The big assumption here is that things stay on their present course. But what if the poor, brown nations starve, or at least experience a lot of mortality as the world's faltering economy, high food and fuel costs, climate chaos and deteriorating environment plague them. The countries with the so-called demographic advantage have few other advantages.

Only rabid, stupid, paleo conservatives would fail to see that the "civilized" world is still doing better and more likely to survive in the coming century. The feared hoards of immigrants are really refugees from this terrible situation. I do sometimes think that the remaining hunter-gatherers, may be in the best situation as long as their environment survives, but that is in doubt.

What was left unwritten in the piece and in the following comments was this simple fact: in First World nations, children are an economic liability, while in the Third World, they are an asset. Thus it is no surprise that the majority of population growth has been in places of economic backwardness. History has shown that attaining First World status is the best remedy to overpopulation. That is easier written than done though, as it would involve removing from the power the corrupt Third World elite types who preside over their respective train wrecks posing as countries.

Thank you menos for some stats, and there are many more you could have cited. Scientists in nearly all developed and developing countries have been warning for years about the strain increasing populations are putting on all natural and man-made systems. Saying we need more people is like saying we need more unemployment, more war, and less medical care.

"I like to repeat the conclusions of a simple calculation, though, to put the problem is some perspective: If you gave every 4 people on earth a single family home in the suburbs, you could fit the population of earth in the state of Texas."

Ummm, ubrew12, you could probably squeeze 10 billion people or more into the state of Texas. Where would the resources required by these people come from? Where would their pollution go to?

There is a concept known as the "footprint" of a community or urban area, which is the land area required for the RESOURCES required by that community. For many large urban areas, the footprint is much, much larger than the metro area.

For mankind as a whole, our "footprint" is almost the entire world at this point. Many would argue that our lifestyle combined with our numbers (well over 6 billion) is unsustainable over the long run, even if we had an infinite supply of oil. Now is not the time to be further increasing world population. Each additional person means more trees will be cut down, more roads will be built, more fresh water will be used up, etc., etc. Whether we could theoretically squeeze everybody into a few thousand square miles is irrelevant.

The supply of oil is far from infinite, as we are now finding out. With a greatly reduced supply of oil in the near future (a few decades away), the sustainable number of people on this planet will also be greatly reduced. The era of cheap oil the last several decades allowed a big expansion of human population; but what that oil provideth, it will now taketh away, as it gets much more expensive and scarce. Remember that the price of oil is a major factor in the price of food and grains.

On top of that, global warming will lead to reduced crop production due to heat waves and severe storms. 5 million acres of corn have already been drowned out and destroyed in and around Iowa this year. Food riots around the world could get considerably worse during the next year or so, as a result.

"Demographic winter" certainly doesn't describe the world's situation in 2008. It will describe the situation a few decades from now, as the world's population finally levels off and/or starts dropping. It may level off from intense efforts to reduce birthrates in high-birth-rate nations, or it may level off due to deaths from starvation reaching the same level as births. I for one would much rather see the former situation, rather than the latter.

If development works as expected, birth rates in the rest of the 'developing world' can be expected to do what they've done in the developed world. We're in for a crowded next 100 years, nevertheless.

I like to repeat the conclusions of a simple calculation, though, to put the problem is some perspective: If you gave every 4 people on earth a single family home in the suburbs, you could fit the population of earth in the state of Texas.

"the Thought Police" (given caps of course to try to pretend its not something imaginary

Oh its quite real. We had it in the US in the early fifties. It was called McCarthyism. If you are pretending the Kangaroo Court ( thought I'd capatilize that too) in Canada that is threatening free speech is any thing other than that, what can I say.

In our country we express our views without this kind of fascism. Some seem to be confused about what that term means. That is a prime example of Fascist behavior.

Styn stinks, but he should be as free as anyone else to espouse his ideas.

We are still adding over 70 MILLION people every year to Earth's population. This yearly increase is down only slightly from 10 years ago. If this is "demographic winter", I'd hate to see what "demographic summer" would be like.

What we REALLY need is a sharp drop in birth rates in the countries that now have high birth rates. Restoring the US funding for UNFPA, and eliminating the "global gag rule" would help a lot in this regard. This funding restoration will occur next year, unless John McBush is elected president in the US in November (probably a 1 in 5 chance), in which case the global gag rule and no US support for international family planning will continue.

They don't have to outlaw birth control. Every day more women are having to forego the cost of birth control pills in order to feed the family she already has.

Those who're pushing it knows - destitute families multiply much more than those who're basically well-off.

Smart women would be wise to learn the old time birth control (before the pill was invented).

Mark Steyn is yet another Zionist posing as someone who gives a fuck. What he is really trying to do is spread anti-Arab/Muslim fear and hatred (which he hopes will culminate in a war bringing them even more destruction, as well as expulsion from European countries they now reside in), and of course, because he belongs to the right tribe, he gets the opportunity to spread this racist propaganda.

What he says is no different than what other supremacists say, like David Duke, for example. Or Hitler.

Funny how that seems to be lost on him. Or is it?

How can it be Demographic Winter when all the white is disappearing? Wouldn't that be spring?

Anyway, the issue isn't white or brown, it's rich and poor. Rich people in brown countries are out- bred five or six to one by poor people in their own countries. But that's the way it has always been, the only difference is that white rich are running out of wage slaves and cannon fodder and brown rich are not.

I love the way a phantom problem like "the Thought Police" (given caps of course to try to pretend its not something imaginary) is used to try to avoid discussing a real problem like the continuation of evil racism and all that we've seen that this implies.

This sort of racist thought has its logical conclusion in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Its worth some effort in society to try to avoid repeating and continuing this sort of world.

