The individual decisions made by the age-25-to-34 Millennial Generation — decisions to not have children, for example, or to go deeply in debt for a possibly useless college degree, or to live in busy urban cities rather than in quaint rural communities like Pagosa Springs — those decisions, we have little control over.
What we do have some control over, theoretically, are our own individual and collective decisions here in Archuleta County.
As discussed in Part Three, a regional or national birthrate suggests the the total number of babies born during a certain period of time — typically, one year. The fertility rate, meanwhile, is an estimate of the number of babies born to an average female during her entire lifetime.
These rates may, or may not, be connected to ovulation rates, one measure of the physical ability to become pregnant among a population of females.
The declining fertility rate in the US — the rate at which young women are bearing children — has (temporarily?) fallen below a “replacement rate” of about 2.3 children per woman of childbearing age. As mentioned in Part Three, the current national rate appears to be in the 1.7 range. That’s a national average. The average rate varies among the US states, with South Dakota on the high side — nearly 2.3 — and Massachusetts on the low side at about 1.5 children per female of childbearing age.
Colorado is near the low end of the spectrum, at about 1.6. Statistical calculations suggest that our women folk here are having fewer children than the women in every neighboring state, where the fertility rates are consistently higher than 1.6:
Utah – 2.1
Wyoming – 1.9
Nebraska – 2.1
Kansas – 1.9
New Mexico – 1.7
Oklahoma – 1.9
Arizona – 1.8
It seems that most of the ‘developed world’ is seeing a similar trend: a declining fertility rate. Back in 2015, the UN World Population Prospectus developed a series of maps showing the average fertility rates in each country of the world. The red colors showed a very high ‘total fertility rate’ (around 7-8 children per female) and the darkest blue showed a rate below 1.5 (well below a ‘replacement rate’.) Orange, yellow and green were all above ‘replacement rate’.
Here’s how the world looked in the last half of the 1950s. Only a a handful of countries were trending ” dark blue.” Almost the entire world was bearing children well above the replacement rate. (Which might help explain why we now have a global population of about 7.5 billion, instead of approximately 3 billion in 1960.)
But that was then.
Here’s a map showing the past five years (2015-2020) in the UN estimate.
Basically, only African countries and Islamic countries are now bearing children above the replacement rate. Or so it would appear.
And here’s what the UN experts predict for 2050-55, thirty years from today:
Apparently, a declining fertility rate is not a new development, here in America. US Census data suggests that, in 1800, our national fertility rate was around 7.0. (This calculation did not include African American women.) . By 1900, the fertility rate among white women had dropped to about 3.6, while the rate among black women was around 5.6. By the year 2000, the fertility rate among all American women — white and black, included — was around 2.1. You can read more about historical fertility and mortality rates on this website.
We are told that the US fertility rate is now about 1.7. The rate in some Asian countries has declined much more dramatically.
South Korea: 1.1
Singapore: 1.2
Taiwan: 1.2
Some experts predict that the population of China will drop by 50 million over the next 30 years, and that Japan’s population will drop by 25 million.
All of which suggests that, eventually, the planet’s overall human population might stop increasing and head in the opposite direction, due to decisions made by individuals, families, and governments, and due also to ovulation rates and other factors. (Declining sperm counts in males, for example?)
Some may consider an overall reduction in our global population to be a positive direction. Over the short haul, however, it suggests a ‘graying’ of the planet, where a larger and larger proportion of the planet’s population is past childbearing age, challenged by declining strength and energy (and perhaps ambition,) and ultimately in need of increased medical care.
Can a small, rural community do anything meaningful to address this global pattern?
Archuleta County has grown rapidly more gray over the past three decades, with our average age going from about 36 years old in 1990 to about 50 years old today.
This trend — a steady decline in the proportion of young people in the Pagosa population — seems destined to continue, unless our community leaders make some hard choices about growth, and especially perhaps, about supporting housing options. For the past three decades, at least, our local leadership has been promoting the idea that our community would benefit from the presence of more and more wealthy people. That philosophy led to numerous policies that actively discouraged workforce housing (outlawing or discouraging, for example, mobile homes and smaller-sized homes almost everywhere in the county) and to investments aimed at attracting wealthy residents, such as the more-than-$20-million spent since 2002 on upgrades to the Archuleta County Airport — a facility that, according to the 2012 Stevens Field Economic Impact Study, serves an aviation community of perhaps 43 people.
Do we expect our current community leaders to make some hard decisions, about the type of “growth” that has been making Archuleta County less and less attractive to a declining number of young people? If not, then it may be time to elect a very different group of leaders.
Along the way, we may each have to rethink our own individual biases, and preferences, and assumptions. We might want to consider, for example, whether we want to ask “top dollar” for that mobile home we bought in 1995 as a real estate investment — and whether it’s the very tendency to ask “top dollar” that has created our current national housing crisis, and perhaps also helped create a declining fertility rate.