Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker

Author:Darrell Bricker [Bricker, Darrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984823229
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 37585564
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

The United Nations’ warning was stark: The world’s refugee population at the end of 2015 had reached 19.9 million, higher than it was even at the end of the Second World War.253 With the world in turmoil, tens of millions had been displaced from their homes, many of them reduced to a life placed on hold in refugee camps. The need is great. Who will help?

Except the UN was torquing the numbers. There may have been more refugees in 2015 than in 1945, but the planet’s population is triple what it was then. And if the plight of Muslim refugees is dangerous, desperate, and terrifying, the millions of Germans who fled from East Prussia as the Soviet armies advanced, or who were expelled by Poles or Czechs or Hungarians who wanted their land, fared far worse. Millions of Poles were displaced, in turn, from eastern lands that the Russians took for themselves. The scenes were equally chaotic in the Balkans. At its peak, fourteen thousand people a day were crossing, or being pushed across, the border between the Soviet-occupied and Western-occupied zones. Many thousands drowned in overcrowded freighters that capsized in the Baltic Sea. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave, and who ended up trapped behind Russian lines, sometimes resorted to cannibalism. Many eventually ended up in Soviet labor camps. At the same time, Western authorities sent about two million Soviet citizens, many of them prisoners of war, back to their homelands, where in many cases they were never heard from again. And hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived the Holocaust struggled to make it to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. It took fifteen years before the last of the refugee camps in Europe were closed.254 In all, as many as fourteen million Germans were displaced at the end of the war, and about five hundred thousand died as a result.255 And on the other side of the world, one study counted thirteen million Chinese displaced or homeless in 1947.256 This figure was only an estimate, and didn’t account for the one hundred million who were displaced by the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists that went on before and after the Second World War.257 The death toll also isn’t known, but it must have been horrific. The planet, in short, was in far greater turmoil in the wake of the Second World War than it was in 2015.

In fact, were it not for the chaos in Syria and Iraq, added to the chronic instability of Afghanistan and Somalia and the state of nature that Libya descended into, the current refugee situation would be relatively stable. According to the United Nations Development Program, in 2015 there were 244 million international migrants—people not living in the country in which they were born—spread around the world.258 While a quarter billion people may seem like a lot—it is, after all, equivalent to the population of the world’s fourth-most-populous country, Indonesia259—it’s just 3.3 percent of the world’s total population, up from 2.

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