I have pretty clear recollections of being taught the dire consequences of human over-population (quite ironically at a school with “saint” in it’s name) when I was an elementary school student in the 70s .
When did over-population stop being a concern? Why was it taken off the table as something to be considered when discussing “world problems.”
It seems fairly obvious to a simple man like me that having fewer people would go a long way to alleviating countless threats to human existence but I hardly hear it come up in any conversation (serious or casual) anymore. Is it a matter of “oh, well… nothing we can do about it!”
The Right is in ascendance, and they oppose both birth control and concern for the future. Or even speaking of them. That doesn’t leave much room for worrying about overpopulation.
But we are presently sustaining even our present population on dwindling non-renewable resources like fossil water; once that runs out you can expect things to get bad, quickly.
Birth rates are falling down pretty much everywhere, and below the replacement rate in more and more countries (not only in western countries). The situation was very different 40 years ago. It is now expected that the global population will peak in the coming decades (at 10-12 billions? Can’t remember).
“Don’t panic, the truth about population”, is a documentary by Swedish statistician Hans Rosling that’s definitely worth watching if you’re interested in this topic!
Sadly, Rosling died last week. Truly a captivating popularizer of fact based numbers. Who else could make such a dull subject (statistics) so interesting! One of my favourites, The best stats you’ve ever seen (20:35)
Now, when we get fusion power, we’ll be better off…
Anyway, yes, we’ve avoided mass famines due to increases in food output, and that’s good…but people have used this as an excuse to increase their numbers, and that’s not good.
It’s like depending, in advance, on Moore’s Law when you’re investing in a computer system. You don’t know it will continue indefinitely…or even to the next five years.
Terrible famines are pretty damn likely, but, of course, not certain.
(For the moment, the war-refugee crisis is more urgent.)
I have watched it and it is a good documentary but the message that I got from it was not quite a good one but more “the situation is not quite as bad as the worst pessimists insist.” That still isn’t very good.
It should be self-evident that overpopulation is a current and future problem because it is directly related to many other large-scale problems from pollution, aquifer depletion, fossil fuel usage, global warming and countless others that we constantly hear about. Birth rates are falling as countries get richer but that adds additional complications. There aren’t enough natural resources to support even 7 billion people at Western world standards. Just ask current marine life about that.
Let me put it this way. People see little difference between 7 billion and the projected 11 billion people that we are quickly headed towards but that is insane. That increase alone is about double the entire world population in 1930 when our inherited problems were already well underway.
Unfortunately, there is little that can be done about it outside of totalitarian governments. China made a smart if not Draconian strategic move with its one child policy but other countries can’t or won’t do that. The reverse is also a large problem. When the birth-rate gets too low and the population starts to fall, it cause all kinds of economic and social problems. Japan is going through that now and will continue to do so unless they have a radical policy change.
The U.S. would be suffering a population decline overall in many areas if it weren’t for immigration. Unfortunately, when you build societies on the assumption of infinite growth, you are just running a very large pyramid scheme and there is no easy way to get out of it. I acknowledge your checkmate nature - well played.
In the late 1960’s there were a lot of people who were convinced that it was impossible to reduce the level of population growth and to increase the level of agricultural growth sufficiently to prevent massive starvation in the near future. The most famous example of someone who made such a guess was Paul Ehrlich, the author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb. He predicted that there would be starvation around the world in the late 1970’s and that there was nothing to be done about it. Ehrlich is no nut-case ranter. He is a respected professor of biology. And yet he was wrong.
He underestimated the amount of improvement in agriculture and the decrease in the fertility rate. Because of this, there has been no starvation on a global scale. What you heard in your school was probably an echo of predictions like Ehrlich’s. The fact that things didn’t turn out as bad as he and others predicted doesn’t mean that we should rest easy now. Yes, the world population will probably peak somewhere over 9 million sometime after 2050. There are a number of possible future shortages that we should worry about and do something about. One is that there may not be sufficient fresh water in several places in the world:
Shagnasty, the clear answer to the problem is to prevent unsustainability. Hell, even if the earth’s population was more then halved, right now, all the problems with climate change and pollution would still exist, all due to the unsustainable lifestyle of the developed world. Us.
The plain fact is that the developed world is the problem. We were always the problem. Harping about the “over-breeding world poor” is to ignore these clear facts/problems, and obfusticates clear solutions. Which is that the developed world needs to bring about a real and legally binding change in lifestyle to starve off disaster.
It’s not some imaginary African, born 50 years from now, who is destroying the environment. Its us who’s doing so. Right now. If all less developed people disappeared off of the earth today…We WOULD STILL BE SCREWED. “They” are not the problem, never was, never will be.
I never said anything like that because I basically agree. The problem is what you are saying isn’t a realistic solution either. How do you plan to downgrade the lifestyles of Americans, Europeans, Japanese and lots more so that this sustainability can happen? I can tell you that recycling plastic water bottles and shopping at Whole Foods isn’t going to cut it. Neither is driving a Prius. What is the answer?
My apologies then, I jumped the gun as I normally see these discussions blindly heading towards such a direction. Either way while individual action and personal responsibility is within our immediate power, this is a problem that requires multi-state legislation. The solution isn’t to favour breeding restrictions in some totalitarian-way, but turn environmental conscience/awareness into cold, hard, political will…
…or barring that to heavily restrict the breeding of us in the developed word (since we are the root of the problem). That would work too.
As Hans Rosling and others have demonstrated population is *no longer the problem we thought it would be *- becasue the planets population will level off.
That’s not to say there aren’t and won’t be too many people, but it will level off as developing countries increase in wealth and healthcare, as we have done.
