By 2050, more than one in five of the 9 billion people on Earth will be over the age of 60, according to a U.N. report.
Hania Zlotnik: The population sixty and over in developing countries is going to almost triple, and in the whole world also is going to slightly more than triple in the coming four decades.
Hania Zlotnik is the director of the UN Population Division. She talked about the challenge of adapting to an aging population.
Hania Zlotnik: The main concern that everyone is talking about is not so much about societal adaptation, but the economic adaptation.
Zlotnik said that people are staying healthier and living longer, and it’s expected that older people will remain in the workforce.
Hania Zlotnik: But it’s also important for the economic system to allow them to save over their working life enough so at some point they are able to stop working as hard as they used to, or maybe stop working at all.
But despite the challenges, she sees the aging of the population as an encouraging sign that people are having fewer children.
Hania Zlotnik: We have to see aging of the population as the greatest success of ensuring sustainability.
At the same time, Zlotnik said, the world’s economies will have to provide jobs for the world’s young people.
Hania Zlotnik: An economy is not going to take off if there’s a lot of unemployment, if people who want to work cannot find gainful employment.
Photo Cedit: Keith Bacongco
Dear Deborah, Beverly, Bruce, Jorge and everyone else in the Earth & Sky community,
Let’s estimate conservatively that the world’s population of 60 year olds is 675 million this year. Then, according to the UN estimates reported above, in 2050 the number of people over 60 years old will increase to over 2 billion people.
According to Population Division estimates of the total human population on Earth, there is a total population of 6.7 billion people in 2009, with a fully anticipated increase to a total of 9.1 billion people in 2050.
What can possibly be good about this “demographic picture”? It reminds me of a terrifying nightmare. The family of humanity will soon be confronted by emerging and converging global threats that are direct consequences of the unbridled growth of huge numbers of old people as well as a gigantic number of young people.
The human community is not providing for the basic needs of the people on Earth now. Over 3 billion people are existing on resources valued at less than $2 per day.
Can you envision that by the year 2050, a mere 41 years from now, if the family of humanity was to achieve Stage IV described in Demographic Transition Theory, then it would require approximately one dozen planets just like Earth to provide the necessary resources for the global population of 9+ billion people?
The widely shared, consensually validated and commonly held interpretation of global human population data by many too many experts, per the theory of the demographic transition, is fatally flawed. The Demographic Transition Theory is founded in preternatural thinking is descriptive not predictive theory and, furthermore, is directly contradicted by unchallenged scientific research regarding human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth.
Perhaps members of the Earth & Sky community will speak out loudly and clearly by expressing their concerns about this actual, unsustainable and distinctly discouraging predicament.
Thank you.
Sincerely yours,
Steve
I agree with Steve that we are already facing an over population that this planet can not substain. Other then not having enough resources we are pushing other animals to extinction, polluted our water, air, and land. Unsafe food is being develop for us to eat, and at times we are unsure of what we are eating.
I turn 60 this year and I have no plans to live to 80 or 90. When I die..I leave behind one son, and he and his wife has one child. As you can see I am in the belief of having small family.
As for health care….you need to get down at the grass root, even is the U.S., and see how many people do not have health care insurance. They can’t afford it. To pay for health care insurance is the last item on their list or not on their list at all.
Hospitals are so over price that one visit could cost you the price of two or three large homes. People living longer? I don’t think so.
Unless we control our population, as we are trying to control how much CO2 we are putting out, we may ourselves be one of the animal to go extinct.
Dear Becka,
Thanks for speaking out and also for exemplifying the kind of behavior needed in our time by choosing to have one child and indicating to your child that one child is enough, given the exploding number of human beings on Earth in our time. The explosion of global human numbers will soon enough become patently unsustainable on a planet with the size, composition and fragile ecologies of Earth.
Please note the silence of so many on this topic, both inside and outside the Earth & Sky community. That silence is the thing to be most feared, I believe. There is no global threat so great as humankind’s leaders’ elective mutism with regard to notifying the public about humanity’s central role in recklessly dissipating Earth’s finite resources and relentlessly degrading Earth’s ecology. Such outrageous behavior could have the effect of ruining the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit as fit place for human habitation. If people do not follow your example, Becka, by speaking out now and recommending the choice to have fewer children, then human civilization, life as know it and the integrity of Earth and its environs will be put at risk soon…………much sooner than most people imagine.
Good people, the willful silence of knowledgeable leaders and followers is a colossal mistake with profound implications for the future of life on Earth. Please, speak out loudly, clearly and often. Say whatsoever you believe to be true and real regarding the human predicament in which humankind finds itself in these earliest years of Century XXI.
With highest regard for Dr. Hania Zlotnik, the UN Population Division and the Earth & Sky community, I remain
Faithfully,
Steve
More voices…….we need many more voices. Time is being wasted by those with wealth and power who adamantly defend unsustainable status quo overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species on Earth in our time. Because these activities could soon become patently unsustainable, necessary behavior change has to occur fast. If more members of the human family do not speak out to vigorously resist what the leaders of the human community are demanding all of us do now as we strive to ravenously overconsuming Earth’s resources; to relentlessly hoarding wealth; and to overproduce unnecessary stuff, then the planetary home we are inhabiting and overpopulating could be made uninhabitable for our children and life as we know it by 2012.
