Scotland’s population growth has slowed and net migration decreased over the past two years, according to the latest official estimates.
The number of non-British nationals residing north of the Border remains stable but years of continuous growth, caused largely by the expansion of the EU in the mid-2000s, is now coming to an end, a report from the National Records of Scotland noted.
The Scottish Government, external affairs secretary Fiona Hyslop said: “This slowing of migration growth in is extremely concerning. All of Scotland’s population growth over the next 25 years – including our working age population - is projected to come from migration, yet these latest population statistics illustrate the significant demographic challenges that we are facing. We want Scotland to continue to be a welcoming, internationalist, progressive, diverse country. People from all over the world who choose to settle in Scotland make valuable contributions to our economy, public services and communities. They are vital to the growth of Scotland’s working age population and in turn, our future prosperity. Instead, the UK Government is pursuing policies which are projected to reduce net migration to Scotland by between 30-50% over the next two decades, completely disregarding our distinct needs."
Yet despite this we have many who declare that we face a population problem.
Many factors affect population growth and the magnitude of the Earth’s carrying capacity over time, among them is a positive feedback loop between demographic growth and technological development. Human knowledge (e.g., science) and technological development (e.g., machines, drugs) improve over time and boost human survival, which helps accelerate population growth. Talented individuals, who can devise intellectual and technological improvements, are statistically more likely to arise from and survive to maturity in larger populations living at more advanced levels of development. The intellectual and technological innovations of inventive individuals make it possible to amplify the Earth’s carrying capacity as the population grows, for example by tamping down the incidence and virulence of diseases, and by increasing agricultural yields. However, there is no guarantee that such a positive feedback can cycle forever, and current trends would seem to indicate that this feedback loop is losing its momentum.
We homo sapiens could as a species choose to cooperate globally to simultaneously raise the living standards of the most impoverished — and majority — of Earth’s people, and reformulate our civilization’s manner of energy generation and economic operation, from its highly inequitable feudal capitalism to a highly equalised world eco-socialism: to halt the poisoning of our global environment with waste heat and carbon dioxide from combustion; waste methane from industrialised meat consumption and a melting degradation of the biosphere; and waste chemicals and plastics from industrialised farming and the detritus of industrialised consumerism. In other words, we could unite to share out the Earth equitably while also maximising the efficiency of the global use of natural resources by quickly reforming our civilisation — our methods of finding, extracting and using energy, and the forms and purposes of our economics — so as to be in sustainable balance with natural processes and cycles, all for the purpose of allowing Lifeboat Earth to row or drift for as long as possible with a minimal sacrifice of human decency and human life.
Capitalism is the ideology of parasites. The people of such an idealised world, eco-socialist society, would be committed individuals who would take it as a given that if human extinction were imminent and unavoidable, they would all share the same fate in solidarity: honour till the end, whenever that would be whether sooner or later.
Human history up to the present suggests that this “all in till the end” type of world socialism is a very unlikely future for us globally, though small isolated pockets of it might develop within the much larger drama of human civilisation.
We might even live to see American and European navies shelling refugee ships at sea, and troops of their militarised police summarily executing undocumented aliens breaching their borders, to thwart the arrival of waves of destitute and desperate migrants. Such atrocities would be manifestations of extreme “them or us” end-times panic by the power-clinging wicked.
Adapted
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/15/too-many-people-or-too-much-greed/
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