POPULATION DYNAMICS

The following topic are the most significant issues that you need to understand in chapter two.

A. POPULATION GROWTH
B. DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION
C. POPULATION CRISIS? Does it exist? Possible solutions?   
        - Classical view
        - Liberal view
        - Radical view

D. MIGRATION (addressed in lecture 4)

One of the most significant tools to geographers is the map. Geographers use maps for four basic reasons:

1. to locate phenomena- such as places, disease, peoples, etc.

2. to show relationships - using maps to prove that some traits are correlated, such as population growth and infant mortality rates

3. to prove ideas - maps illustrate relationships (as mentioned above) and statistics which allow us to support our ideas with locational examples

4. to ask questions - at times maps may reflect areas of contradiction from basic relationships. Such anomalies enable us to question the causal factors we are addressing. For example, if you look on the natural increase/population growth map, you will see a pattern of wealthy or industrial societies having lower population growth, while less developed countries have higher population growth. But, what accounts for high growth in countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) or Ireland (relatively)? This allows us to see the impact religion can have despite other relationships, such as growth rates among Mormons in the United States.

HOW TO READ A MAP
Since we geographers often take for granted that other people see what we see on maps, I give a lecture in class to show you how geographers look at maps. The following is a little organizational matrix that you may use and play with to familiarize yourself with the mapping portion of the exam.

1. TITLE: note the title of the map, try to see what it is the map is illustrating, often this is described in the figure heading more thoroughly.

2. PATTERN: note the coloration and symbolization used on the map. Try to see if there is a pattern displayed in the map. This will help you determine the process (causal factors), #4 below. For example, if you look at the map on world birth rates, there clearly is a pattern that industrialized countries, or countries in the Northern Hemisphere have lower birth rates than do countries in the Southern Hemisphere.

3. EXAMPLES: This is the part of mapping that most of my students have difficulty with, selecting country specific examples. Try to pick two or three countries that demonstrate high and low examples.  If you stay with the birth rate map, some countries with high birth rates would be: Zaire, Kenya, and Oman, while countries with low birth rates would be: The United States, Italy and Japan. Then you can also use the statistics from these examples to validate your ideas, such as the birth rate of Oman in 40/1000 while the birth rate for the USA is 20/1000.

4. PROCESS: this section asks what factors determine the pattern of the map. In our birth rate map used above, this requires your knowledge and synthesis of the reading materials. After reading chapter two, you should know some of the reasons which explain why countries have high birth rates, such as high infant mortality, a lack of contraception, lax child labor laws, an agricultural society (children are a labor supply), and religion. The ability to explain the process behind the pattern illustrated on a map shows that you clearly understand the course material and geographical relationships.

A. POPULATION GROWTH:
The most significant relationship you need to understand regards to population growth is that when BRs (birthrates) are greater than DRs (death rates) population growth, or natural increase occurs. This allows geographers to look more closely at BRs and DRs to see the cause of such growth and propose appropriate solutions, if needed. From reading the text you should now understand the relationship between BR and DR. The demographic transition is a graph which illustrates how population growth has changed over time, using Western Europe as a role model. The key idea is that the demographic transition shows the impact of INDUSTRIALIZATION upon population growth. Each stage represents a major change in society, and this affects population growth.

STAGE ONE: High BR and high DR creating low population growth. This stage is not acceptable to us due to its high mortality and low life expectancy. Some scholars suggest that during this stage women were close to having the MAXIMUM FERTILITY RATE that the human body can support which is 15 babies in one's lifetime. This number makes sense when you figure most women have around 30 years of fertility (menstruation to menopause) and doctors suggest waiting at least a year between each child to rejuvenate the woman's body. There are no countries currently in this stage. When countries have been in crisis, like Somalia in 1990 (life expectancy was 5 years), then we come close to what this stage was like.

STAGE TWO: Birth rates remain high (it does not increase!) and Death rates fall. This stage is associated with the AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION, when domestication occurs. This is associated with the material in Chapter 3. DOMESTICATION is when humans take plants and animals out of the wild and begin to control their reproduction. This enables us to become sedentary and remain in one location rather than continuously migrate looking for food. The DR decreases due to the following changes:

- increased food supplies (less starvation and malnutrition)

- improved sanitation and irrigation (less disease)

- the use of low level technologies

One example of a low level medical technology is ORT (Oral Rehydration Therapy). This is a long name for a simple procedure. If your baby has diarrhea and is dehydrating, how would you replenish his fluids so the baby would not die? Most of us would go to the doctor and give the child whatever medicine they would prescribe. But what if there were no doctors, like most of Africa? ORT is simply combining potable water with sugar. This will stop the baby from dehydrating. Modern forms of this we use today are Pedialight, which is a mixture of fructose and water. This seems simple, but the diffusion of such technologies can reduce the death rate.  As the Peace Corps and other agencies work in less developed countries, the end result is that they often reduce the DR (inoculations, sanitation systems). This reduces suffering and extends the life expectancy, but drastically increases population growth.

Countries in stage 2 have high natural rates of increase, usually between 2.5% and higher. This would include Ethiopia, Oman, Kenya, Nicaragua, Honduras, and most of the countries in Africa. in these agricultural societies children are valued as an economic asset; as labor in the fields, and social security when one becomes old.

