Is the world overpopulated essay

Is the world overpopulated essay

Overpopulation Essay,Related Posts

WebAs a result of human actions, overpopulation on the planet became a major factor, negatively affecting the cumulative life of the world, all its life forms and the planet WebAs of June , the world population stands at about billion people. There is one birth every 8 seconds and one death every 12 seconds, which means that there is WebThere is a growing sense among scholars that the topic of overpopulation — which has faded from public consciousness as the world’s population growth rate has declined WebOverpopulation is one of the most serious threats to blogger.compulation is a serious problem that will eventually have an extremely negative effect on our countries and our ... read more

A new study projects that the world population, which now stands at 7. If the UN's Sustainable Development Goals are met, the population could be even smaller at 6. Human overpopulation is one of the biggest myths we keep needing to debunk. The reason is because this belief has an insidious effect, in some cases leading to profound acts of evil. How so? First, let's start with the obvious. A belief in human overpopulation is often rooted in racism. Today, those who claim the world is overpopulated point to Africa, India, and Southeast Asia -- in other words, places where impoverished people of color live. They never point to New York City, London, or Paris. Back in the s, the English thought that there were too many Irish people, which is why they didn't bother helping to feed them during the potato famine.

Second, a belief in overpopulation is factually incorrect. Humans are not cockroaches or bacteria. We do not reproduce exponentially until the food runs out. Instead, as a nation becomes richer and more developed, people naturally have fewer children, choosing to invest more of their time and resources into raising one or two children instead of ten. That's been the pattern in every rich country around the world, including the United States. Despite this, global population models often projected that humanity would continue growing well into the 22nd Century before peaking at around 11 or 12 billion people and then declining.

But some demographers are starting to question this. Last year, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson wrote a book called Empty Planet that claimed that the human population would peak and decline this century, beginning in roughly 30 years. Now, a new study confirms this view. Published in The Lancet , a study from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that the world population, which now stands at 7. If the UN's Sustainable Development Goals are met, which include education and access to contraception, the authors project a population of 6. Shockingly, the paper predicts that some countries will see their populations cut in half or more by Poland, for instance, currently has a population of just under 38 million and is projected to fall to Part of the reason for the dramatic decline in Eastern European populations is due to emigration.

Even China is expected to shrink by roughly half, from 1. Such a demographic shift will have enormous implications. Not only will the world be smaller, it will be older. How do we keep the global economy healthy if there are far more older, retired people than younger, working people? How will we pay for the healthcare of all the elderly people? Will we need an army of robots to take care of them? Japan is already headed in that direction. By now, the overpopulation myth should be dead and buried. Is it even possible to manage people as numbers while respecting them as human beings? Joel E. Cohen, a Columbia demographer, is an expert on population growth and environmental sustainability.

He cringes at the term overpopulation. A report published in April by the UN Population Division concludes that high birthrates are hampering economic development across sub-Saharan Africa, mainly by limiting per-capita investments in education and health care. Columbia economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin has shown that high birthrates typically stunt economic development. The UN report also states that population pressure is worsening food and water shortages in the region. Environmental concerns also are real: rain forests in sub-Saharan Africa and in South America are being destroyed primarily by subsistence farming, according to NASA data, and deforestation is reducing local rainfall and exacerbating global climate change.

Cohen says we then may ignore political factors that contribute to these problems. For instance, agriculture subsidies in rich nations contribute to hunger by driving down farm incomes in the developing world; and African governments are famous for mismanaging food and water supplies. Cohen agrees with Sachs that international family-planning programs are underfunded. But he says that family planning should continue to be promoted — both to Western donors and to government officials in developing countries — strictly as a human right. Might this cause the West to back away from other aid obligations, or inspire poor countries to implement coercive methods of population control? Cohen hesitates.

