Green Options

Fertility rates are declining around the world and most of what is written about this trend casts it in a positive light.  The cover story of last November’s Economist magazine carried the headline: “Falling Fertility - How the Population Problem is Solving Itself.”  It claimed that countries like China are enjoying a “demographic dividend” over the coming decades.  As positive as an end to human population increase might be for the planet, the question that is not getting much attention is, “what next?”  After population reaches an inflection point and begins to decline, what will society be like?  I won’t live to see this, but my grand daughter who was born last month certainly will.

My good friend John sent me a link to the IIASA website (International Institute for Applied System Analysis) where it is possible to download data from their models of global demographic trends (I’ve made some graphs of that data).  Most such models stop at 2050 but this one goes out to 2100.  If these models are correct, there are some major challenges ahead for humanity.  The most immediate is how to feed the population that will continue to increase until about 2060.  The next is how to deal with a population that is getting very old.  If you are an American, the trends in the following graphs should be seriously unsettling.  We have a dysfunctional, hyper-partisan-dominated, political establishment that is chronically unable to find reasonable solutions to the challenges of medical costs, Social Security insolvency or immigration reform, and yet addressing these very issues will become even more critical in the future pictured in these graphs.  

Fewer and Fewer Children

The first thing that strikes me (see graph above) is the declining proportion of children.  This global trend is well under way in the developed world and is only slightly less so in North America because of immigration.  I wonder at what point colleges will start competing for the few remaining students?

A teen in Florida may be deported if she refuses to get the Gardasil vaccine.

Seventeen-year-old Simone Davis has been applying for citizenship for almost 10 years. When she was 3, she was abandoned and then adopted by her paternal grandmother, who married an American. The family moved to Port St. Joe, Fla.

Now, because she refuses to get the HPV vaccine, she may be sent back to England. That’s because Gardasil is among the required vaccines for citizenship. This vaccine is not mandated for American girls, though different localities have their own laws.

Rather than recommending that Americans cut back on their excessive consumer lifestyle, an anti-immigration group has released an advertisement touting controversial research that has claimed immigrants’ carbon footprints quadruple in size after moving to the US.

The group, Californians for Population Stabilization, does not advocate that Americans themselves have fewer children, nor do they promote any other type of change to the American lifestyle. In fact, this is the first time they have mentioned global warming in any of their campaigns.

Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

It is a truth well documented that community gardens foster unity among neighbors, but Germany’s Stiftung Interkultur has taken this logic a step further in the creation of its Intercultural Gardens. Communities in Berlin, Gottingen, Hamburg, and Munich (among others) are home to large and diverse immigrant populations, often living in close proximity. To encourage interaction and community spirit between German residents of all extractions, the Stiftung Interkultur has built a series of community gardens in which residents can share their gardening skills and horticultural knowledge with one another. The idea was born out of recognition that social exclusion plagued many new immigrants to Germany. Further, members of the discussions at Stiftung Interkultur felt that environmental and sustainable eating considerations were directed at the middle class, causing a secondary level of isolation that affected the health and eating practices of urban immigrants.

Ecosystem will be severely fragmented by fence

The Bush administration has announced it will wave more than thirty federal laws to finish building a wall along the Mexican border by the end of this year. The Washington Post calls the move the most sweeping use of the administration’s waiver authority during the wall’s construction. The waivers allow the Bush administration to bypass mandatory reviews on how the wall will affect ecological areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. House Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson called the waiver “an extreme abuse of authority.”

Environmental groups have filed petitions challenging the waivers before the Supreme Court siting several potential ecological hazards that would be created by the fence. Biologists are especially concerned about a handful of extremely rare jaguars that prowl up from Mexico over mountain trails in some of the wildest country in the southwest.