Families in the U.S. and around the world are having fewer children as people make profoundly different decisions about their lives. NPR's series Population Shift: How Smaller Families Are Changing the World explores the causes and implications of this trend.
On a late autumn day, John Davis hiked through what looks like wild forest in New York's Champlain Valley, surrounded by flaming red maple trees and yellow birch. A bird flushed noisily through the undergrowth. "Look there, a ruffed grouse," he said, his delight obvious.
This place is an example of what Davis calls "rewilding," which means the footprint of human activity has begun to fade.
"It simply means stepping back and letting nature unfold as it will," he said. "Some of this was farmed as recently as the 1990s. Probably used for sheep pasture and certainly for logging. You're seeing old stone walls."
Populations in many countries are beginning to age rapidly and gradually decline, in large part due to individuals choosing to have fewer children.
It's a trend that alarms many experts, and politicians, who say the fabric of whole communities could unravel, but many activists, researchers and economists also see big upsides.
This part of New York state, Essex County, has lost about 6% of its population since 2010 due to out-migration and the declining birthrate.
Davis, who works for an organization called the Rewilding Institute, says the pivot toward fewer people is allowing landscapes like this one to heal.
"I have a perhaps unpopular view on human population, I believe we are too many and we consume too much," he said. "We need to encourage a small family ethic, especially among affluent people."
Upsides: More choice and a huge decline in teen pregnancy
The global population has doubled to more than 8 billion since the 1970s. Davis thinks that growth turbocharged consumerism and accelerated climate change and the loss of wildlife habitat.
"I love kids, we all love kids," Davis said. "But if we could encourage small families, we'd have a better chance addressing not just the extinction [of species] and climate crisis, but also problems of poverty and inequity."
That hope is being tested, as the "small family ethic" championed by Davis and other activists arrives in much of the world.
Since the 1970s, researchers say family size dropped by more than half, from about five children per woman on average to roughly two, according to the latest United Nations data.
Actual population decline has already begun in about half the G7 industrialized countries that make up much of the world's economic activity. Every one of those countries, including the U.S. has fallen below the so-called "replacement rate" of births needed to maintain a stable population over the long term.
Without large-scale immigration, the U.S. will join the list of countries losing population in the coming decades.
Experts say the trend is driven in large part by women choosing to delay having children, having fewer kids, and in many cases, deciding not become mothers at all.
"I just really wanted to do other things with my life," said Marian Starkey, who told NPR she and her husband opted not to have children.
"Most of my friends here don't have children. People have made the decision they also want to do other things with their lives than raise children."
Starkey works with a group called Population Connection that advocates in favor of policies that support this shift toward smaller families and gradual depopulation.
According to Starkey, fewer people will mean a healthier environment, but she also thinks the trend is good news for humans.
"The smaller families are, the more time and wealth there is to invest in each child, making sure all of your kids get an education, which does not happen in all parts of the world, especially for girls," she said.
Many experts are voicing deep concerns about this population shift. They say it's not clear how economies and family structures that have relied for decades on steady growth will function as communities age and begin to decline.
"I think this has huge implications for which we're not prepared as a society," said Martina Yopo-Díaz, a sociologist at the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, who studies population loss, in a July interview with NPR.
"Key social systems, from the economy to the labor market to pensions, are based on the principle that there will be new generations to replace the old ones. But now we see that that principle is no longer something that we can, you know, take as given."
But NPR also found experts who who view this as a hopeful moment, part of a decades-long trend with benefits for the environment, families and women.
Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University, said fears about declining population are overblown. She says there's evidence people are happier when free to decide for themselves if and when to have kids.
"To have the number of children they want to have, and to have them at the right time in their lives, is certainly a benefit to couples," she said.
None of the advocates for lower population interviewed by NPR favor efforts that force people to have fewer kids, like China's infamous "One Child" policy, which ended in 2016. Instead they support access to reproductive freedom, family planning information, and contraception.
Goldin and other experts said the biggest single upside to the trend toward smaller families may be improvements in the lives of women and girls. Research shows delaying motherhood and having fewer children often leads to more education, more financial security and better health.
"The ability of women to decide how many children to have and when to have them, it's something that is a very positive development in the history of mankind," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the lead population scientist at the United Nations.
Kantorová points to the fact that much of the falling birthrate in the U.S. and around the world reflects a plunge in teen and child pregnancy. "Adolescent child bearing has declined everywhere, so this is something that is really a success story," she said.
Those who see advantages in this population shift generally agree that smaller families and declining birthrates will bring serious policy challenges. Finding workers, maintaining a strong economy and weaving a sense of community could be more difficult in many areas.
One question is how to fund the social safety net and healthcare for rising numbers of elderly, when there are fewer young people. John Davis says he doesn't have answers to all those challenges but he's hopeful people will find ways to navigate this transition.
"If the smartest young minds in the world were dedicated to figuring how a declining population could support its elders, we would achieve that goal," he said. "I think we'd have a happier world, for people and wildlife."
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