The Upside of a Population Decline
LETTERS, Oct. 5, 2023, New York Times
To the Editor:
Re “The World’s Population May Peak in Your Lifetime,” by Dean Spears (Sunday Opinion, Sept. 24):
Dr. Spears warns that, more than 60 years hence, the global population will peak at 10 billion and then drop to a mere eight billion (roughly our population today) by 2100. He worries about “tens of billions of lives not lived over the next few
centuries — many lives that could have been wonderful for the people who would have lived them.”
In a world where our natural resources are already strained to the max, this is rank sentimentality.
Year after year, we wring our hands about climate change, yet continue to drive up energy use and resource extraction to meet our ever-growing hunger for greater comfort and diversion.
Along with taming our resource gluttony now, a retreat from population growth will be the best thing that could happen to our ravaged planet.
---Philip Warburg, Newton, Mass.
The writer is the author of two books on renewable energy and former president of the Conservation Law Foundation.
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To the Editor:
When I sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on our nearby freeway, at a time of day when not too long ago there was rarely any traffic at all, I am hard-pressed to feel much concern about the dangers of a declining population. While there are certainly
dangers inherent in a decline that occurs too rapidly or too steeply, we needn’t worry about this.
First, as the article itself points out, the pace of any projected depopulation will be very slow. Slow enough for us to adapt and adjust.
Second, I believe we should welcome some measured decline, not fear it. The world population in 1960 was only three billion (compared with eight billion today). I don’t recall that people were concerned about too few people on the planet back then.
Quite the opposite: “The Population Bomb” would become a best-selling book later in the decade.
Finally, the article appears to assume that halting a population decline would result in a relatively stable population size without any problematic growth. That seems naïve. More likely, the pendulum would swing to the other extreme and we would again
experience the unsustainable population increases that have been our primary fear until now.
---Ted Landau, El Cerrito, Calif.
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To the Editor:
We should not ignore the many positives of a declining human population.
Fewer humans means less pollution, less carbon, less climate change and less impact on other species.
Fewer humans means more living space, more wilderness, cleaner oceans, greater sustainability, healthier families and more opportunities per child.
We should celebrate all parents who choose to have two or fewer children. Their legacy is a better future for everyone.
Justifying increased human population in the name of economic growth is a G.D.P. pyramid scheme that leads to an ever less livable planet.
---Kevin Curtis, Cazenovia, N.Y.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/opinion/letters/population-decline.html

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