I'd gladly take a world where someone might object to my speech to a world where I'm marched off to a gas chamber. Especially when one problem is real and has killed millions (or more) in the last century and the other is a phantom dreamed up from fantasy and paranoia.

I still like the Richard Pryor solution. We should all @#%@ each other's brains out until everyone is a nice light brown.

But which is worse? Mark Steyn's opinions or the Thought Police that are trying him now.

I'll take freedom of expression any day.

Mark Steyn and "self-detonating Islamists"? I don't see a difference. pfft!

The entire earth would benefit if all the Mark Steyn's of this world were to go extinct! By my guesstimate that number would likely approach 6 Billion. hahah

Doom n Gloom June 18th, 2008 4:10 pm
"Yes Mr. Steyn, your genocidal imperialist philosophy is crumbling and brown people will inherit what is left of the Earth."

Boy! I'm glad you aren't racist.

Yes Mr. Steyn, your genocidal imperialist philosophy is crumbling and brown people will inherit what is left of the Earth.

This theme is not new. 19th and 20th century European governments wanted more babies so they could field bigger armies against their competitors. The French became especially desperate, because they went from being Europe's #2 in population in 1815 (behind only Russia), to #3 in 1871, and a distant #3 or 4 in 1914. Before his final defeat in 1815, France was the terror of the continent, and it took four other powers to bring it down. In 1870 it couldn't even beat Germany. In 1914 it survived a German attack only with the help of Russia and Britain. So birth rates matter. Think of our case. In the 19th century the Anglo U.S. had very high birth rates, and lower mortality rates than the Mexicans. That is why Anglos flooded the northernmost provinces from Texas to California. Now that Mexicans have the higher birth rates, they're counterflooding. And there's no doubt that Islamic immigration and militancy are so strong because of high Muslim birth rates. Desert Egypt will soon have a population larger than Germany's, something that would have seemed absurd fifty years ago. Pakistan has far more people than any European country, including Russia! Millions of Muslim immigrants want into Europe for work and a higher standard of living, but many also want to live under Islamic law. I don't blame the Europeans for worrying.

Slightly declining numbers of nice, hard working white people who are consuming the Earth's resources like there will be no tomorrow!

The mushrooming hoards of brown people who are themselves beginning to get the hang of consumerism!

And all the fine multinational corporations fueling the crisis for all they are worth!

Good Bye Mother Earth!

www.StudentsForTheEarth.org

They have more babies to throw at us than us at them.

This baby gap will not do!

Neocon nirvana will be achieved when 10 million ultra-wealthy people control 100% of the world's wealth, thereby relegating the other 6 billion people to virtual slaves.

If you compare all the nations of the world, high reproductive rates insure high rates of poverty. The faster that mankind creates more desperate people willing to work for low wages, the faster neocon nirvana will be achieved.

Neither the people writing such books nor a 21st-Century Pope will have any significant effect on this issue at all. But it is aggravating to have to endure the attempts of men to tell modernized women to have more babies so "we" can out-populate the Muslims. Good grief.

I see Mark Steyn's tribalist argument (and those of us who find that repellent should keep in mind that most of the world, however you categorize it, also carries their version of this). Tribalism is stupid, but I get what he's saying. He's afraid of being out-bred.

That fear would only be even valid (on some tribalist level) if the population part of his argument made sense, which it doesn't. The "civilized" world is vastly overpopulated in terms of sustainability. Now, even though the "developing" world is even more vastly overpopulated, the problem for us all is effectively equal: this will not work long-term! We can't sustain it and so, sooner or later, there's going to be something like a cull or die-off.

As for the teror of the end of the world as we know it, bah, that happens every single day. Nothing's ever been static with human beings. Quit being such a wuss, Mr. Steyn. Things fall apart.

Hey, the US racists used these same arguments to get rid of abortion in their anti-abortion campaigns: 1850 - 1900.

Before 1850, mid-wife induced abortions were perfectly legal in the US as long as they were done before the "quickening."

For various reasons (one of which was transfer pediatrics from midwives to the male doctors produced by the newly minted medical profession), the anti-abortion movement emerged and they fought to illegalize abortion.

One of their arguments was that the educated and superior category of WASP women were increasingly producing less and less offspring relative to the jumping birthrates of the new, and less superior, immigrants from Catholic, Jewish and Orthodox areas of Europe.

These anti-abortionists claimed that the major reason for the fall in WASP birthrates was easy access to legal abortions.

These anti-abortionist movements were also against the rising number of the WASP women entering the workforce and their clamoring for the vote: of both which kept the fertility of WASP women down.

The fact that black and ethnic-European women worked at grinding jobs was considered (if considered at all) good.

If we knew our history, we would identify when the same old rationales and the same old policies are being circulated.

That is why groups fighting for increasing inequality always use the same old arguments, and appeal to the same old fears.

That is why they are labeled reactionary.

There are between 6-7 BILLION people on this earth; never before has the human population been so big. The earth is struggling to sustain itself in the face of misplaced priorities, war, rape, inhumanity, polution, malnutrition, disease, abandoment of women and children, etc. And the boys' club at the Vatican is worried about the "declining" population of Christians vs Muslims? The nuts never stop coming out of their shells!
If women in less developed countries were treated better and fed better and properly educated, many of the issues facing them wouldn't be occuring. Christian women - the same issues apply, maybe to a lesser degree, but nonetheless, women want a good, bright future for their children and themselves and often economics plays a big part in the decision about how many children to bring into the world. Men, especially Christian men, often want the same things for their children as their wives; a better life. Economics plays a very big part in the "better life" scenerios. Demographics isn't the issue; quality of life is the issue.