Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why we shouldn’t worry about overpopulation

Perhaps the most sinister side of the environmentalist movement is the idea of an “optimal population,” where human life is seen as a menace. The Optimal Population Trust has today said that there are 45 million too many people living in Britain – which, for a country of 60 million, is quite some statement. The peculiar thing is that this “problem” may well have a solution in the form of the human race failing to reproduce. The hands of the world population clock are slowing. The natural population replacement level, 2.1 kids per woman, is achieved by no European country (pdf here). England stands at a respectable 1.75, Scotland at 1.6 and Italy at a dismal 1.2.

According to the UN’s medium forecast, the world’s supply of Italians will peak in ten years’ time. The rate of increase of the world population is projected, by the UN, to fall relentlessly: 5.7 percent between 2010-15 down to 1.7 percent between 2045-50. If you extrapolate the date on current trends (i.e. fertility rate falls as countries reach a certain degree of wealth)  you can come up with a graph showing that mankind will have been on earth for less time than the dinosaurs – and that the last Scotsman will die on April 2224.

Extrapolating trends into infinity is the source of all manner of nonsense (climate change being the least of them). In 1977 World Bank president Robert McNamara sternly warned that the number of people was growing faster than the planet’s ability to feed them and overpopulation was the ‘gravest’ threat next to a nuclear winter. But what about humankind’s ingenuity? As it turned out, the world was entering a golden age of poverty reduction as globalisation spread and Chinese and Indians rose up from their agrarian knees.

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