July 03 2008 / by jcchan
Category: Culture Year: General Rating: 5 Hot
By JC Chan
In the next eight seconds 34 babies will be born to the world.
Of these five will be from India and four will be from China. In
ten years China will be the dominant English speaking country in
the world. With world population exploding and shifting so
dramatically, it’s easy to envision a future with billions more
humans inhabiting Earth than do today. But that may not be the
case. 
Consider the scenario presented in the sci-fi film Children
of Men (2006), a bleak vision of Earth in 2027 where humans
have mysteriously lost fertility and the ability to procreate. In
one scene, a scruffy-faced man named Theo, played by Clive Owen,
and a woman named Miriam walk across the dreary rust of an
abandoned school playground. Sitting on the squeaky swing set is
the African woman they are protecting, miraculously nursing in her
hands the first newborn the Earth has seen in over a decade. Miriam
recalls her days as a nurse delivering births. She notes that over
time fewer births were recorded until the day they ceased
altogether.
“As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in. Very
odd, what happens in a world without children’s voices,” she grimly
states.
The backdrop for the film is a future England that has adopted a
survivalist policy as it attempts to police millions of incoming
immigrants into concentration camps to preserve the little
remaining natural resources they have left. When I first watched
Children of Men, the idea of humanity wiped out by
widespread infertility seemed a little far-fetched. Certainly there
are many other, more viable ways for us to go: nuclear weapons,
terrorism, a nanotechnology nightmare, a super-resistant bacteria
strain, asteroids, global warming.
Growing up in the 90’s, schools and media have always drilled
into my head the post-war baby boom, exponential growth, limited
allocation of resources, and recycling, oh lots of talk about
recycling. (Note: I am an avid recycler.) Still, though we can and
should do something about issues like global warming and runaway
population growth, scenarios like the reality of the 2027 in
Children of Men remind us that there may well be other
formidable challenges on the horizon that may not be so much in our
control.
Case in point, a recent NYTimes Sunday Magazine article
by Russell Shorto entitled “No Babies?” addresses the very
real possibility of population decline. Shorto examines the sleepy
Italian town of Laviano in Southern Italy, a spectacular sight with
magnificent steep slopes and wild poppies adorning medieval
fortress ruins of a fortress, in which a population of 3,000 has
fallen to just 1,600 and still dropping.
This has caused such alarm that the Laviano’s mayor has created
a new fund to give any woman that would rear a child in the
village, a sum of 10,000 euros ($15,000). Though the plan has
resulted in a slight uptick in residents, Laviano is still steadily
losing population. (cont.)
A study conducted by the UN in 2002 predicted that 75% of the
developed world will hit a below-replacement fertility by 2050.
This means that Eastern Europe will lose a third to a half of its
population by 2050, of which has been steady declining since the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
As people live longer and longer and less babies are born, there
will be a smaller workforce to support the elderly, this is called
graying of the population, where the elderly will outnumber the
young in developed nations. Parts of Europe like France enjoy a
traditionally earlier retirement age, where only 39% of those aged
from 55 to 65 still hold jobs.
Ironically, it is also France who enjoys a healthy replacement
rate that it shares with Ireland due to its large family programs
and economic child-bearing incentives, averaging two children per
couple compared to Spain’s 1.15 or Latvia’s 1.16. It is estimated
that by 2025, a good third of Europe’s population will receive
pension funds.
What does this mean to Europe besides its cultural implications?
We think of typical Italian families with five, six or more
children, but at present, a small town in the Italian Alps is
hosting more funerals than baptisms.
Ever heard of Bandai? Yes, it’s a Japanese toy company, but did
you also know that Bandai has a plan in place to give $10,000 to
those employees for every second child? Japan too is facing a
declining population crisis – they are actually greying the
fastest!
As it stands, Japan has been facing in this decade its lowest
birthrate since the records began. Japanese men are expected to
live 77 years and Japanese women, 84 years. With Japanese aged 65
or older to make up 27% of the shrinking population by 2020, one
wonders when it will be the elderly that will be taking care of the
young one day.
Make no mistake about it, developing nations are booming at an
alarming rate. Reproduction rates in parts of under-developed
regions like Nigeria and Pakistan are exploding. Three and a half
billion Asians are expected to join the world’s population by 2050,
but if indications show, even those nations won’t be growing
forever, as China is beginning to feel the effects of graying with
its one child policy.
At present, one young Chinese will need to support four elderly
people. Countries like Armenia, Cyprus, Sri Lanka and Thailand are
also facing a low replacement fertility.
I remember learning about the “demographic transition” where a
nation’s population will follow a exponential path as it advances
from a undeveloped nation to a developed one. The demographic
transition attempts to explain the shift from high birth and high
death rates to low birth and low death rates with the overall
population starting slow but eventually shooting up over time.
It is divided in four steps with the population shooting over
the ceiling at the end. This means happy and plentiful people,
correct? But as what you’re seeing, perhaps we missed a fifth step
on the chart as actual population starts to drop. Something that we
aren’t too familiar with, but are starting to see its effects. This
PDF has a good explanation of the fifth stage of
demographic transition.
Perhaps the end of humanity will not arrive as spectacularly or
gloriously as movies such as Independence Day, Armageddon,
2001: A Space Odyssey, Transformers, Mad Max, or the
Matrix trilogy suggest.
Maybe it’s not evil aliens bent on conquest or a rogue A.I. like
HAL 9000 that will be our end but a more
quiet and slow doom as depicted in Children of Men. The
Total Fertility Rate of Italy is 1.38, Russia is 1.34, Latvia,
1.29, Belarus, 1.20. I look at these numbers and hope they aren’t
the beginning of a more sinister trend.
Allow me to conclude by quoting political scientist Paul Treanor
about demographic collapse in Europe:
“It is no longer possible to say simply, that the end of the
demographic transition is a stable population. Perhaps a shrinking
population is “normal” – as growth was once considered to be
“normal”. Perhaps a shrinking population is characteristic of any
planets with an advanced technology. If so, then Latvia and Estonia
have also answered a theoretical question of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). The
famous question, used by those who do not believe in
extra-terrestrials: if there are billions of advanced
civilisations, why are they not here to visit us?
Look at the table of Latvian population, project it 10,000
years into the future, and you have an answer: there are not enough
aliens to build a spacecraft. All those huge galactic federations
in science-fiction films, with billions of billions of alien
inhabitants, may simply reflect mistaken demographic
theory.”
Photo by J.C. Chan.
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