Spending the final years of my education during the Vietnam War, I recall many references to “the light at the end of the tunnel” that promised a successful conclusion (for us anyway) to that war.
We tried to find hope in that phrase, but it was difficult. The war was finally concluded with serious human cost to all participants, in 1975.
Now we face another crisis in our history. The new tunnel we are trying to exit is “the climate crisis.”
This tunnel results from natural processes and human excesses; among the latter is the population explosion of the twentieth-century sending global population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in the year 2000. Animal, vegetable, and human life cannot continue as we know it with this unsustainable human growth rate, as I suggested in my recent column on our interest in Mars.
However, we now see light at the end of this particular tunnel, found in a piece from the New York Times weekend edition of May 22-24, entitled Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications.
The authors got my attention with this statement: “Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy, Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties [330,000 housing units since 2002] have been razed, the land turned into parks.”
This dramatic and rapid decline in population will reduce pressure on natural resources. China, these authors tell us, could shrink from its current 1.41 billion to a mere 730 million by 2100. Decline, like growth “spirals exponentially” as fewer people have fewer children, causing a drop that “starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff.”
This suggests that the “light” of a reduced planetary population that could allow us to better adapt to a warming global climate might only come at the end of a tunnel of massive social, political, and economic unrest. We cannot welcome the coming light without being clear about what we must endure to enjoy the light at the end.
Our economies, especially in capitalist industrialized countries, are predicated on growth—in products, purchases, and people. Fewer people mean fewer jobs, smaller markets, diminished revenue for governments at all levels. One town in southern Italy, Times authors report, closed its maternity ward, built to accommodate 500 births annually, a decade ago because “this year, six babies were born.”
When schools, factories, businesses and hospitals close (with nursing homes the last to go), society as we know it will face those “sweeping ramifications”—a polite term for collapse—promised in this article’s headline.
There are ways, however, of dealing with our need for the “light” of a reduced population to help restore our planet to sustainability without suffering the full “tunnel” of a turmoil caused by a too rapid population drop.
The authors of the “Long Slide” article explain that people still want to have children but often “face too many obstacles.” They cite the story of Anna Parolini, who left her small town in Northern Italy to find a better job in Milan. Her salary of under 2,000 euros a month is not enough to raise a child without parents nearby. She is 37, and says that “thinking of having a child now would make me gasp.”
Anna, and many like her in other “advanced” countries like the USA, could benefit from free day care (or a higher salary) which would allow her to have children and more security and hope, perhaps even a better job. Then she might be able to pay taxes, some of which could help us better adapt within our current tunnel of climate change.
Some of my Republican friends call such a “gift” socialism. So far employers in places like the United States, Australia, and Canada have been able to make up for the population decline (especially among white people) with immigrant labor from other countries.
Yet those who confuse socialism with democratic social welfare programs that promote a stronger, healthier country economy are also the ones who want to reduce immigration. Go figure?
We can address climate change by promoting equity and hopefulness among citizens that might slow the inevitable population drop just enough to allow our economy and society to adjust as we move through our tunnel?
Maybe that is what President Joe Biden has in mind.