Dud

clipped from reason.com The environmentalist news website Grist (former tagline: "Gloom and Doom with a Sense of Humor,' now replaced with "A Beacon in the Smog") is running an article by Fred Pearce that forthrightly (and finally) admits that the population bomb is a dud: A green myth is on the march. It wants to blame the world's overbreeding poor people for the planet's peril. It stinks. And on World Population Day, I encourage fellow environmentalists not to be seduced. Some greens think all efforts to save the world are doomed unless we "do something" about continuing population growth. But this is nonsense. Worse, it is dangerous nonsense.  For a start, the population bomb that I remember being scared by 40 years ago as a schoolkid is being defused fast. Back then, most women round the world had five or six children. Today's women have just half as many as their mothers -- an average of 2.6. Not just in the rich world, but almost everywhere.