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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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As a father of eight (four girls, four boys), I’ve done my bit for the Wolfgramm dynasty and, when it comes to birthdays, I know what it means to have a full house. Whether I’ve done the right thing by the planet as a whole is another matter.
Two hundred years ago, the population of our planet reached one billion, and it had taken since Creation to achieve that. By1900 the population had reached two billion, and today, another hundred years later, it stands at 6.3 billion. By 2050 earth is expected to be home to more than 9 billion people.
If human life existed 10,000 years ago and we were part of it, we would have shared the planet’s air with a mere eight million others (according to scientific retro-estimates). Today, almost that many people are born every month.
Why have we become so many so quickly and how has this impacted on our relationships with each other and with our planet?
Most of the planet’s new mouths are in Africa and Asia, particularly India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria. More than three-quarters of the earth’s population live in these less-developed regions, with India and China accounting for one-in-five new humans born every year, with China alone accounting for one-in-five humans living.
The disparity or unevenness in the human population explosion can be further highlighted by the fact that in the first week of 2001, India achieved the total increase in people that it took all EU countries to achieve in all of 2000. Indeed, the rate of increase for European peoples is slowing (0.25 per cent annually) as non-European peoples from least developed nations is increasing (2.5 per cent). Moreover, where American women have a fertility rate of two children per lifetime, the rate in parts of the Middle East and Africa is seven per lifetime.
Where the predominantly European industrial nations were among the planet’s top-10 most populous nations 50 years ago, in another 50 only the US will remain. In short, the future of the earth’s people and its immediate problems look to be brown and yellow, rather than black and white.
Mass movements of peoples are expected as a result of this global demographic imbalance. In the low-growth West a blow-out in the greying population makes the issue of who will support them in decades to come an urgent one. Pressures on welfare systems and institutional care have already begun to exacerbate the medical claims of my already ageing, baby-boomer cohorts (born 1946-64).
Against this trend, the world’s poorer regions are experiencing a boom in couples reaching optimum child-bearing ages. For example, almost half of Mexico City’s population is less than 15 years of age. Wherever they are, the young Millennium Generation (born 1980-94) and the older Generation X (born 1965-79) will be carrying the weight of my generation and beyond. Their wealth will be required to sustain our standards of living.
More critically perhaps, will be the pressure in developed nations to accept higher migration intakes from the over-peopled, less-developed world. By 2050, one-in-three Europeans will be aged 60 and older. The UN argues that nations such as Italy and Germany will need up to 500,000 new migrants a year to sustain themselves into the 21st century. Wherever these people come from, the pressure of increased tolerance and multiculturalism will be a wave of the future. The people of developed nations, including Australia, will have to find the political and cultural will to adjust to this prospect and to absorb the changes that come with these trends.
Despite progress on many fronts, there are good reasons for pessimism given the revival of racism, xenophobia, terrorism and war in our post-9/11 world. But one thing is certain: Planet Earth is the divinely appointed home for the human race, and whatever short-term problems we create by peopling it, they are problems we have to deal with and resolve in the long run.
Short-term thinking and imagined isolation will not help. Daily we’re being forced to recognise our global interdependence. A child born in Africa, Asia and Latin America will impact on our private world, whether we like it or not.
What the ancient biblical wisdom tells us is that how well we relate to each other in the face of our increasingly congested and inter-related conditions is a factor in whether we have future in eternity.
Sources
“UN World Population Prospects—The 2002 Revision,” by David Newman, in Sociology, Pine Forge Press, California, 2002.
Sociology, Anthony Giddens, Polity Press, UK, 2001.
Extract from Signs of the Times, September 2003.
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