The authors know they're working against not only popular perception, but also raw numbers. 'Empty Planet: The Shock Of Global Population Decline' by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. 'Once that decline begins, it will never end.' 'The great defining event of the 21st century – one of the great defining events in human history – will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population begins to decline,' they write. They agree with Malthus, Ehrlich and company that humanity is indeed facing an imminent population catastrophe – but the problem won't be overpopulation.

His 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb warned of imminent, widespread famines as the result of human overpopulation.īricker and Ibbitson say such books and the thinking behind them are 'completely and utterly wrong'.

Such a view has been the standard for centuries, and some of its proponents have made quite tidy sums writing books about the doom it foretells, most notably Paul Ehrlich. He declared back in 1798 that in conditions of economic and cultural stability, the human population would continue to increase, even to the point where it chokes resources and overburdens the Earth itself. Stripped of modern trappings such as greenhouse gas es and industrial meat farming, this is fairly close to the old vision of 18th-century scholar and theorist Thomas Malthus. According to all that received wisdom, there is a worldwide population crisis, with humans reproducing at ever-increasing rates, rapidly eating up all the world's resources and driving the engines of runaway climate change.

The central assertion Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson make in Empty Planet is one that readers of the daily news or regular government reports will find deeply counterintuitive.

Empty planet