EU implosion, update #5: The wolves are returning to Germany

Newsweek International, July 4 issue:

Wolves returning to the heart of Europe? A hundred years ago, a burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany's wolves. Today, it's the local humans whose numbers are under threat. Wolf-country villages like Boxberg and Weisswasser are emptying out, thanks to the region's ultralow birthrate and continued rural flight. Nearby Hoyerswerda is Germany's fastest-shrinking town, losing 25,000 of its 70,000 residents in the last 15 years.

Such numbers are a harbinger of the future. Home to 22 of the world's 25 lowest-birthrate countries, Europe will lose 41 million people by 2030 even with continued immigration, according to the latest U.N. Population Division report. The biggest decline will hit rural Europe. As Italians, Spaniards, Germans and others produce barely half the children needed to maintain the status quo—and rural flight continues to suck people into Europe's suburbs and cities—the countryside will lose close to a third of its population, say both the United Nations and the EU. "It's a triple time bomb," says University of Lisbon demographer Nuno da Costa. "Too few children, too many old people and too many of the remaining young people still leaving the village."

Chuck Colson also comments on the "birth dearth" in Europe (as well as Japan):

Now, wolves in Berlin sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s a science fact. What’s incredible is the response of the average European or East Asian. They literally shrug their shoulders; they can’t imagine changing their lifestyle to accommodate having two or more children instead of one or none. They believe against all evidence in a technological or political solution to this problem.

But, as columnist Mark Steyn writes, “there’s simply no precedent for managed decline in societies as advanced as Europe’s”—or Japan, for that matter. Throughout history, societies in demographic decline, usually as a result of disease, have faced two unattractive options: a decline in their standard of living or the replacement of their native population with a more fertile immigrant one.

Europe has, essentially by default, chosen the latter. But as last week’s bombings in London illustrate, turning millions of Islamic immigrants into “Europeans,” however you define the term, is a dubious proposition. And in Japan, where racial purity is a primary cultural value, the population faces eventual extinction.

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