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New Documentary Explores Global Demographic Crisis

By John Jalsevac.

February 8, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - While the world focuses its energies and its fears on a purported global-warming crisis, a new, not-yet-released documentary claims that if there is any global crisis, it is not global warming, but rather demographic winter.

As the website for Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family, explains, the phrase "'Demographic Winter' denotes the worldwide decline in birthrates, also referred to as a 'birth-death,' and what it portends."

"The ongoing global decline in human birthrates is the single most powerful force affecting the fate of nations and the future of society in the 21st century," says demographer Philip Longman in the film. The film argues that the global decline in birthrate, if unchecked, will have devastating social, political and economic effects; it also argues that the issue is studiously ignored in mainstream circles, due to the politically incorrect nature of the solution to the crisis - that is, the rebuilding of the strength of the family as the core unit of society.

"We are headed toward a demographic winter which threatens to have catastrophic social and economic consequences," say the filmmakers. "The effects will be severe and long lasting and are already becoming manifest in much of Europe."

The documentary is directed and produced by award-winning director Rick Stout, whose previous film ventures include music videos and specialty videos for celebrities. He is joined by producer Berry McLerran, executive director of Family First Foundation, and executive producer Steven Smoot, the president and founder of Family First.

In making this film, Stout, McLerran and Smoot join their voices with an increasingly vocal chorus of experts and politicians who have begun to waken to the reality that if the global birth-rate continues to sink below replacement level, then the consequences will be dire, particularly for the West where the birth-rate has in many cases plummeted far below replacement level.

Production on the film began in May 2007, at the World Congress of Families in Warsaw, Poland. Over the following months, the filmmakers traveled to Berlin, Osnabruck, Rome, Paris, and Moscow, conducting interviews with sociologists, demographers, economists, psychologists, parliamentarians, government representatives, as well as interviewing private citizens on the street.
 
Their research proved time and again the underlying thesis of the film - that the only and most obvious solution to the demographic winter facing the world is to strengthen the place of the family in society. "Of all the causes we have in the world today, many of which particularly capture the time and space of the media and academia, it is singularly peculiar that the disintegration of an institution as important as the human family should want for attention," says the synopsis of the film. 

"The years have not been kind to this most important institution…particularly the last four decades. Worldwide, families have broken down at a historically unprecedented pace.  There are certainly records of how now extinct societies have experienced similar declines before their demise, for what we now face is unique in that it has a global spread. This has ominous portent."

"This film will bring the voices of experts from all over the world for the first time to a general audience, an audience still being taught in their schools, on television, in film and in print, the failed ideas and philosophies of the past that we need to reduce our population and that families are merely a social construct and not crucial to society in their traditional form. Demographic Winter will correct these errant ideas in a powerful voice using forty years of social science, demographic and economic research."
 
Visit the Demographic Winter website at:
http://www.demographicwinter.com

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