This is no remote, hypothetical, problem. In May of this year, Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah published research that shows that Russia today is suffering depopulation in absolute numbers. Russia's current population is 7 million lower than it was in 1991. In Russia's case this is a combination of higher than average mortality and a dramatically lower fertility rate of 1.34. This depopulation has led to "adverse and very real consequences—humanitarian, social and economic."

Are we in the United States already seeing the effects of a decline in fertility rates? Maybe. Daniel P. Goldman has written "Demographics & Depression" in the May issue of First Things. Goldman notes "The declining demographics of the traditional American family raise a dismal possibility: Perhaps the world is poorer now because the present generation did not bother to rear a new generation. All else is bookkeeping and ultimately trivial. This unwelcome and unprecedented change underlies the present global economic crisis."

Phillip Longman, senior fellow at the New American Foundation, hardly a center of conservative thought, notes that, notwithstanding ever cheaper food, natural resources and other commodity prices, "we still face a 'population bomb' of a different sort. What makes today's economic growth unsustainable is not that it is about to exhaust the Earth's bounty, but that it is consuming more human capital than it produces."

Dramatically falling birth rates may well reduce our carbon footprint, but they will also have enormous and adverse consequences for civilization as we know it today. And maybe sooner than we think.

Joseph A. Cannon is editor of the Deseret News. E-mail: cannon@desnews.com