Sachs insists that we speak clearly about population pressures. The problem of dwindling farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, he says, is insurmountable without a major effort to slow population growth. As arable land in Africa has vanished, Sachs explains in Common Wealth , farmers have abandoned land-management techniques they used previously to sustain the long-term fertility of their fields, such as allowing one of the fields to lie fallow each season. Three-quarters of all arable land in sub-Saharan Africa today is severely depleted of nutrients because it has been overused, according to a recent study by the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development.

Until a few years ago, most were food exporters. He and colleagues at the Earth Institute, as part of the United Nations Millennium Villages project, which Sachs initiated, are helping the governments of a dozen nations in Africa introduce modern farm technologies. He says that countries in sub-Saharan Africa now must spend huge portions of their budgets providing basic services, which leaves little money for the type of agricultural investment that Malawi is making in its fertilizer program. Back in the s, the populations of many poor countries in Asia, Latin America, and North Africa were growing as rapidly as the populations in sub-Saharan African countries are today.

International health programs had gone into former colonies in these areas following World War II with antibiotic drugs, vaccines, and pesticides, which lowered mortality rates dramatically. Farmers in poor countries had always had lots of babies: They needed to, in order to ensure that at least one son grew up to work their fields and to take care of them in their old age. The problem was that while more of their children were surviving, rural people retained a cultural proclivity for huge families. Furthermore, they had little or no access to modern birth control, so they ended up with even more kids than they would have otherwise chosen.

Population growth soon was outpacing food production, especially in Asia, causing Western officials to fear that widespread famine would destabilize the continent, Columbia history professor Matthew Connelly explains in his latest book, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers viewed the situation through a lens of Cold War—inspired paranoia: Johnson, speaking to U. So in the late s, the U. government began pouring tens of millions of dollars annually into international family-planning programs. The programs were administered primarily by Planned Parenthood, under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations Population Fund UNFPA , which was financed largely by U. dollars and which claimed that its programs provided contraceptives, sterilization procedures, and abortions on a voluntary basis.

In reality, American and British economists and demographers had designed these programs to slow population growth by nearly any means necessary, according to Connelly. South Asian countries with caste systems were willing to push family planning most aggressively, Connelly writes, because many ruling-class Hindus feared social unrest among the hungry lower castes. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka implanted in women a type of intrauterine contraceptive device that was proven to cause infections and the rupturing of the uterine wall. Couples in all of these countries lost medical, housing, and education benefits for having more than a designated number of children.

When local health officials balked at implementing aggressive programs, the U. Agency for International Development and the UN threatened to shut off Western food aid. Around the same time, police rounded up at gunpoint all of the men in the Indian village of Uttawar and forced them to get vasectomies. International family-planning programs, which by this time had spread throughout Latin America and North Africa, gradually abandoned coercive methods over the next few years. The population control movement would have one last gasp, though, when UNFPA and Planned Parenthood helped China launch its draconian one-child policy in By the late s, the UNFPA and Planned Parenthood had cleaned up their programs so that medical workers on the ground no longer were expected to lower birthrates.

Clinicians now concentrated on helping women make informed choices about their sex lives and childbearing. If family planning executives discussed the prospect of slowing population growth in public, Connelly says, it was only as an ancillary benefit of giving women more control over their bodies. The economic benefits of slowing population growth, though, were apparent: as birthrates plummeted in most of the developing world, prosperity and modernization typically arrived. The governments of many countries in Asia and Latin America, now that they had proportionately fewer poor people to care for, could afford to invest in industry and modern agricultural methods, which boosted grain production percent in some nations between the s and the s.

Connelly, in Fatal Misconception , makes the controversial argument that family planning programs have received too much credit for declining birthrates, and hence for development; see sidebar to the left. Across the developing world, birthrates declined where family planners provided a range of safe contraceptives and taught people the benefits of limiting their family size — not only where they bribed people to be sterilized or threatened tax penalties. Yet, just as family planning programs were beginning to define a new humanitarian mission, funding stagnated. launched a major lobbying effort against international family-planning programs. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to most women who lack access to birth control today in part because family planning programs arrived to the region late, in the s, when the money had already begun to dry up, say family planning executives.

