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Introduction
The purpose of this web site is to assemble in one place a collection of serious literature for university students on the subject of population growth. We are providing this because the population subject has nearly disappeared from the media and is now rarely discussed on college campuses or in international policy discussions. This silence on population in the 1990s until today stands in contradiction to
- the 1993 statement of 60 of the world’s national scientific academies stressing the importance of slowing population growth in order “to prevent irreversible degradation of the natural environment and continued poverty for much of the world”;
- reports produced by nearly every U.S. administration since the 1950s recognizing a connection between rapid population growth and civil unrest – including our current administration’s 9-11 Commission Report ;
- a considerable body of research showing that population growth is indeed a factor in environmental decline; and
- The UN Population Division’s medium level projections data have shown a growth of nearly 50% in the world’s population between year 2000 (6.071 billion) and year 2050 (8.9 billion).
Population dynamics include not only population growth but also mortality, decline, migration, and change in population structure, which includes the currently much-publicized aging of populations. On this web site we are focusing on population growth because this is the only factor considered by many to be too “sensitive” to talk about, thus the one factor that is often pushed off the table and overlooked in discussions of poverty, health, environment, consumption, and climate change. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has barely mentioned the population factor – having reached a tacit agreement among participating governments not to discuss population because it is too sensitive.
The sensitivity has some political roots, but we’ve long suspected it is based also on some discomfort around talking about sex and human reproduction. Confusion exacerbates this situation, as it is common to mix up two questions, “Is population a problem?” with “What reduces population growth?” In addition, many people are still holding on to the wrong paradigm for answering this second question, implicitly assuming that population would have to be “controlled” by changing people’s behaviors or telling them what to do. In contrast, we find what is needed throughout the developing world is removing the many barriers that prevent the poorest women from obtaining the technologies (fertility regulation methods) and correct information about it – the critical factors that enable women to decide whether and when to have a child.
A sense of political incorrectness about this subject started prior to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and it was reinforced and expanded during the two-year period leading up to the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, 1994. At the same time, in many circles the term family planning – which is a measurable factor – was replaced by the term reproductive health, which was defined in a wide variety of ways and is not measurable. Reproductive health is indisputably an important factor in women’s health and well-being, but its obscurity when used in either policy or demographic discussions appears to have exacerbated the disappearance of discussion about population.
In selecting the readings for this web site we have focused on countries where birth rates remain relatively high, and these tend to be the countries where women have little power and few options about their own childbearing.
We gratefully acknowledge the Population Environment Research Network (PERN), whose website provided a substantial portion of the references used on this site, especially in the population-environment page. The PERN site also includes the capacity to see descriptions of its references, and readers of our own reference site may benefit from taking advantage of the additional PERN capacity.