The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [7]
In the twentieth century, one Demographic Transition concluded and another began. In Europe and North America it took from about 1750 to 1950 to complete, making these places the fastest-growing in the world while most of Asia and Africa grew slowly. This growth then slowed or stopped as industrialized countries completed the Demographic Transition, their fertility rates falling to near or even below the death rate.
But in the developing world, a new Demographic Transition that began in the early twentieth century with the arrival of modern medicine has still not finished. Thanks to the inventions of antibiotics and vaccines, along with insecticides to control diseases like malaria, death rates have plummeted17 but fertility rates, while dropping, have fallen less quickly. In some countries they haven’t fallen at all, defying the classic Demographic Transition notion that all modernized women prefer fewer babies. Such discrepancies underline a known weakness of the Demographic Transition model: Not every culture will necessarily adopt the western ideal of a small nuclear family, even after women’s rights, health, and security conditions improve.
So somewhere around 1950, our fastest population growth rates left the OECD countries18 and went to the developing world. Because the base population levels in the latter are so much larger, the resulting surge in world population has been nothing short of phenomenal. In most developing countries the spread between fertility and death rates, while narrowing, remains substantial. This second Demographic Transition is not yet finished, and unlike before, it involves the vast majority of the human race. Until a few decades after it ends—if it ends—world population will continue to grow.
The second global force, only partly related to the first, is the growing demand that human desires place upon the natural resources, services, and gene pool of our planet. Natural resources means both finite assets like hydrocarbons, minerals, and fossil groundwater; and renewable assets like rivers, arable land, wildlife, and wood. Natural services include life essentials like photosynthesis, absorption of carbon dioxide by oceans, and the labors of bees to pollinate our crops. And by gene pool I mean exactly that—the diversity of genes being carried around by all living organisms still existing on Earth.
It’s difficult to comprehend how fully dependent we are upon these things. Steel machines burn oil to grow and harvest our grains, with fertilizers made from natural gas, generating many times over what a farmer and mules could produce on the same land. From the genetic code of organisms we take the building blocks for our food, biotech, and pharmaceutical industries. We frame our buildings with timber, steel, and cement. We take water from the ground or trap it behind dams to grow alfalfa and cotton in the desert. We need trucks and diesel and giant metal-hulled ships to move ores and fish and manufactured goods from the places that have them to places that want them. The resulting trade flows have grown entire economies and glittering cities, with their music and culture and technology. Coal-fired electricity zaps through billions of miles of metal cable to power buildings, electric cars, cell phones, and the Internet. Airplanes and cars burn the sludge of long-dead things, granting us personal freedom and the chance to see the world.
It’s no secret that our twentieth-century expansions in population, modernization, trade, and technology have escalated demand for all of these. Public concern—both for the stability of raw commodity supplies and for the health