Tag Archives: decline

Environs

National Extinction Coming Soon

Based on declining fertility rates in some Asian nations a new study predicts complete national extinctions in the not too distant future.

From the Telegraph:

South Koreans will be ‘extinct’ by 2750 if nothing is done to halt the nation’s falling fertility rate, according to a study by The National Assembly Research Service in Seoul.

The fertility rate declined to a new low of 1.19 children per woman in 2013, the study showed, well below the fertility rate required to sustainSouth Korea‘s current population of 50 million people, the Chosun Ilbo reported.

In a simulation, the NARS study suggests that the population will shrink to 40 million in 2056 and 10 million in 2136. The last South Korean, the report indicates, will die in 2750, making it the first national group in the world to become extinct.

The simulation is a worst-case scenario and does not consider possible changes in immigration policy, for example.

The study, carried out at the request of Yang Seung-jo, a member of the opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy, underlines the challenges facing a number of nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and increasingly China are all experiencing growing financial pressures caused by rising healthcare costs and pension payments for an elderly population.

The problem is particularly serious in South Korea, where more than 38 per cent of the population is predicted to be of retirement age by 2050, according to the National Statistics Office. The equivalent figure in Japan is an estimated 39.6 per cent by 2050.

According to a 2012 study conducted by Tohoku University, Japan will go extinct in about one thousand years, with the last Japanese child born in 3011.

David Coleman, a population expert at Oxford University, has previously warned that South Korea’s fertility rate is so low that it threatens the existence of the nation.

The NARS study suggests that the southern Korean port city of Busan is most at risk, largely because of a sharp decline in the number of young and middle-aged residents, and that the last person will be born in the city in 2413.

Read the entire article here.

Art

When the Gold Rush is Over

Bryan Schutmaat chronicles the slow death of communities in decline.

His images are stark and eerily beautiful.

From the Guardian:

Weatherbeaten male faces stare out from the land they struggle to make a living from. The landscapes seem both elemental and despoiled; the men at once stoic and sad. Around them, the houses are rundown, while abandoned cars and trucks rust in wintry sunlight.

Photographer Bryan Schutmaat’s series Grays the Mountain Sends shows rural working-class mining communities in decline across the Amerian midwest. Inspired by the fiction of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford as well as the poetry of Richard Hugo, from whom he borrowed the title, Schutmaat’s images are tough yet lyrical. “The stories of some of these men run parallel to those of the towns they live in, or even of the nation at large,” Schutmaat told the critic Aaron Schuman. “Once young and full of promise, now their great expectations have been shed somewhere during the course of history.”

Here and there, photographs of fresh-faced young men interrupt the narrative of fading hope, but the inference is that their destiny is linked to their land and to a mining industry now struggling to survive. Schutmaat’s interior landscapes are more poignant: a battered armchair sits on a messy carpet beneath a fading print of an idealised rural landscape. Beside it, a hunting trophy stands under a cluttered tabletop. There is a sense throughout of things fading into history.

See more images and read the entire article here.

Image: Pinos Altos, New Mexico, 2012. Courtesy of Bryan Schutmaat / Guardian.