Headed toward extinction?

World depopulation — rather than overpopulation — is the troublesome trend that should concern the entire planet.

World population will hit 7 billion by 2012, according to a recent United Nations report. Given that we just hit the 6 billion mark in October 1999, it is easy to conclude that there are just too many people in the world. How are we ever going to overcome global warming, feed the masses, get that beachfront property, let alone find parking, if the population keeps jumping by nearly one billion per decade?

The good news is that's not going to happen again. If you need another megatrend to worry about, fixate instead on the growing prospects for world depopulation and what it means for you and your children (assuming you have any).

Yes, human population is still growing in some places dramatically so. But at the same time, a strange new phenomenon is spreading around the globe, one whose very existence contradicts the deepest foundations of our modern mind-set.

Darwinism presupposes, and modern biology teaches, that all organisms breed to the limit of their available resources. Yet starting in the world's richest, best-fed nations during the 1970s,and now spreading throughout the developing world, we find birthrates falling below the levels needed to avoid long-term, and in many instances, short-term, population loss. The phenomenon has spread beyond Europe and Asia to Latin America.

Brazil, a land once known for its celebration of dental-floss bikinis and youthful carnival exuberance, is an aging nation that no longer produces enough children to replace its population. The same is true of Chile and Costa Rica. Joining them over the next 10 to 20 years, the U.N. projects, will be many other countries Americans still tend to associate with youth bulges including Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Algeria, Kuwait, Libya and Morocco. Think we need to build a wall on the southern border? Birthrates have declined so quickly in Mexico that its population of children younger than 15 has been in free-fall since 2000 and is expected to drop by one-third over the next 40 years. …