The stability of the world depends on safe sex, according to a Boston University demographer who addressed the future of human population last night at the School of Management.
The world’s population affects and is affected by culture, economy and environment, said Joel Cohen, a visiting professor at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
Cohen said there are many things people can do now to reduce future overpopulation, including being aware of fertility and giving others access to contraception, such as condoms.
“If you don’t want children, don’t have them,” he said. “There would not be a population problem if every baby was a wanted baby.”
Cohen, a Columbia University Earth Institute populations professor, began with his central argument based on a visual representation of the interaction of the world’s population with other areas of life.
“We cannot talk about population alone,” said Cohen, who is an Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations at Rockefeller University in New York.
Addressing about 60 students and professors about the causes and effects of the world’s increasing human population, Cohen began the first lecture in a five-part weeklong series.
He emphasized the rapid growth rate in the last few centuries, particularly in the 20th Century, noting five-sixths of all population growth in the last 12,000 years has occurred in the last 200 years alone.
Cohen also pointed out the increasing gap between social and economic classes in the world’s population.
“There are two worlds on this planet,” Cohen said. “I will call them rich and poor.”
The top two percent of the world’s population own 51 percent of its wealth, while the bottom half of the population owns barely 1 percent, Cohen said.
“Population is only a factor of the world’s problem. It is not the only problem,” he said. “If people carry away this image of population, culture, economy and environment, they will not be persuaded by simple explanations of complex phenomena that leave out essential ingredients.”
School of Education graduate student Jennifer Fox said it is important to discuss the future of the world’s population.
“Especially in this media-centered world, because we’re so focused on our own comfortable lives of TV and entertainment, but this is something that the media lacks,” she said. “This is information about why our world is the way it is, and any way you can inform people about it is good.”