Redu, Belgium — Nearly 40 years ago, books saved this village.

    The community was shrinking fast. Farming jobs had disappeared and families were moving away from this pastoral patch of French-speaking Belgium. But in the mid-1980s, a band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. The village of about 400 became home to more than two dozen bookstores — more shops than cows, its boosters liked to say — and thousands of tourists thronged the winsome streets.

    Now, though, more than half the bookstores have closed. Some of the storekeepers died, others left when they could no longer make a living. Many who remain are in their 70s and aren’t sure what’ll happen after they’re gone.

    It’s not just the businesses at risk. It’s Redu’s identity.

Reis Thebault. This village was a book capital. What happens when people stop buying so many books? In: The Washington Post. Internet: www.washingtonpost.com (adapted).

The World Might Be Running Low on Americans

    The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chickfil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.

    But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.

    I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.

    Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing? Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.

    And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.

    But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners. This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.

    For decades, the United States has enjoyed a significant economic advantage over other industrialized nations — our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and more prosperous future. But in the last decade, American fertility has gone down. At the same time, there has been a slowdown in immigration.

    The Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that these trends are catching up with us. As of April 1, it reports that there were 331,449,281 residents in the United States, an increase of just 7.4 percent since 2010 — the second-smallest decade-long growth rate ever recorded, only slightly ahead of the 7.3 percent growth during the Depression-struck 1930s.

    The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history. The nation will cross the 400-million population mark sometime in the late 2050s, but by then we’ll be quite long in the tooth — about half of Americans will be over 45, and one fifth will be older than 85.

    The idea that more people will lead to greater prosperity may sound counterintuitive — wouldn’t more people just consume more of our scarce resources? Human history generally refutes this simple intuition. Because more people usually make for more workers, more companies, and most fundamentally, more new ideas for pushing humanity forward, economic studies suggest that population growth is often an important catalyst of economic growth.

    A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century. And a declining population could be catastrophic in other ways. In a recent paper, Chad Jones, an economist at Stanford, argues that a global population decline could reduce the fundamental innovativeness of humankind. The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.

    There are more direct ways that slow growth can hurt us. As a country’s population grows heavy with retiring older people and light with working younger people, you get a problem of too many eaters and too few cooks. Programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare may suffer as they become dependent on ever-fewer working taxpayers for funding. Another problem is the lack of people to do all the work. For instance, experts predict a major shortage of health care workers, especially home care workers, who will be needed to help the aging nation.

    In a recent report, Ali Noorani, the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration-advocacy group, and a co-author, Danilo Zak, say that increasing legal immigration by slightly more than a third each year would keep America’s ratio of working young people to retired old people stable over the next four decades.

    As an immigrant myself, I have to confess I find much of the demographic argument in favor of greater immigration quite a bit too anodyne. Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth. I also believe that the United States’ founding idea of universal equality will never be fully realized until we recognize that people outside our borders are as worthy of our ideals as those here through an accident of birth.

Five stranded snorkellers rescued from tiny island off Australia after their huge SOS message was spotted by helicopter.

(Adam Withnall / Wednesday 23 April 2014)

    Five snorkellers stranded on a tiny island off
the east coast of Australia have been rescued after
scrawling a giant SOS message into a nearby
sandbank.

[05]    The group had been stuck out at sea for more
than nine hours after their boat’s anchor failed and
it drifted away. 

    They had been swimming around a remote
sandbar near Wigton Island, Queensland, when the
[10] vessel started shifting - with their mobile phones,
clothes, water and sunscreen all still on board – and
it had moved beyond reach before they had time to
react. 

    Speaking to the Courier-Mail about the ordeal
[15] yesterday, Lyn Forbes-Smith described how she, a
female friend and three male friends were facing
the prospect of a long, cold night surrounded by
ocean when they finally spotted an approaching
rescue helicopter. 

  [20]   “We had sort of made plans about what we’d
do on the rock for the evening,” she said.

    “We had reef walkers on thankfully, but we
had no food, water, cream, no hats, not much at all.
We just looked for the highest ground, we looked
for rocks where five of us could huddle together
[25] because we didn’t really want to separate, and we
wanted to be out of the wind as best as possible.” 

    Ms Forbes-Smith explained that they were
concerned the sandbar – and their message – would
[30] go under with the tide, but that they were
“reasonably confident” someone would come
looking when friends realised they had not
returned.

