Joshua Treed
This weekend Kim and I are spending our time in Joshua Tree on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert. The occasion is the 40th birthday gathering for Kim’s nephew (technically my nephew as well), Joshua. I don’t know that he chose the venue for the gathering because of the name he shares with the area, but I’m also sure that the coincidence did not miss his attention. We are organized and led by Josh’s wife Haj and their kids JJ (6) and Leila (3). The other attendees are the usual suspects of Josh’s mother Sharon and father Woo, Josh’s brother Will and his new wife, Ashley, and Kim’s brother Jeff and his wife Lisa. This group of a dozen constitutes Kim’s entire nuclear blood family. In fact, since she is not really very involved with any cousins or aunts and uncles, this is pretty much it for any blood and in-law family of all generations. In other words this is Kim’s bloodline nuclear and extended family for all intents and purposes. It’s still early days for her nephews in terms of their procreation tracks, so this could still grow a bit, but demographic trends in the United States would imply that child-bearing-age women have 1.781 children as of this year (down considerably in the past generation), so that means that statistically speaking there is 1.562 children still in the offing for this group. I will not go so far as to suggest where those might come from since I want no cat fights between Haj and Ashley. Ashley has a size advantage over Haj, but Haj has that Persian eye-of-the-tiger that would make me want to never count her out in taking two out of three falls in any wrestling match.
U.S. fertility rates peeked in the year Kim was born, 1958. They hit a surprisingly high 3.582 per woman, and have pretty steadily declined since then, bottoming out in 2018 at 1.776. They are going through a COVID, dead-cat bounce at the moment, but I wouldn’t extrapolate any trends from that just yet. I’m enough of a student of this issue to remember how birth rates surged after the famous Northeast blackout, so I get it that when people get bored and unable to follow their regular routines, they tend to procreate. I’ll bet there’s a social psychologist out there that will remind us that the increase in depression among COVID-bound people would eventually work against that procreation desire. I wonder whether things like testosterone levels in men follows a similar trend? Based on the men I know, I am going to guess that testosterone level is far more resilient than fertility rate in women and whatever physiological characteristics embody that. It takes a lot for a guy to lose his rutting instinct.
As I glance at fertility rates, I am also interested to see how these U.S. trends compare to the trends in the rest of the world. Is this fall in fertility a human species trend that somehow demarcates where we are in our species lifecycle? Is it the 7.8 billion souls that crowd around us worldwide? The Zionist state of Israel leads the world with a fertility rate of 2.976, but note that is still well below the U.S. rates in the height of the Baby Boom. I suspect we have all noticed that people inclined to fundamentalism (regardless of the specific religion) tend to want to broaden their minority by populating like-minded souls. Whether we are talking about Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, Arab fundamentalists, Evangelical Christians or, yes, Mormons, their birth rates tend to be higher than in other subgroups. Who hasn’t seen the religious family with 6+ children piled into their minivan?
So we are ranging in age from 3 to 80, spanning more-or-less three generations. When doing historical generational math one has had to generally use a 25 year turnover. That no longer works for most families (at least not in the developed world), where people are generally waiting longer to have children. If I were doing generational math I would use something like a 33-year cohort timeframe, meaning three generations over 100 years. If we give Kim’s nuclear family another seven years to take advantage of their statistically allocated 1.562 descendants, that will give an 87 year span….but with JJ being the oldest in the youngest cohort, he has a good thirty years until he is likely to bear fruit. That would make the span 110 years. If we take a simple average of the two measurement techniques, that would mean Kim’s family comes in at 98.5 years and moving. I feel comfortable with these approximate demographic calculations and furthermore, in suggesting that the generational span will likely lengthen and thin out. It cannot lengthen too much based on female fertility age-range, but it will surely continue to fall in fertility rate, perhaps not as low as the Chinese one-child policy of old (as we know, they have moved off that standard rather vigorously now that they have seen that it curtails growth and their neighboring Indian subcontinent is racing to pass them by in total population).
Coming back to this weekend in the desert, we have been asked by Josh to avoid using our screens (cell phones and tablets), a rather radical concept to most of us. I think there are exceptions available to do mandatory fact-checking on Google, navigational and geosynchronous data (for instance, what altitude are we at?), business on Jeff and Lisa’s e-commerce business, which demands 24X7 customer service, story reading or writing (this was my addition to the list) and finally, anything Sharon wants to do on her phone. So we have all three generations trying to figure out how far conversation, reading (magazines and books), hiking, sitting around and watching a fire and other olde fashioned activities can occupy them. We have about another half day to get through and it seems we may just make it.
While most of the gang was either hiking through Joshua Tree National Park or sleeping in as a traditional and civilized Sunday morning activity, I went off to Cactus Mart in the Morongo Valley to try to find a Joshua Tree plant to purchase for my back hillside. No such luck. Despite seeing Joshua Trees all along the highway and in every patch of dirt around here (not unlike Ocatillo in the Anza Borego Desert), these guys are considered near endangered species and are therefore forbidden for casual roadside harvesting for backyard gardeners like me. The nurseries only grow them from seed, but it seems that Joshua Trees are also going through a fertility problem like the human species. This is all making me think that In addition to missing getting Joshua Treed this weekend, I am also getting forced to face the end of life as we know it thanks to the universe attacking fertility on all fronts.