Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It is a common meme these days that humans are busy bringing about their own extinction. This is usually imagined to take the form of mass death resulting from the effects of climate change including food shortages, and/or from the rapid decline in the availability of fossil fuels, and/or from a worldwide pandemic … But what if our path to extinction is really taking the form of damage to human fertility?
As predictions about world population decline proliferate, the causes almost never include the toxic chemicals that are dramatically undermining human fertility worldwide.
China’s slowdown is a welcome opportunity for global leaders and policymakers to get our priorities straight and set ourselves on a path of sustainable happiness and well-being.
Sure, Malthus missed predicting this enormous surge in human population, not factoring in stored fossil energy. That doesn’t mean we should declare human population a mystery beyond our grasp and refrain from any attempt to understand its trajectory and future.
Humans could disappear from planet Earth without even a whimper, that is, the whimper of new babies as the human sperm count keeps plummeting.
The Earth’s ecosystem is a typical complex system. It reacts to perturbations, even minor ones, sometimes very strongly. Don’t expect it to remain stable just because it has been stable up to a certain moment.
It turns out women around the world are on board with zero population growth! It turns out zero population growth is not all that difficult or expensive to achieve!
For millennia to come, the peoples of North America will have to contend with drastically expanded deserts, coastlines that in some regions will be many miles further inland than they are today, and the presence of dead zones where nuclear or chemical wastes in the soil and water make human settlement impossible.
