Just 500 Japanese.
An empty Europe.
The world dying out.
Anthony Browne and Richard Reeves
The Guardian & The Observer [U.K.]
Even as the six billionth human is born, it’s time to forget fears about the world being overpopulated. By the end of the next millennium, Tokyo will be a ghost town, and Japan will be empty. The country’s population will be just 500 by the year 3000, and just one by 3500. When that person dies, the Japanese nation will be no more.
These apocalyptic predictions aren’t the rantings of a doomsday cult, or of a maverick academic out to gain some publicity, but of the Japanese government itself. Its Ministry of Health and Welfare reports: ‘If we dare make the calculation, Japan’s population will be… about 500 people by the year 3000.’
Of course, a lot of things can change in 1,000 years. But what is frightening about the forecast is that it’s a mathematical certainty if Japanese women carry on having just 1.4 children each on average – and if Japan doesn’t change its immigration policy. If things continue as they are, the Japanese will die out. It’s just a question of when…
Obviously, the social structure is going to change dramatically in the next century,’ says John Clarke, professor of geography at the University of Durham. ‘We are going to become used to a world with no-child and one-child families, and with a growing proportion of older people. Siblings will become rarer and rarer.’
Clarke points out that the unprecedented ‘birth dearth’ is even spreading to some developing countries. Women in India now have fewer babies than American women did in the 1950s, while in China, Cuba and Thailand women are already having too few babies to replace themselves.
After centuries of population growth, and decades of apocalyptic warnings about the population bomb, most of the developed world is now facing a ‘population bust’. In his landmark 1968 book, Population Bomb, Professor Paul Ehrlich warned that ‘we will breed ourselves into oblivion’. Thirty years later, demographers say he is right – but not in the way he expected.
Read the entire article from The Guardian & The Observer
