Is overpopulation really an issue?
A lot of people, especially young people think that human overpopulation isn’t such a big issue anymore as numbers are expected to start declining in a few decades. Do you think that's true? And why should you care if it is?
Here are some quick facts about overpopulation for you to care about:
India, while only having 170 million hectares of land for farming, has a population of more than 1 billion
Mothers with unplanned pregnancies in China need to do abortion methods to control the issues of overpopulation.
Overpopulation in certain regions can lead to a ruinous degradation of the land and its resources.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India once used coercive methods to solve overpopulation problems. People were forced to have vasectomies and were sterilized without personal consent
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of India once used coercive methods to solve overpopulation problems. People were forced to have vasectomies and were sterilized without personal consent
A dozen years is what it takes to increase the population by one billion people. In the year 1000 AD, the world population was only 400 million. In 1750 AD, 750 years later, the population was 800 million and it first reached the 1 billion mark in 1804. By 1927 we had 2 billion people, and 3 billion by 1960. But it only took 40 years - until 2000 - for the population to double again to 6 billion.
After reading these facts, you are probably convinced that overpopulation is still a serious issue even though it is not one of the media's favourite global topics.
Dr. Allan P. Drew, a forest ecologist, put it this way: “Overpopulation means that we are putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than we should, just because more people are doing it and this is related to overconsumption by people in general, especially in the ‘developed’ world.” “But, whether developed or developing,” said Dr. Susan Senecah, who teaches the history of the American environmental movement, “everyone is encouraged to ‘want’ and perceive that they ‘need’ to consume beyond the planet’s ability to provide.”
We could say that overpopulation itself is not an issue, but that it creates issues in our future: over-consumption, hunger, over-fishing, more and more houses, more cars with more pollution, pollution.
I think the main issue is that we still have not realized that all the issues we consider important are due to overpopulation and nothing else. Global warming is not due to cars, it is due to too many people using too many cars. Of course more people could use public transport and we could make global warming less harmful, but that’s another story. It is the same thing with overfishing, we would not overfish, if there were less hungry people to feed. So we could say that every 'popular' problem's origin is too many people.
For example, a UK study in 2005 showed the advantages of living in the countryside instead of in a city:
Direct access to fresh, organic farm food relatively cheaply.
People who live in the countryside also have better health not just because they eat healthy food, but because they inhale healthy air with minimum pollution in it.
And also there is a surprising advantage of living in the countryside: pregnant women who live in the countryside also stay healthier during their pregnancies, they sleep better and their babies are typically healthier, calmer and usually more emotionally stable then a baby grown and born in a city.
These facts sound cool, but if we continue making babies there will be not a single healthy baby, or adult, because we will lose all our countryside. The imminent lack of space and healthy air means that our society will inevitably get distorted and all the global problems we have now will be intensified.
Overall we think it really should be the time to stop reproducing.
