Leave it to women to save the world

File in the no duh department:

Pick any litany of environmental horrors you can think of.

Little if any of this would have transpired had human numbers peaked long ago. Such a peak might have occurred by now, even with the gains in life expectancy of the past century, if the status and reproductive intentions of women had found consistent support rather than silence and censure.

writes Robert Engleman of the Worldwatch Institute in an excerpt on Alternet from his new book, "More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want."

Leave to women, more than to anyone else, the decision about when and how often to bear children ... History ... suggests that doing so has moderated population growth in the past, and contemporary evidence makes clear that it does exactly that today.

This has been said many times before, but it seems to keep being forgotten. And thanks to Engleman for taking a swipe at those moaning about falling birth rates, who apparently want to see women perpetually barefoot and pregnant and the world groaning with the weight of us all. I thank Engleman especially for taking a swipe at that stripe of environmentalist who favor Big Fixes (which as he notes are often not only ineffective but downright dangerous).

What’s new(ish) in his piece is that he joins his warning about population with the problem of worsening resource depletion and ends up with a rather encouraging thought:

The current momentum of population growth all but guarantees there won't be population declines for several decades. Those are precisely the decades during which humanity could make the easiest gains in energy efficiency. And just about when energy use is about as efficient as it can be in an imperfect world, human population could begin to shrink. That will remove much of the burden of squeezing additional water from the stone of a super-efficient global energy system. The need to reduce demand for fossil fuels will grow more urgent with each passing year as the global climate warms and the illusion of endless carbon-free energy gradually fades. And population decline reduces energy demand, all else equal, without any hardship for anyone.