An Unfamiliar World
An Unfamiliar World John Michael Greer Last month’s post on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers worldwide. Nearly everyone alive today grew up hearing about the population boom; it requires a major shift in mental gears to adjust to the imminence of the population bust. A twentieth century problem. It fascinates me that so few people have grasped that this is happening, and even fewer have any sense of what it implies. I still field comments tolerably often from readers who are convinced that overpopulation is the biggest threat our species faces. (Admittedly most of those readers belong to my generation, and we grew up in a media culture saturated with such ideas.) That human population is near a peak and will be declini
