Population explosion: still expanding.

• Author: Hollingsworth, William G.

Despite optimistic forecasts of falling birthrates in the developed world, high fertility in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East remains a threat to the planet's resources.

About 1,500,000 people--roughly a new Milwaukee, Wis.--are being added to the world's population every week of the year, fueling an ongoing debate over the present and future implications of population growth. Many human beings are profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of overpopulation. So distasteful and disturbing is the idea of massively tragic overpopulation that most individuals have become virtuosos in ignoring, denying, or at least minimizing such thoughts.

Journalists are no exception to the wish to deny or discount doomsday scenarios. One way to cater to that feeling is to pretend that the population explosion virtually is over. Consider the following headlines that have appeared recently: "Too Many People? Not by a Long Shot" (Wall Street Journal op-ed); "More Elbow Room" (News week); "New Global Population Crisis--Not Enough People" (Sacramento Bee); "Now the Crisis Is Global Underpopulation" (Orange County Register); "How to Fix a Crowded World: Add People" (The New York Times); and "The Population Explosion Is Over" (New York Times Magazine).

What, besides wishful thinking, prompted the above pronouncements? It was either or both of two events. One was the release of revised United Nations population estimates and projections that indicated a slower rate of population growth than previously forecast. The other was a UN conference that focused on an already known fact: In a minority of the world's nations, mainly in Europe, fertility apparently has fallen well below "replacement," the rate--about 2.1 children per woman if mortality is low--yielding long-term population stability.

As for the news of slower growth, it should be noted that, in this case, "slower" does not mean slow. Nor does it mean "more elbow room" compared with today. Even if the UN's revised medium projections prove true, world population will number nearly 9,400,000,000 by the year 2050. That would be a gain of almost 3,500,000,000 persons in the next 52 years, an increase equal to the world's entire population in 1967.

It was the UN conference in late 1997 on sub-replacement fertility that generated the "underpopulation" headlines. These misleading headlines ignore the fact that fertility in the modem world varies greatly from region to region and nation to nation.

At the low end of the continuum is southern Europe, where fertility averages a mere 1.3 children per woman (cpw), including, to many people's surprise, 1.2 cpw each in Italy and Spain, both predominately Catholic nations where birth control and abortion are condemned by the Church. Fertility for Europe as a whole is 1.4, albeit with considerable national variation: 1.3 cpw in Germany and Russia, but 1.9 in Ireland and...