The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet's Surprising Future

Beacon Press, 2010. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Demography is destiny. It underlies many of the issues that shake the world , from war and economics to immigration. No wonder, then, that fears of ove rpopulation flared regularly over the last century, a century that saw the world's population quadruple. Even today, baby booms are blamed for genocid e and terrorism, and overpopulation is regularly cited as the primary facto r driving global warming and other environmental issues. Yet, surprisingly, it appears that the explosion is past its peak. Around t he world, in developing countries as well as in rich ones, today's women ar e having on average 2.6 children, half the number their mothers had. Within a generation, world fertility will likely follow Europe's to below replace ment levels-and by 2040, the world's population will be declining for the f irst time since the Black Death, almost seven hundred years ago. In The Coming Population Crash, veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce re veals the dynamics behind this dramatic shift. Charting the demographic pat h of our species over two hundred years, he begins by chronicling the troub ling history of authoritarian efforts to contain the twentieth century's po pulation explosion, as well as the worldwide trend toward the empowerment o f women that led to lower birthrates. And then, with vivid reporting from a round the globe, he dives into the environmental, social, and economic effe cts of our surprising demographic future. Now is probably the last time in history that our world will ho.