One day our children will look back in anger and utter disbelief at many too many leaders and followers in my not-so-great generation who had the chance at least to try and mitigate the fully expected damages of pollution, climate change, environmental degradation, resource dissipation, biodiversity extinction and overpopulation but abjectly failed because we chose to play around the edges of the global challenges before us and refused to take demonstrably responsible action in the face of clear and present dangers. Sacrifices of ‘sacred cows’ and ‘golden calves’ often associated with being honest, earning wealth, exercising moral courage and making necessary changes were too damn hard for so soft, satisfied, sanctimonious, selfish and stupid a generation of leading elders, I suppose.
For me, it is impossible to believe that a species so wondrous and gifted as Homo sapiens will not find a way to continue rather than to induce its own extinction as we appear to be doing now. Somehow the miracle of life as we know it, with all its beauty and biodiversity, has to be protected. At least we have to try, whatever the odds.
What I find difficult to see this morning is how the human community can protect itself from itself. It looks like most of the leaders among us who are organizing and managing the global political economy have determined how the family of humanity will proceed. It reminds me of the strategy deployed by the stars of the movie, Thelma and Louise. The greediest among us, who have hoarded most of world’s wealth and purchased political power with it, appear to have determined that they will play their game out to its bitter end. Come what may for the children, coming generations, life as we know it and the integrity of the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit.
These leaders have decided not to concern themselves with the future. They live for themselves. They remind us that in the future, “We’ll all be dead anyway.” Why worry? After all, they say that, according to their endgame, we should embrace ‘the courage’ to do nothing…….except to conspicuously consume, hoard and party hardy until our enterprise goes over the cliff marked UNSUSTAINABLE.
Everyone is encouraged to ravenously consume and excessively hoard resources, just like they do. Climb any mountain, cross any stream so you can worship your very own “sacred cow”. Perhaps a fleet of autos, a private jet, a mega-yacht, a Madoff-like beach house in the Hamptons, a ski chalet in Davos, a club membership at Augusta National or day to day living in a gated community of your choosing. This is the “greed run amuck” way of life that has been legitimized, institutionalized, legalized and regarded as virtuous. This “greed is good” way of living in which everyone is encouraged to participate is of all things, so we are told, the one and only way to live. Life is not worth living if the values of wanton greediness are not idolatrized. People who say and do otherwise are branded losers and chumps.
The bold-faced recognition that this way of living in the world we inhabit is as unsustainable as it is obscene is not something leaders in the last 8 long, dark years cared to talk about. Dishonesty, duplicity, double-dealing and denial prevailed. These leaders were famous for not fighting the battles for freedom but are all too ready to send other peoples’ children into harm’s way. They had bigger things to do. These leaders make statements like, “I haven’t flown commercial in thirty years. Only private jets for me.”
So here we are, nearing the end of the first decade of Century XXI. Wealthy people buy politicians and the same old business-as-usual activities continue, just as all of them have agreed. Corporations have their PR firms promote whatever it is they want to keep doing. We have large-scale business enterprises that are “too big to fail” and too big to succeed as viable operations because they are soon to become unsustainable.
The focus of many too many leaders remains riveted upon convenient and attractive matters associated with endless growth of human enterprise, per-capita overconsumption and overpopulation rather than upon the actual threats to human wellbeing and environmental health that are directly posed to the human family by these very same, distinctly human global overgrowth activities. By so doing, these leaders could be willfully, duplicitously and perniciously directing the children down a “primrose path” to face some sort of unimaginable, colossal, human-driven wreckage which a single, selfish generation is largely responsible for precipitating.
Perhaps it is somehow right, and timely finally, to speak openly of such things even though so many of our most greedy leaders appear so clearly unready to change their unsustainable lifestyles. I would submit that it is not the public who is not ready to address global challenges and make needed changes, but too many leaders who have chosen to disregard the welfare of others as well as the preservation of Earth’s body and its environs for the sole purpose of protecting the greed-mongers’ way of life.
Dear Hania Zlotnik and Colleagues:
As humanity’s most luminous beacon of truth, science provides us with a last best hope for the survival of life as we know it on Earth. We must make certain that scientific evidence is never downplayed, distorted and denied by religious dogma, politics or ideological idiocy.
Let us not fail for another year to acknowledge extant research of human population dynamics. The willful refusal of many too many experts to assume their responsibilities to science and perform their duties to humanity could be one of the most colossal mistakes in human history. Such woefully inadequate behavior, as is evident in an incredible conspiracy of silence among experts, will soon enough be replaced with truthful expressions by those in possession of clear vision, adequate foresight, intellectual honesty and moral courage.
Hopefully leading thinkers and researchers will not continue supressing scientific evidence of human population dynamics and instead heed the words of Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston regarding the emerging and converging, human-driven global challenges that loom ominously before humankind in our time, “we’ve got to make sure that population is recognized…. as a multiplier of many others. We’ve got to make sure that population really does peak out when we hope it will.”
Sir John goes on, “what we want to do is to see the issue of population in the open, dispassionately discussed…. and then we’ll see where it goes.”
In what is admittedly a feeble effort to help John Sulston fulfill his charge to examine all available scientific evidence regarding human population dynamics, please give careful consideration to the following presentation and then take time to rigorously scrutinize the not yet overthrown science from Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation.
http://www.panearth.org/GPSO.htm
Please accept this invitation to discern the best available science of human population dynamics and human overpopulation; discover the facts; deliberate; draw logical conclusions; and disseminate the knowledge widely.
Thank you,
Steve Salmony