STAGE THREE: In this stage the BR drops, this is in response to the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, often defined as the use of technology to mass produce goods and services. For our concerns with population, industrialization stimulates the following changes:

    - child labor laws (limiting use of children in factories)
    - industrial contraceptives (condom, IUD, diaphram)
    - industrial medicines/inoculations (penicillin, polio)
    - urbanization (housing is expensive)
    - reduction of religion
    - mandatory education

In combination, these changes and policies make children more of a liability than an asset (as in stage two). Children become expensive and our values shift away from children as a sign of wealth to things (consumption) as a indicator of one's economic status.   Countries in stage three have growth rates between 2.5-0.5 %, this includes countries such as India, China, Greenland, Brazil, and most of Latin America. Here, these countries are experiencing declining BRs as they become more industrialized, and religion becomes less important to the society.

STAGE FOUR: this stage represents the goal of all societies, yet it may have its own problems. In stage four DRs and BRs continue to drop due to modern technology. This is termed the HIGH TECH REVOLUTION, using technologies in medicine and contraception that have appeared since the 1960s.
        - high tech contraceptives (the pill, RU 486, Norplant, abortion)    
        - high tech medical care (open heart surgery, cancer treatments and testing...)

These countries have come close to ZPG or ZERO POPULATION GROWTH, where BR are equal to DR. This does not mean that couples only have to have one child, but in a society as a whole, each couple simply replaces themselves. Countries with growth rates less than 0.5 % are considered close to ZPG. These countries include Italy, Sweden, Japan and most other post-industrial societies. Factors that lead to this are often due to the improved status of women in society; women having careers, better access to contraceptives, very low infant mortality rates. In this stage, societies have very long life expectancies, some research suggests babies born in the year 2000, will have an average life expectancy of 120 years in these societies. Compared to the current life expectancy of 42 years in Sierra Leone (and other stage two countries) this seems like a huge gap of technological diffusion.  And, it is these countries with a long life expectancy which are dealing with euthanasia rights. Most European countries have no legal resistance to such decisions, such as Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands..

C. POPULATION CRISIS: As you will see on the graph of population growth over time, global population trends have drastically increased since the 1960s. This is reflective of the spread of technology and reducing DRS.  Stage two countries where there is a large gap between BRs and DRs (Oman: BR over 40, DR less than 10), are experiencing rapid population growth, which advanced countries have termed the POPULATION EXPLOSION.

One way geographers examine population growth is to look at two indicators:

A. DOUBLING TIME: this as the book states is the "rule of seventy", meaning that if you take the countries natural rate of increase (BR-DR) then divide this number by 70, this will give you the time such as country has until its population doubles in size based upon current rates of growth. For example; countries with 1% natural increase (USA, Spain, Portugal, Ireland) these countries have 70 years until their population doubles in size. This seems to be enough time to locate new sources of   food to feed the population. yet, if you look at countries with natural increases near 4% (Oman, Kenya, Rwanda) these countries have less than 17 years to double. This means that they must also double their food supply or experience famine, civil war (fighting over resources) and disease (dysentery from decaying bodies); all the natural checks which Thomas Malthus expected when population growth is much greater than the agricultural supply.

B. CARRYING CAPACITY: this can be defined as the amount of food or consumables needed to sustain a population. Carrying capacity can vary according to the level of technology a country possesses (commercial agriculture) and the rate of consumption that society utilizes.

Perspectives debating population growth center upon these two concerns. Classical economists, such as Malthus, see population growth as the major cause for the gap between advanced and less developed countries. They feel we should diffuse technology (contraception, medical) to countries with high growth and this will reduce the economic gap we see.

Liberal economists want to examine the issue of population growth more deeply, trying to fully identify the cause of high BR in specific situations. This implies our need to fully understand the cultural and economic circumstances of each society, and propose appropriate solutions if needed within the situations. For example, if the culture is Muslim, such as Oman and places a high moral value on children, yet experiences no problems from their high population growth, then perhaps we should not worry about its rate of growth.

The radical perspective takes a view supported by less developed countries. Their argument is that the reduction of population growth may be another form of domination by advanced countries. Even the demographic transition is proof of this, it uses countries with ZPG as best case scenarios, and also assumes that countries with high growth rates can easily (within one generation) reduce family size with no impact upon the culture or society, and yet it has taken advanced countries over 600 years to come to their current ZPG.

One researcher, E. Boserup, has used this argument to show that reducing population growth of less developed countries actually limits their industrialization, due to the fact that it limits the availability of cheap industrial labor. Her argument holds some validity if you recall the population growth rates (family size) of Americans during mass industrialization, 1870-1910.  Also, as the liberal argument addresses above, if high population growth is not harming the individual society, then perhaps the main concern of advanced countries is the political strength of a populous third world.

Marxists also point out that programs to reduce population are often a form of acculturation, where the more powerful group forces the weaker group to changes their culture. We see this argument in the United States when discussing the use of Norplant into welfare mothers. Which ethnic groups would this mostly affect? Is it right for a government (like China) to limit the number of children one can bear?

There are a lot of interesting debates on this topic. Be sure to see the websites listed in my hyperlink section if you want to address this topic

further.