Jason White wrote:
Carl Turney <carl@boms.com.au> wrote:
But the vast majority of people still believe that population growth isn't a bad thing, and extremely few politicians and policy-makers who'll dare to educate them. It's predicted to peak at approximately 8 billion. However, this also coincides with an era of global warming in addition to resource constraints and, of course, risks that are hard to estimate, for example the next influenza epidemic.
I am surprised by such a low figure; but of course population reduction promises the simplest solution to our environmental woes. Perhaps this anticipates third world nations moving to first world fertility rates ? An interesting problem which doesn't seem to get much attention, because it has thus far seemed unlikely is: What if fertility rates continued to decline and world population collapsed to to say a tenth of that current , ie to say 600 million. Even if this occurred slowly, say over a several hundred years the cultural, industrial and economic effects would be enormous. In that situation vast amounts of skill, technique and knowledge must likely be lost, for the simple reason there is no one to pass it on to; quite aside from the obvious reduction in market sizes; regards Rohan McLeod