Dubbed every two generations

It would be imprudent to extrapolate this growth, and to say that the world population should have quadrupled by the end of the century.

Many factors may occur in the meantime. Some demographers propose the model of “demographic transition”: after a long period of poverty, medical and industrial progress, rising standards of living and education increase both life expectancy and birth rate, so that the population grows rapidly; The resultant changes in habits would lead to a reduction in the birth rate, so that the population would stabilize.

The example of France in recent years seems to confirm this theory. The population also tends to stabilize in other developing countries or even decrease. However, the demographic transition model is not certain. It is disputed by other theorists and, ultimately, no one can predict in a certain way the figures that will reach the world population in the coming times.

In fact, the problem is elsewhere. Not in the future but in the present: the approximately seven billion individuals who are already surveying the planet, with their own needs, far exceed its biocapacity. This number is rapidly increasing, and needs are increasing at a dizzying rate. See for example this article: “World Population, Agriculture and Malnutrition”.

The agricultural situation is in the process of becoming catastrophic, soil erosion far exceeds its regeneration capacity, groundwaters are everywhere in the dark, fertilizers used at a massive dose will become scarce along with oil and gas from which they are fired, land and water are already severely polluted, nothing seems to be able to stop global warming with its weather consequences and the rise of the oceans that niggle the continents…

The urgency of the situation requires action on all variables: moving to renewable energy and materials, to a form of agriculture that respects the reserves of humus and fresh water, independants of fossil fuels, and learning to save, to recycle whatever is possible.

But it is equally imperative, in the longer term, to reduce the number of incoercible predators we are. The individual’s needs will never return to what they were at the Stone Age. We only have one solution if we want to avoid famines, wars, diseases, suffering of all kinds to future generations: limiting the number of predators.

And to act on birth rates, we must begin by analysing all the factors on which they depend. Not only economic, socio-cultural, health and other factors, but the first factor involved in reproduction: human sexuality, and what has become of it under the yoke of culture.