Densely populated Hong Kong has one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Photo: imago/Frank Sorge
On July 11, the United Nations published new forecasts for the development of the world’s population: humanity is growing more slowly than expected ten years ago, and the peak that it is expected to reach in the 2080s will be just over ten billion lower assumed. The reason for this is the rapidly falling birth rates worldwide – a trend that began in the so-called developed countries, but has long since reached the societies of the emerging countries and is now even beginning to emerge in the African countries south of the Sahara.
The UN celebrates the new data as good news: “The earlier and lower maximum value is a sign of hope. Because this could mean that human-caused environmental pollution will decrease due to lower overall consumption. The UN no longer dares to estimate how many people the earth could feed. The question is too complicated, but it also depends on what technologies we will have in the future and how we actually want to live. But in view of the increasing destruction of nature, it is clear: the fewer we are, the more likely it is that the planetary boundaries can be adhered to. So: Finally a ray of hope!
However, what the UN reports as good news should actually be viewed in a more differentiated manner.
Europe today has a median age of 42 years and the trend is rising.
The first thing we have to realize is that the demographic turnaround, which appears to be the only really effective global measure that we have taken so far against the destruction of nature, is not a political measure at all. It is at best a happy coincidence, but was not decided upon or even consciously influenced in any country. The good news from the UN about the saving grace simply hides our political failure when it comes to ecology.
And this brings us to the second shadow that lies over the good news: Precisely because the demographic change was not planned but happens spontaneously, its causes are largely unclear. The only thing that can be deduced from the statistics is that it has something to do with prosperity and modernization: rising GDP, integration of women into the labor market, changing lifestyles with later parenthood, social security structures that make (own) children superfluous for retirement provision. But there is another possible cause that doesn’t fit with the good news: We live in an increasingly polluted environment. Environmental toxins can even be detected in the blood of newborns. Many of them have a hormone-like effect and can impair fertility. The falling birth rates could also be related to this. To my knowledge, no government in the world is investigating this in comprehensive studies. The EU is content to document the progressive poisoning of the population through pesticides and plastic additives etc. in the “Human Biomonitoring Initiative”, but refrains from banning dangerous substances.
But not only the causes but also the effects of demographic change are unknown, and this is the third reason for concern. Our society is gradually beginning to feel the challenges that an aging population brings with it, for example with regard to the necessary infrastructure for medical care and nursing. Less talked about are the political consequences. An aging population is not necessarily more conservative or less interested in future issues. This is clearly shown by figures on environmental commitment. But if you think in terms of world history, it becomes clear: the major political upheavals all occurred in societies with a completely different demographic structure. Europe today has a median age of 42 years, and the trend is rising. During the French Revolution it would have been much closer to today’s African figure of 18 years. To formulate it as a hypothesis: Old people – and that means everyone over 25, including the author – don’t make revolutions. But what if this is exactly what we need in view of the ecological crisis?
But the demographic change could prove to be a problem not only politically, but even biologically. Biology has now understood that there are interactions between natural evolution and cultural development and that social developments can also leave their footprint on the genome. Therefore, the British biologist Robert John Aitken is right when he says in a current Article asks what evolutionary consequences demographic change can have. He fears a “demographic trap.” Normally in biological evolution, all mutations that lead to lower fertility are automatically displaced by reproductively more successful competitors. However, in a society with a low birth rate, low child mortality and developed reproductive medicine, this mechanism is overridden, which is why declining fertility can now also become genetically anchored. In other words, if the world’s population has reduced to a more ecologically sustainable level, it may have lost the biological ability to stabilize at that level.
Politically, of course, this is no more an argument against demographic change or against reproductive medicine than it would be an argument for higher child mortality. But it shows that we and the UN are about to rejoice over a development that we have not even understood and whose significance is not at all clear to us. What should be the subject of an urgent and enlightened policy turns out to be a persistent wandering of the human race, which gives itself a bad report to a capitalist modernity that considers itself to be the epitome of rationality.
Oliver Schlaudt is professor of philosophy and political economy at the University for Social Design in Koblenz.
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