    The group had set off from Keswick Island
[35] towards Wigton Island at around 8am for the
snorkelling trip, and it was around 5pm when they
first saw signs of help approaching.

    Another member of the group, Craig Gilbert,
told ABC News of their joy at spotting an RACQ
[40] rescue helicopter. 

    “We saw the helicopter and we thought, 'Oh,
you beauty' - and then it disappeared and we
thought, 'Oh no - we better look out for our beds
for the night' - then it came back probably 20
minutes later,” he said. 

    Rescue helicopter crew member Damien
[45] Kross said the five were treated for sunburn and
dehydration, but were otherwise “fine”. 

    “They were a little bit dehydrated but we
winched them to safety and brought them back here
to Mackay on the mainland] for just to have a
[50] quick medical attention and they were all fine.” 

(Adapted from The Independent / Friday 11 July 2014)

T E X T

Children set for more climate disasters than their grandparents, research shows

    People born today will suffer many
times more extreme heatwaves and
other climate disasters over their
lifetimes than their grandparents,
[5] research has shown. The study is the
first to assess the contrasting
experience of climate extremes by
different age groups and starkly
highlights the intergenerational
[10] injustice posed by the climate crisis.
    The analysis showed that a child
born in 2020 will endure an average of
30 extreme heatwaves in their lifetime,
even if countries fulfil their current
[15] pledges to cut future carbon emissions.
That is seven times more heatwaves
than someone born in 1960. Today’s
babies will also grow up to experience
twice as many droughts and wildfires
[20] and three times more river floods and
crop failures than someone who is 60
years old today.
    However, rapidly cutting global
emissions to keep global heating to
[25] 1.5C would almost halve the heatwaves
today’s children will experience, while
keeping under 2C would reduce the
number by a quarter.
    A vital task of the UN’s Cop26
[30] climate summit in Glasgow in November
is to deliver pledges of bigger emissions
cuts from the most polluting countries
and climate justice will be an important
element of the negotiations. Developing
[35] countries, and the youth strike
protesters who have taken to the
streets around the world, point out that
those who did least to cause the climate
crisis are suffering the most.
[40]     “Our results highlight a severe
threat to the safety of young
generations and call for drastic emission
reductions to safeguard their future,”
said Prof Wim Thiery, at Vrije

[45] Universiteit Brussel in Belgium and who
led the research. He said people under
40 today were set to live
“unprecedented” lives, ie suffering
heatwaves, droughts, floods and crop
[50] failures that would have been virtually
impossible – 0.01% chance – without
global heating.
    Dr Katja Frieler, at the Potsdam
Institute for Climate Impact Research in
[55] Germany and part of the study team,
said: “The good news is we can take
much of the climate burden from our
children’s shoulders if we limit warming
to 1.5C by phasing out fossil fuel use.
[60] This is a huge opportunity.”
    Leo Hickman, editor of Carbon
Brief, said: “These new findings
reinforce our 2019 analysis which
showed that today’s children will need
[65] to emit eight times less CO2 over the
course of their lifetime than their
grandparents, if global warming is to be
kept below 1.5C. Climate change is
already exacerbating many injustices,
[70] but the intergenerational injustice of
climate change is particularly stark.”
    The research, published in the
journal Science, combined extreme
event projections from sophisticated
[75] computer climate models, detailed
population and life expectancy data,
and global temperature trajectories
from the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.
[80]     The scientists said the increases
in climate impacts calculated for today’s
young people were likely to be
underestimates, as multiple extremes
within a year had to be grouped
[85] together and the greater intensity of
events was not accounted for.
    There was significant regional
variation in the results. For example,
the 53 million children born in Europe
[90] and central Asia between 2016 and
2020 will experience about four times
more extreme events in their lifetimes
under current emissions pledges, but
the 172 million children of the same age
[95] in sub-Saharan Africa face 5.7 times
more extreme events.
    “This highlights a disproportionate
climate change burden for young
generations in the global south,” the
[100] researchers said.
    Dohyeon Kim, an activist from
South Korea who took part in the global
climate strike on Friday, said:
“Countries of the global north need to
[105] push governments to put justice and
equity at the heart of climate action,
both in terms of climate [aid] and
setting more ambitious pledges that

take into consideration historical
[110] responsibilities.”
    The analysis found that only those
aged under 40 years today will live to
see the consequences of the choices
made on emissions cuts. Those who are
[115] older will have died before the impacts
of those choices become apparent in the
world.