Gwynne Dyer is cheering up. Sure, the past decade has had more than its share of stupid wars, obsessions about terrorism, denial about climate change, rapacious turbo-capitalism, and lies, lies, lies. But signs of progress actually do abound. While the world is far from perfect as we embark on a fresh decade, Dyer believes that the "sense of sliding out of control towards ten different kinds of disaster has gone." When things go wrong it’s always easy to pin blame — but singling out the forces that lead to positive change can be trickier.

In this illuminating collection of columns from the last five years, Gwynne Dyer ferrets out the signs of hope — without overlooking the issues that remain seemingly intractable. Mining the events of recent history, Dyer contextualizes the recent past and anticipates what the future might have in store. This journalist’s beat is global: from Africa to South America, from Europe to the Middle East, and any other region with a political pulse.

Acerbic and iconoclastic, Dyer has never been afraid to call ’em like he sees ’em — and we are all the better for his trademark candour and the breadth of his knowledge and expertise. For anyone seeking to understand the larger forces that shape our society and our world, Crawling from the Wreckage makes for necessary reading.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

When experts play around with population growth statistics they are mostly concerned about overpopulation, pressure on resources and the environment, all the usual worries—and they are right to worry about those things. They pay less attention to the political effects because they are less easy to trace, but they are there, and they are very important.
 
There has been a steady run of good news on the population front in the past few decades. In 1968, the United Nations Population Division predicted that the world population would grow to twelve billion by 2050. By 1992, the same office was predicting ten billion people by 2050. Last month, it predicted that the world’s population would peak at 8.9 billion, and not until 2300—although it will already be pretty close to that figure by 2050.
 
In reality, even this is probably a pessimistic prediction. All these projections have been based on an assumption that birth rates will continue to fall—a straightforward projection of the world’s population based even on today’s birth rate would yield a total of around fifteen billion people by 2050—but the assumptions about how fast they will fall have consistently been too conservative.
 
You can see why the forecasters tended towards pessimism: the recent history of human-population growth has resembled an avalanche. It took almost all of human history to reach a total of two billion people, around 1927. It took less than fifty years to add the next two bil lion, by 1974. It took less than twenty-five years to add another two billion, by 1999. And we’re still growing at seventy-six million a year: an extra two Canadas every year.
 
In 1950, there was not a single country where the population was not growing rapidly, the average woman had more than five children in her lifetime, and the birth rate was not dropping significantly anywhere. Then came the new birth-control technologies and the rise of women’s liberation ideologies, and in many Western countries the birth rate dropped by half in ten years. As recently as 1974, however, the median birth rate worldwide was still 5.4 children per woman, so the pessimists were still winning the arguments.
 
They believed that only literacy could spread the ideas and techniques that made birth rates fall, and that literacy would not grow fast enough. Well, literacy has grown a lot faster than they expected—between 1980 and 2000, literacy rose from 18 percent to 47 percent in Afghanistan; from 33 percent to 64 percent in Nigeria; from 66 percent to 85 percent in China; and from 69 percent to 87 percent in Indonesia. But birth rates have dropped even faster than literacy has risen: the global average is now 2.7 children per woman.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

Visit Gwynne Dyer's website.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

Introduction
 
1. Nowhere to Go but Up
2. Afghanistan
3. Climate I
4. Religion I
5. Israel-Palestine I
6. Miscellany I
7. Terrorism I
8. South Asia
9. Iraq I
10. The Post-Soviet Space
11. Iran
12. Africa
13. Oil
14. China
15. How War Works in the Middle East
16. Europe
17. Nukes
18. Of Time and Human Nature
19. Terrorism II
20. The Old Dominions
21. Iraq II
22. Climate II
23. Demography in Action
24. Religion II
25. Latin America
26. Miscellany II
27. Southeast Asia
28. Israel-Palestine II
29. Disaster Politics
30. Japan
31. The International Rule of Law
32. Crawling from the Wreckage
 
Index

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page

GWYNNE DYER was born in Newfoundland and entered the Canadian navy at seventeen. He has served in the Canadian, British and American navies. He holds a Ph.D. in war studies from the University of London, has taught at Sandhurst and served on the Board of Governors of Canada’s Royal Military College. Dyer writes a syndicated column that appears in more than 150 newspapers around the world. He lives in England with his wife and children.

 Back to top | e-mail or print this page