From Deseret News archives:
Overpopulating the Earth is unfounded myth
Ehrlich and his skeptical friends have been wrong at every turn about the amount and availability of the Earth's resources. This fear of scarcity is embedded in the Malthusian fear that population growth will outstrip the resources necessary to sustain growth.
No matter how wrong the anti-population growth cadres were about the scarcity of resources, they were successful in creating a sustained fear of the "population bomb." This fear of growth is so steeped in the world consciousness that nothing seems to be able to dislodge it. Even today, there is a strong anti-natal movement among policy elites aimed at "population stabilization."
"Fears of a population time bomb have dominated environmentalists' and demographers' predictions for decades. Malthusian doom-messengers will be disconcerted by U.N. findings ... which will reveal that women are likely to bear an average of only 1.85 children in all countries by the middle of the century. Families in developing countries are beginning to limit the number of their offspring as much as those in the West," reports The Sunday Times (London).
That little number, 1.85, is very significant. It refers to "total fertility rate," or TFR, which is the average number of children born to women during their childbearing years. In order for a country to simply stay even in population, the TFR needs to be 2.1; anything below that means population decline over time.
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