Population 10 Billion by Danny Dorling
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Blurb: Before May 2011 the top demographics experts of the United Nations had suggested that world population would peak at 9.1 billion in 2100, and then fall to 8.5 billion people by 2150. In contrast, the 2011 revision suggested that 9.1 billion would be achieved much earlier, maybe by 2050 or before, and by 2100 there would be 10.1 billion of us. What’s more, they implied that global human population might still be slightly rising in our total numbers a century from now. So what shall we do? Are there too many people on the planet? Is this the end of life as we know it?
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A global population of 10 billion is nothing to worry about | Danny Dorling | The Guardian
Clive Cookson, Financial Times
“Dorling evidently feels the need for a label and describes himself as a “practical possibilist” in the mould of Hans Rosling, the Swedish professor of international health and development. “Looked at in a certain way, told with a certain kind of story in mind, it is possible to paint a picture that has a rosier, less optimistically combative and less pessimistically catastrophic ending than many presume,” he writes … But both “10 Billion” books, in their very different ways, make a valuable contribution to rekindling a discussion on global population”
John Kampfner, The Observer
“Dorling punctures many myths, including the relationship between crime and population size. He provides interesting insights into the effect of population on social mobility, the wealth gap and global warming … His analysis of the past convinces me more than his insights on the future. The author suggests that the world may have gone past its peak in energy consumption. That might be the case in the declining west, but surely not for Asia’s booming economies.”
John Gray, The Guardian
“Intensely ideological … In a book that recurs regularly to famines caused by western imperialism, there is no discussion of the politically engineered famine that cost millions of lives in the Ukraine in the early 1930s. Even more remarkably, Dorling manages to avoid the famine China suffered as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958‑62 … Dorling invokes Marx on several occasions, always with respectful admiration. But Marx knew the human world is an arena of struggle and history more than a collection of reassuring anecdotes. Faced with Dorling’s sermonising, he would have reacted with a guffaw of contempt.”
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