Population decline Quotes

“Overpopulation”

“The first dramatic effect of food shortage is upon fertility.”

“The low-fertility trap, once in place, is irreversible.”

“[Eight] billion people will die. The bigger question is: will millions still live?”

“Degrowth will happen, but it will do so involuntarily due to energy and resource decline.”

“[The world] population may shrink for multiple reasons, including poor nutrition and epidemics.”

“In nature, population overshoot is usually remedied by a higher die-off rate, not a lower birth rate.”

“The sudden — and surprising — end of the fossil fuel age will stun everyone — and kill billions.”

“With populations aging and declining almost everywhere, countries may one day be competing for immigrants.”

“Food supply has been made heavily dependent on fossil fuels, whose inevitable decline very likely partners with a population decline.”

“In the 1990s, as the consequences of a chronically low birth rate begin to sink in, Ottawa opened the floodgates, inviting 250,000 immigrants a year to come to Canada.”

“On a farm, a child is an investment—an extra pair of hands to milk the cow, or shoulders to work the fields. But in a city a child is a liability, just another mouth to feed.”

“The ultimate measure of human success is not production but reproduction. Economic productivity and profit are means to reproductive ends, not ends in themselves.”

“[It's] likely that, within the lifetimes of many people alive today, widespread breadbasket and supply chain failures will rapidly cause horrific famines and migrational chaos for billions, rapidly leading to societal and cultural breakdown...”

“Humans, like many mammals, have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control procreation. In good times females reach puberty earlier, and their chances of getting pregnant are a bit higher. In bad times puberty is late and fertility decreases.”

“There are more forty-year-old women than there are thirty-year-old women, who outnumber twenty-year-old women. That's what makes population decline so implacable; once it sets in, it’s virtually impossible to stop, because every year there are fewer women of child-bearing age than there were the year before.”

“[The operative] mechanisms [leading to] the collapse of the human population will be starvation, social strife, and disease. These major disasters were recognized long before Malthus and have been represented in western culture as horsemen of the apocalypse. They are all consequences of scarce resources and dense population.”

“Among millennials, especially, the fertility rate is very low. Between 2007 and 2012, the birth rate among Americans who came of age after 2000 dropped by 15 percent, to the lowest birth rate ever recorded in the United States: 0.95, less than one baby for every mother.”

“People who believe that a stable population can live in balance with the productive capacity of the environment may see a slowdown in the growth of population and energy consumption as evidence of approaching equilibrium. But when one understands the process that has been responsible for population growth [the extraction and use of fossil fuels], it becomes clear that an end to growth is the beginning of collapse.”

“What we think of as national boundaries can be expected to change, while countries themselves will generally become smaller. With less energy per capita, the quantity of government services provided can be expected to fall. Government organizations can be expected to become smaller and simpler. It is unlikely that democracies can continue; single rulers with a support staff are more likely. Plagues may cause the overall population to fall.”