Nobody seems to be interested anymore in overpopulation.
Why isn’t that a popular topic whenever world hunger comes up?
Or countries awash in disease, or slums.
How did overpopulation become disconnected from discussions of poverty and disease?
The phrase “Population Bomb” comes from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book predicting a global Malthusian crisis – which failed to manifest, because of the green revolution in food production and because industrialization turns out to depress the birthrates in industrialized countries (leaving Europe, in particular, with a “birth dearth” and “grayby boom”). Which does not mean global overpopulation might not be a problem – just a less imminent one than it once appeared.
I don’t think it’s ever been disconnected in academic or scientific circles as a major factor for many of the issues we face, but it’s not one with a ready-made set of solutions, so folks tend to focus on the other factors instead. The two solutions for dealing with overpopulation are either an extremely draconian government policy with strict enforcement (worked a little for China, but led to different issues) or a massive societal shift in values. The former isn’t likely in other countries and the latter is mostly out of any institutions direct, or even any substantial indirect, control.
People are aware of it, but for the most part it does not get a mention as being a major cause of the problems you listed.
I think many people are more comfortable with discussing charity and aid for the poor than suggesting birth control, because then you get all sorts of objections–religious (“birth control is wrong! Don’t keep babies from being born!”), political (“it’s not our place to tell others how to live their lives…or maybe it is”), ethical (“do we have the right to insist that aid be reduced or withheld until Country X stops inundating itself with babies?”) , debates over eugenics and race (“is somebody trying to wipe out that population very slowly?”), and so forth.
The fact is this: you simply can’t cram too many people into one space with very few resources and not expect serious consequences. This applies anywhere.
I’m just waiting for the day when rogue chinese men form Sino-viking pirate ships and raid Hawai’i for its beautiful, tropical women.
But the solution isn’t to provide free birth control to women in the third world, that won’t work unless the women are allowed to control their own fertility, and women feel they have an interest in controlling their own fertility.
Bowls of free condoms in the village marketplace won’t do a thing unless people actually use them.
What will do the most to reduce population growth in the third world is gender equality, education (not birth control education but general education, like reading and writing) and economic development. Poor, ignorant, and exploited women don’t know how to control their fertility and aren’t allowed to control their own fertility. Wealthy, educated, and empowered women can.
Also better health care, so that it’s reasonable to expect that the vast majority of the children who are born will live to adulthood. Better health care also helps because some effective and popular methods of birth control can’t be safely done without a health care facility involved. Some of the most effective methods of birth control fall into this category.
Mandatory education and anti-child-labor laws help, too. They make it less worthwhile to have lots of kids, if the kids are restricted in how much they can work and bring in income for the family. Requiring the kids to be in school means that they can’t be at home all day watching younger siblings.
Set course for Secret Pirate Island, aka “Hong Kong”.
short answer:
I think it’s safe to say that we err on the side of ignoring world issues. :mad:
They developed a Pill for it.
I think overpopulation continues to be a major issue but one that is looked at somewhat differently now. For example, it is now recognized that, in particular, because of limited resources and problems such as global warming, it will not be possible to have even all the people currently on the planet living the sort of resource-intensive lifestyle that we do in the industrialized world. Hence, it is recognized that the road to industrialization for the developing world will have to be different (e.g., less carbon-intensive).
On the other hand, it is also recognized that it is desirable for the developing world to increase their level of industrialization and wealth not only for humanitarian reasons but also because the side effects of this noted above seems to be a large drop in birth rate that helps to prevent overpopulation. And, predictions of population growth based on these observations are no longer so dire…I.e., the population is predicted to level off and even start to decline in this century.
All in all, I think that most people recognize overpopulation as a significant problem. The debate is mainly between those who see it as the most significant problem and those who see it as a problem (and one which excerbates many other problems) but not the most significant one.
What I don’t see, and used to see, is a general call for family planning. (Not to mention the “hot wire” of explicit birth control.)
Any group passing out condoms seems to disguise it as AIDS treatment, rather than birth control.
Overpopulation creates poverty, slum conditions where population outpaces clean water and sanitation, etc.
We hear of “micro loans” helping village women start home craft businesses, but not the more powerful empowerment of simply delaying children and working outside the home for a while.
Sociologist with training in demography here.
Overpopulation is not currently much of a concern among demographers. Fertility rates are going down everywhere, and there is no reason to believe that trend won’t level out somewhere at or below replacement fertility, as it has already in the US and Europe. World population is still growing at a phenomonenal rate simply because there are so many people that are of reproductive age out there, not because individual people are having lots of babies.
The current hot topic in demography is population decline, which is or soon will be a problem in Japan, Spain, Greece, Russia, etc.
I will look for some cites later.
Actually, it’s more imminent that ever. While the Green Revolution (modern irrigation, agricultural methods, synthetic pesticides, high yield varieties of grains and grasses, et cetera) increased crop yields by roughly half an order of magnitude and sustained growth extending outward from the Indus River Valley, as well as high yield textile agriculture in areas like Egypt and the Sudan, it also has amplified demands on water for agricultural needs per person at the same time that the population size has grown. The critical problem with this is that many regions have a demand for water that massively exceeds the renewable level, and as a consequence are pumping so-called “fossil water” out of the underlying aquifer. The opportunity cost of this has been masked by the fact that the water is “free to all”; also known to economists as 'the tragedy of the commons", i.e. no one owns the resource, and you’d better get yours before somebody else gets there’s.
