Reply #44: It hasn't become a 'taboo' subject. It's become a passe or even dumb malthusian subject [View All]

[HamdenRice]

The reason it isn't discussed much is that every couple of years the leading demographers announce that global fertility decline is in even greater freefall than before. Every few years the plateau human population is revised downward -- from 20 billion, then to 16 billion, then to 12 billion, and so on.

Fertility decline is occurring in poor countries where it wasn't expected for decades. Vast areas of Eurasia (especially Russia) are in negative population growth.

Moreover, the mainstream environmental movement has come to see the population problem in terms of environmental footprint, not in terms of numbers of people. One north American has a bigger environmental footprint than up to 60 or 70 people in the poor areas where population decline has not yet begun.

So people stopped talking about it because it has been solving itself thanks to birth control, women's emancipation, lowered child mortality and education.

Only North American malthusians sit around and bitch about the population bomb these days, and mostly their "concerns" are aimed at the poor brown and yellow people who are doing much less to destroy the environment than they, the malthusians themselves, are.