Russia faces demographic disaster (BBC) {Russia to lose 1/2 of population}

By Steven Eke
BBC News, Moscow

In his recent state of the nation address, President Vladimir Putin said the most urgent problem facing Russia is its demographic crisis.

The country's population is declining by at least 700,000 people each year, leading to slow depopulation of the northern and eastern extremes of Russia, the emergence of hundreds of uninhabited "ghost villages" and an increasingly aged workforce.

Now, one of Russia's leading sociologists has warned that the country's population may halve by the middle of this century.

Official Russian forecasts, along with those from international organisations like the UN, predict a decline from 146 million to between 80 and 100 million by 2050.

But in an exclusive interview to the BBC, Viktor Perevedentsev, who has been studying Russia's population since the 1960s, said he believed even these figures may be overly optimistic.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5056672.stm

Maybe they could offer immigration to any Chinese couples who want to have more than one child? That would be an interesting conflict of priorities.

Humans, like gas, expand to fill the space available. Any trend that tends to depopulate a resource-rich region (like northern and eastern Russia) will be reversed in 20-30 years when such pristine wildernesses become chic.

Don't worry, there isn't a square inch of the planet that we humans won't ultimately fuck up.

I'm all for population decreasing. But this will probably have the unfortunate side effect of a certain amount of political instability, at least for awhile.

*SIGH* If everyone could just be grownups about it...

...I think we'll all be in for quite a bit of political instability for the next 100 years at least.

Maybe its just me but, when I take a short term view of humanity's prospects, I get very depressed. When I take a longer view, I feel a bit less pessimistic. It would be nice if we could fast-forward through the hell to come, to see what lies beyond.

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for the planet. So the human population ANYwhere on Earth declines, that's a bad thing?

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