HUMANITY AND WILD NATURE WILL LIKELY BOTH BE FLOURISHING IN 2100.

AuthorBailey, Ronald
PositionSCIENCE

"HUMAN ACTIVITY HAS wiped out two-thirds of the world's wildlife since 1970," CNN reported on September 10. Later that month, The Guardian reported that "40 percent of [the] world's plant species [are] at risk of extinction."

In an even more worrisome article, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and his colleagues asserted that "the ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization." Around the same time, The Daily Mail warned that "human civilization stands a 90 percent chance of collapse within decades due to deforestation."

These dire calculations and projections come from authoritative-sounding reports issued by international agencies, conservation groups, and peer-reviewed scientific journals. But is the future of wild nature and human civilization really so bleak?

Not according to the demographic and ecological trends that Marian Tupy and I describe in our book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know (Cato Institute). Data from uncontroversial mainstream sources strongly indicate that both humanity and the natural world are likely to be flourishing rather than collapsing at the end of this century.

WORLD POPULATION, TODAY about 7.7 billion, likely will peak at 8.9 billion by 2060 and decline to 7.8 billion by the end of this century. This projection is based on the fact that women around the world are choosing to have fewer children, causing the global average fertility rate (the number of children per woman of childbearing age) to plummet from 5 in 1960 to 2.4 now.

According to a July analysis in The Lancet, that rate will fall to 1.5 by the end of this century. Other global trends--such as steeply falling child mortality rates, increased urbanization, rising incomes, expanding education of women, and the spread of political and economic freedom--all strongly correlate with the choice to have fewer children.

Human ingenuity, enlarged through free markets, is also enabling us to get ever more goods and services from fewer and fewer resources. Arnulf Grubler, an energy researcher with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, documents how modern smartphones "dematerialized" computers, calculators, cameras, televisions, radios, recorders, and many more gadgets, replacing equipment weighing a combined 57 pounds and using 72 watts of stand-by energy with a device that weighs 2 ounces and...

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