A World of Empty Spaces

It wasn’t all that long ago that we fretted about a burgeoning world, constantly filling with billions of more people and the draining of resources that would ensue.  I was just graduating from high school in Calgary when Paul Ehrlich published his The Population Bomb.  It became a bestselling sensation, with specific courses being offered on it in various universities.  Like the scare of the atom bomb, the population version drove fear and dread into the hearts of people, as they read about imminent worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s, along with political and social turmoil.  Though it didn’t pan out quite so much like the Armageddon people had predicted, the book nevertheless set the tone for decades to come.

And now a new book by Canadians John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker is telling us that we’ve likely had it all wrong.   True, the 7 billion in the world at present is set to climb to 9 or10 billion in a few decades, but that’s when everything changes according to these two authors.  It’s not even for sure that we’ll get to 9 billion.  And there’s one key reason for this new prognosis: the education of women.

The authors travelled the world and came away with a dramatic conclusion.  Quoting one Wolfgang Lutz, a demographer: “The most important reproductive organ for human being is your mind.  That if you change how someone thinks about reproduction, you change everything.  Based on this analysis, the single biggest effect on fertility is the education of women. And that is something that has been happening everywhere, in part thanks to the UN’s Millennial Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that brought new coordinated investment into the developing world over the last two decades.

An increasing number of women in the normally poorer regions of the world now have cellphones, with data packages, and the ability to search and understand what they read about the broader world – including reproduction.

And there’s another phenomenon that plays a major role along with the emancipation of women: the rate of global urbanization.  “Large parts of Africans are urbanizing at two times the rate of the global average. If you go to Kenya today, women have the same elementary education levels as men. As many girls as boys are sitting for graduation exams,” the authors note.

After interviewing women from 26 countries, the authors discovered that the universal number the women selected for the number of children they desired was 2 – far less than anything they had learned in their traditional culture.  Women are making their own decisions about their lives and the effect of that on humanity, and not just on their own bodies, will be massive.

But that effect won’t be what the world has believed for a long time now.  If the projections are off, and the world population begins shrinking rapidly, then the prognostications could all be wrong.  To quote the authors:

“A lot of people who are thinking about the future of the world, the future economy, the future of city planning, they’re basing their projections on that future size of the human population. And people are actually making decisions based on this. If you dig in and see that there isn’t going to be a lot of growth of young people coming into the population, a lot of growth is actually going to come from older people hanging around longer because we’re getting better every day at keeping them alive. How does that affect transit decisions in New York City? Or how governments support rural communities that are collapsing at an enormous rate right now. All those decisions are based on having a correct understanding of what our societies will look like in the future.”

The implications of this are enormous and could alter everything we once believed about the global future. With cities growing at such fantastic rates, for instance, will this understanding alter decisions about healthcare, public transport,  education, politics ?  It surely will, but hardly anyone is thinking about it yet.  It will be a world in which our metropolitan centres get larger while the global population itself begins to shrink at a rapid rate.  Most of us weren’t expecting that.  Will we revert back to a time of great city states, for example, whose influence and might could transcend that of nations?

And what will be the effects on climate change, as the population declines around the world? Will it get worse?  Better?  We just don’t know because the research has been premised on the old model of an ever-growing planet.

And one more thing. As the world begins running out of people, it won’t stop.  Or as the book puts it: “It will never end.”  Families will be smaller.  Women will be smarter.  Cities will become more adaptive and challenged.  Rural areas will be increasingly abandoned.  Ultimately, there will be more empty spaces everywhere, except in cities.  What will that mean for the planet?  For us? We can’t yet be sure, but if Ibbitson and Bricker are right, it will all happen much quicker than we realize and nothing will remain the same.