This is a problem for three reasons:
First, the water being consumed is not replaceable in anything like a reasonable timeline. Very little surface water is actually used for agriculture, or for that matter as potable water sources, as it’s much more reliable and cheaper to pump fresh water from the ground. That’s a limited resource, however; the water in the Ogallala Aquifer under the North American Great Plains, which permits high yield agriculture in South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma dates back from the last Ice Age, and will take thousands of years to replenish. The Colorado Plateaus aquifers are the only thing that permit the irrigation-intensive agriculture in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, which gives the distinctive polka-dot pattern that jet passengers identify, and will take tens of thousands of years to renew. The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer–the world’s largest aquifer, laying under the Sahara desert–will require hundreds of thousands or millions of years to refill. Even worse, the aquifer is being compressed due to subsidence because it can’t support its own weight without being filled with water, so once depleted, the capacities of the aquifers are substantially reduced.
Second, high yield crops and intensive agriculture demand more water and produce more runoff. The runoff contains artificial pesticides and natural phosphates that are toxic downstream, and leaves salt deposits as it evaporates or is absorb by soil so that even water that does re-enter the ground hydrological cycle is ill-suited to agriculture and certainly non-potable. The increased yields sustain population growth, but increasing yields are themselves not sustainable.
Third, in the case of grain and textile exports, “virtual water”, i.e. water that is irreplaceably used in agriculture is then shipped away, so that there is even less water to support locally-consumed agriculture…and the logistics of bringing real water back in is prohibitively expensive, even assuming that you have a sufficient and inexpensive source of fresh, uncontaminated water to draw from. Nations like Pakistan and Egypt are “selling England by the pound,” with no hope of recovering the resource once gone.
This is all be exacerbated by attempts to create agriculture where not only is there not hydrologically sustainable aquifers, but there isn’t even a significant amount of subsurface water as well, requiring water to be transfered, often with great loss, to another area. Colonel al-Qaddafi’s Great Manmade River is the poster child for this; described by Libya as "The Eighth Wonder of the World pumps some 230 billion cu ft of water a day from the Nubian Aquifer to areas around Benghazi and Tripoli to support non-native agriculture there. This makes the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California look like a third rate water park in comparison, and is legitimately one of the largest engineering projects in the world.
Between 15% and 40% (depending on who you believe) of water used for modern agriculture is unsustainable on the long term (>50 years), and while better water management and efficient point irrigation systems may extend some supplies, ultimately the canteen will run dry. And without water, there is no food, no cotton, and ultimately, no life. The frightening thing is that there is really no way to remediate or compensate for this; even if you had free desalination of ocean or silted water, the energy cost in transporting it across great distance, and especially uphill is grossly prohibitive. So when agriculture dependent upon unsustainable water resources runs out of water, that will represent a hard limit to agricultural growth, barring of course future sustainable methods. In general, the public has absolutely no clue as to just how much solar power–in the form of the hydrological cycle–powers free access to water that would otherwise be very expensive to purify and transport.
The population bomb isn’t a dud, it just as a delayed fuse. As for the size of a sustainable population with current agricultural methods and technology, it depends on what economic level you discuss; at bare sustainment we can probably support the extant population or something slightly smaller; for a standard of living comparable in quality and usage of the industrialized West, the numbers top-end at the one billion range and get worse from there, even assuming a viable amount of conservation and recycling. And while population growth rates are slowing or even going negative in some of the most industrialized nations of Europe and the Pacific Rim, rates in Asia are still growing apace, though not skyrocketing the way they were in the post-partition Subcontinent or in post-colonial Africa.
In fact, far from being the ultimate salvation against famine, the Green Revolution allowed ballooning population growth by limiting famine and resource constraints. (Virtually every famine in the 20th Century has been the result of political gambitting, not crop failure or food unavailability). It’s a very temporary solution which serves only to exacerbate the underlying problem. And as a looming catastrophe, water depletion makes global climate change–itself a significant issue–look like a tempest in a teapot.
Stranger
In the recent political climate in the US, it’s been hard to get money for giving out family planning assistance. It’s easier to get money for AIDS prevention, so that’s what they say it is.
Of course, genocide works too, and the technology is so much better now! We’ve got nerve gas, and enhanced-radiation neutron bombs, and, oh, everything! 
(Well, not quite everything. We’re still waiting on that ol’ death ray. What’s it been, now, 87 years?! 
)
I’ve seen the population of the United States double in my lifetime.
I think there are more people in China than were in the world when I was born.
I can’t help but think of the experiment that I saw on film in college in the Sixties. White mice (or rats?) were allowed to breed unchecked in a limited enclosure. It seemed roomy enough at first. But after a while, it was obviously uncomfortable. By the end of the film, the rodents were exhibiting bizarre behaviors and generally “going crazy.” They were all over each other. The words violent and psychotic come to mind, though I can’t remember specific behaviors except some just shut down completely.
It was Rwanda, and the Hutus and Tutsis.