"By 2050, it is calculated that the United States will have the dubious honor of being the first Western nation to turn its dominant culture into a minority. Bill Clinton has hailed this as a good thing." [NewsMax]

"The remarkable particulars of today's global march toward smaller family size fly in the face of many prevailing assumptions about when rapid fertility decline can, and cannot, occur."[Australia News Weekly]

"A funny thing happened along the way to the Federal Election - commentators began to wake up to what is arguably the most pressing social and economic problem facing Australia. When John Howard announced his innovative, though modest, incentive for mothers to stay home with their first-born baby - and virtually no one slated him for "wanting to keep women in the home" - it marked a possible turning point in the debate on family policy." [Australia News Weekly]

"First World nations, including Japan,... have begun slowly to vanish from the earth." [Drudge Report]

"Western civilization is committing suicide. But you are not supposed to realize it. Not until it's too late to do something to reverse the tide." [NewsMax]

"And here's the overwhelming demographic story of our time: Never have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, all over the world, yielding populations in decline. That story was buried by the noise of "the population explosion," a powerful trend that peaked decades ago, but which is still promoted by environmental alarmists and their allies in the United Nations." [Jewish World Review]

National Geographic News story about the hypothesis that past climate variations led to the collapse of civilizations, with speculation on the implications for our society's future.

Population levels in former communist countries are diving because of economic decline, the UN says. [BBC News]

"In fact, no major industrialized country has a fertility rate above 2.1, known as the replacement rate because it is the number of children per woman at which a population replaces itself. The average fertility rate in Europe is 1.45, a rate that could lead, one day, to a severe decline in population. And 22 developing countries have also dropped below this threshold." [MSNBC]

"WASHINGTON - "In America, the places prepared for the forty million unborn lost since Roe v. Wade have been filled by the grateful poor of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.""

"One issue most of the main players in the debate can agree on is the decline in Australian - and Western - fertility rates. There is agreement not only that the decline exists, but that it represents a major problem in need of urgent correction." [News Weekly Australia]

"If Tony Blair has anything to do with it, there won't always be an England" [The Spectator]

BBC Talking point on the subject. Quotes a russian as saying "So, what is there to do? Nothing - we just have to accept that our civilisation is going to die out "

Discussion with Pat Buchanan on "Death of the West". [WorldNetDaily]

"Japan's population, under pressure from a low birth-rate and a rapidly ageing society, may start to decline sooner than expected." [Reuters]

While for many countries concerns about high birth rates persist, for many other countries the problem now is very low rates of birth. [Population Today]

"If Italy's fertility will remain at the same level for thirty to forty years, the Italian population will be reduced by one-third."

Discussion of the ramification of the book "Death of the West" [NewsMax]

Russia faces a demographic crisis unprecedented in peacetime - violence, alcohol and poor healthcare are among the reasons. [BBC News]

Discusses some of the issues surrounding the population fall in Russia. [Population Today] (May 1, 2001)

Disease, drug abuse, poverty and depression cause a sharp fall in Russia's population.[BBC News]

New figures predict that Scotland's population will drop over the next 25 years. [BBC News]

"A sizable swathe of the country's heartland is undergoing a severe drop in births that, if it continues, could empty many small towns in just one generation." [Atlantic Monthly] (July 1, 1997)

"Already, Japanese demo-graphers are publicly speculating about which year in the Third Millen-nium the last Japanese baby will be born."

Two interrelated mysteries: Why do so many Arab Muslims think Western civilization is about to collapse? And how could so many well-educated hijackers live among us for so long and not be seduced by our cherished American way of life?

"The Japanese island of Oshima is giving us an inkling of what the future may be like. Children are so rare that an old people's home set up dummies of a little boy ... Many schools are empty as there are so few children. As people die, houses are abandoned. Twenty years ago, one village had 500 people; now there are 230; in another twenty years there might be none. ... According to the reporter, "what has happened here will also happen, to one degree or another, throughout Japan - and in many other developed countries."

The old assumptions about world population trends need to be rethought. One thing is clear, in the next century the world is in for some rapid downsizing [Atlantic Monthly]