Which is worse, overpopulation or climate change?
Overpopulation, I feel, can be inferred if the rapid use of non-renewable resources or the capacity of the environment to sustain life degrades to the point of non sustainability, and with life expectancy getting longer and longer, and live birth rates increasing. One of the largest causes of overpopulation is the advancements of medicine in the field of longevity. The United Nations and the US Census Bureau put the world population at around 7 billion people. At our going rate the world population is expected to be around 10 billion by 2045 or so. The largest growth in population has been over the last 50 years. Some countries rely on importing food for their population because there isn’t enough agricultural products coming from their native lands, for example Britain and Japan, though I do believe that the birthrate has significantly declined in Japan lately. Some good news is that many people are heeding the warning of overpopulation and in many countries the birth rate is beginning to fall. China as we know limits birth rate to one child per family, because of their severe overpopulation. India is another example of severe overcrowding.
Look around you in the south of Louisiana and other agricultural areas. How many farming families have given up on farming? For many that’s because they can’t compete with the larger corporate farms, and often there is a perceived loss in quality when corporate farms take over due to overcrowding of animals, and excessive use of antibiotics and growth hormones.
Throughout history we’ve had some quite successful population rebalancing which helped reduce the world population. Events like the Black Plague in Europe in the 1300’s pruned about 50% of the population. That went a LONG way toward helping mother earth slow the rate of overpopulation. I sometimes liken the planet to a living “thing” or being, and we are all virus’, bacteria, and pests on the planet. If you get too many lice on your body you do something to reduce or eliminate that. The Black Plague was one of those “delousing’s”. Europe’s not so subtle invasion of North America caused the death of about 90% of the Native American population, due to smallpox. So there’s always some balancing going on, and we may be due for another in the near future with modern plagues like Ebola, and some type of exotic influenza outbreaks.
Now at first glance it seems like I’m being counterproductive to my argument that the world is, or is headed toward being overpopulated, but we’re getting SO good at curing illness and increasing life expectancy; there is already a vaccine in the final stages for Ebola. Since around 1950 we’ve seen growth rates in some countries of between 150 to 200 percent. Now don’t misunderstand, when I talk about overpopulation, I’m not talking about the ratio of people to square feet of land. There’s plenty of land space available, just not enough of it in places that promote life. And the more people spread out, the less land there is for agriculture, and the less room for agriculture the harder it is to grow enough food to sustain the population. So it always seems to come back down to natural resources, like water, and how much healthy food we can produce. When I talk about overpopulation I’m talking about just how many of us the earth can take given what we “do” to the planet. We can probably fix things like food production, as long as we don’t mind having to significantly change “what” we eat. I’m sure we could support a HUGE population of people, so long as we don’t want to eat real steak, and pork, and chicken. We can produce healthy enough food to sustain the population if we can divert the food from the farms and into the labs, but I’m assuming you probably wouldn’t like the look and taste of synthetically derived food after eating a great “real” rib eye steak.
The biggest way that we overpopulate, is when we tear up, or tear down, our natural ecosystems. I could suggest world’s rainforests as a good example here. With the accelerated loss of the rain forests we lose, or endanger more species of animals, and plants, the latter of which has been some of the main sources for medical advances.
I guess in the end I’m more in favor of saying that climate change, whether one believes it’s natural or man caused, is the biggest peril to the living conditions of the planet. Overpopulation is a close second and should be considered strongly when we think of the sustainment of the GREAT living conditions we have now, and the “barely acceptable” ones we might have in the future. Would you feel it’s okay to continue unrestrained population growth if it meant giving up many of our natural food sources NOW, instead of waiting till it was absolutely necessary? I doubt most people would. For that alone I’d think we would want to curb population growth. I have a sneaking suspicion though that those that deny that we are overpopulated, just may be right. I think we will harm the ecology and sustainability of the planet long before we have too many people for the earth to sustain. I think I feel another delousing coming soon.