilemma—overpopulation. However, history clearly shows that we cannot continue dancing.  Grant shows clearly that we cannot keep dancing.  He also pinpoints our greatest population multiplier: all forms of immigration.

“For the common good as well as our own, the United States needs to reverse its present inadvertent policy of promoting population growth,” said Grant. “We ignore the consequences of our policies, and then we apply Band-aids and super highways to try to compensate for the distortions we have created.”

Finally, Grant speaks to negative population growth.  “Perhaps the strongest argument for NPG is “Why not?”  said Grant. “It is not, after all, a terrible inconvenience to have two children rather four.”

However, that cannot happen with immigration driving America’s population to add 100 million people in the next 25 years.

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