Franciscan Sister of Christian Charity Sister Renee Mirkes, ethicist at St. Paul VI Institute, Omaha Nebraska, writes for The Catholic World Report on the global birth dearth. She sees it as an existential threat if we’ve ever faced one. Image: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Just decades after ominous warnings of overpopulation, we are careening toward a population implosion that is incapable of sustaining global humanity.
Rewind. It’s 1970, and Walter Conkrite sounds this demographic siren on CBS Nightly News: “The stakes in this battle are far greater than any other we have ever fought. . . . The experts we interviewed told us population is the fundamental crisis.”i Nobody better to turn to, Conkrite advises, than biologist Paul Ehrlich. His recent book, The Population Bomb, portends: “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come—and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” In sum, Conkrite concludes, the verdict is in. Unless we limit births, overpopulation is going to ruin humanity.
Fast forward. In a 2021 interview on CBS This Morning, Professor Dowell Myers, a renowned demographer at the University of Southern California, made this unnerving correction. “The trouble is we overshot and we dropped [the population] down too much.” Read more.
