"Genealogy and population fascinate us all. Who are we? Where do we come from? And crucially nowadays, how many more of us can we accommodate? Can we survive the impending crisis and, if so, how?
Danny Dorling, one of the UK's leading experts, tells us not to worry. His latest of several books on population [
Population 10 Billion] takes to task the United Nations and its recent predictions of a world that will explode to 10 billion people….
This 10 billion mark is proving talismanic, with a spate of doom-laden books presaging the moment. One eagerly awaited tome, by Stephen Emmott, will be published shortly, with a message to be very scared. Dorling, by contrast, is more sanguine.
Several factors, he argues, are driving down fertility rates. One is education. Another is public health. More intriguing is his contention about migration: 'People tend to rapidly adopt the fertility rates of the places they move to. If Europeans want to be well cared for in our old age, and we also want fewer future people in the world, the last thing we should be doing is trying to reduce migration to Europe.'"
— John Kampfner,
The Guardian
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