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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • Watch: Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba on Population and National Security

    April 28, 2011 By Schuyler Null
    “Long-term trends really are what shape the environment in the future,” said Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba in this interview with ECSP. “As we’ve seen recently with…revolution in North Africa, it’s the long-term trends that act together for these things to happen – I like to say demography is not usually the spark for a conflict but it’s the fodder.”

    Sciubba is the Mellon Environmental Fellow in the Department of International Studies at Rhodes College. In her new book, The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security, she discusses the importance of demographic trends in relation to security and stability, including age structure, migration, youth bulges, population growth, and urbanization.

    One of the most important things to emerge from the book, said Sciubba, is that countries that are growing at very high rates that are overwhelming the capacities of the state (like many in sub-Saharan Africa) really will benefit from family planning efforts that target unmet need.

    Afghanistan, for example, “has an extremely young age structure,” Sciubba pointed out. “So if you’re trying to move into a post-conflict reconstruction atmosphere…you absolutely have to take into account population and the fact that it will continue to grow.”

    “Even if there are major moves now in terms of reducing fertility, they have decades ahead of this challenge of youth entering the job market,” Sciubba said. “Thousands and thousands more jobs will need to be created every year, so if you have a dollar to spend, that’s a really good place to do it.”

    For more on Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba and The Future Faces of War, see her book launch at the Wilson Center with Deputy Under Secretary Kathleen Hicks of the Department of Defense (video) and some of her previous posts on The New Security Beat.
    Topics: Afghanistan, Africa, demography, family planning, Middle East, military, population, security, video, youth
    • Anonymous

      Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that having 7 billion human beings overconsuming, overproducing and overpopulating in our planetary home in 2011 is a cause of climate destabilization? What is making it virtually impossible for many of us to see that the gigantic global scale of human-induced environmental degradation and human-forced natural resources dissipation is destroying Earth as a fit place for habitation by the children and life as we know it? What if first class professionals with appropriate expertise in human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth started speaking out about heretofore willfully denied scientific research by Hopfenberg and Pimentel? What if experts started being scientists by beginning to fulfill their responsibility to science and their duty to humanity?

      Although many capable people have spoken out to alert the family of humanity of a clear and present danger to human well being, environmental health and a good enough future for children everywhere, does a conspiracy of silence still exist among many too many so-called high rank experts with regard to a willfully unacknowledged, non-recursive biological problem: the one posed to humankind by human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth? Are we witnesses to the most incredible failure of intellectual honesty, moral courage and nerve in human history?

      Steven Earl Salmony
      AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
      established 2001
      http://www.panearth.org/

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