The weekend got off to a very good start around here when the current issue of Mother Jones landed in the mailbox on Friday morning. I’m not normally into math stories, but the one I read this Saturday morning is an exception. So here, from the cover story, are some numbers: in 1965, the year before I was born, there were 3.3 billion people in the world. By 1983, the year before I graduated high school, that number was 4.7 billion. And by 2009, the year after I quit drinking, there were 6.8 billion of us.
I really try to resist reciting chunks of other people’s text, but I do love a good paragraph. Like this one, compliments of Mother Jones:
The United Nations projects that world population will stabilize at 9.1 billion in 2050. This prediction assumes a decline from the current average global fertility rate of 2.56 children per woman to 2.02 children per woman in the years between 2045 and 2050. But should mothers average half a child more in 2045, the world population will peak at 10.5 billion five years later. Half a child less, and it stabilizes at 8 billion. The difference in those projections—2.5 billion—is the total number of people alive on Earth in 1950.
Sort of takes your breath away, doesn’t it? At best – assuming that the fewer mouths to feed, the better, which is in fact my assumption – we’re going to add at least 5.5 billion people over the course of one brief century. How, I wondered on Saturday morning, is that possible?
Then it occurred to me that it happened in families like mine, times many millions more. My parents were married six years after there were 2.5 billion of us; in 2050, the last of their six offspring will turn 80. It happened like this: My father had one sister and one brother. My mother had one sister. In little more than half a century, those five individuals – my blood aunts and uncles and my parents – put 21 additional people into the system. And most of us have added two or more on top of that.