Family planning came to Africa late, they say, because international health programs, with their ensuing population boom, had arrived late, too. Today, UN-backed family-planning programs operate in nearly all developing countries. If the UNFPA were better funded, say its proponents, birth control would be more available in rural Africa as well as in many Muslim and Catholic countries, where Western family planners must work hard to educate local leaders about the benefits of reproductive health services. How to raise the money? Advocates for family planning are doing a lot of soul-searching these days.

Shortly after my wife graduated from college, she joined Zero Population Growth. In the s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Zero Population Growth has morphed into the Population Connection. Bernie Sanders recently vowed to support "educating everyone on the need to curb population growth" as a response to climate change. Ehrlich is not the only voice proclaiming the end is near. The OPT movement has attracted followers such as David Attenborough. In the US, Bernie Sanders recently vowed to support "empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth" as a response to climate change.

Circa , influential intellectuals in Europe and the U. voiced concerns about uncontrolled procreation causing a supposed decline in the quality of human beings. Malthus thought food production could not keep pace with population growth. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands.

Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. Unlike Ehrlich and others, Malthus had reason to be a pessimist in his lifetime. If Malthus had been writing history or predicting the near future, he would not have been far from the mark. The year was one of famine in Sweden. Norberg shares this powerful testimony of a survivor remembering back to his childhood. We often saw mother weeping to herself, and it was hard on a mother, not having any food to put on the table for her hungry children. Emaciated, starving children were often seen going from farm to farm, begging for a few crumbs of bread. One day three children came to us, crying and begging for something to still the pangs of hunger.

Sadly, her eyes brimming with tears, our mother was forced to tell them that we had nothing but a few crumbs of bread which we ourselves needed. Hesitantly she acceded to our request, and the unknown children wolfed down the food before going on to the next farm, which was a good way off from our home. The following day all three were found dead between our farm and the next. The population of Sweden in was a bit over 3. Is Sweden more overpopulated today than it was in ? Overpopulation is relative to the ability of an economy to provide a decent standard of living, adequate nutrition, and minimize the impact on the environment.

Geographically, North Korea is almost 25 percent larger than South Korea. The population of modern South Korea is about double the population of starving North Korea. Using that measure, North Korea, with more land and fewer people, is overpopulated compared to South Korea. If you think South Korea, with its more modern economy, inflicts more harm on the environment than the poor economy of North Korea, you would be wrong. In North Korea, some rivers run black from uranium mining. The result has been widespread deforestation and a denuding of the landscape. Emaciated looking farmers tilled the earth with plows pulled by oxen and trudged through half-frozen streams to collect nutrient-rich sediments for their fields.

Dutch soil scientist Joris van der Kamp reports on the North Korean environmental collapse. Everything is collected for food or fuel or animal food, almost nothing is left for the soil. Elon Musk dreams of colonizing Mars , but he can find in North Korea a dead landscape with warmer temperatures, more oxygen, and minuscule travel costs compared to the Red Planet. When communism collapses in North Korea, capitalism will terraform the country at an inestimably small fraction of the cost of terraforming Mars. Based on its ability to support its human population and protect its environment, sparsely populated North Korea is one of the most overpopulated countries in the world.

As farmers got individual property rights, they then had an incentive to produce more. As borders were opened to international trade, regions began to specialize in the kinds of production suited to their soil, climate and skills. And agricultural technology improved to make use of these opportunities. Even though population grew rapidly, the supply of food grew more quickly. The more specialization and exchange, the wealthier and better fed a growing population will be. As Matt Ridley explains in his book The Rational Optimist :.

The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation. Increasing self-sufficiency is the very signature of a civilisation under stress, the definition of a falling standard of living. In their book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline , Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson have startling facts for those who believe the population will continue to explode. No, we are not going to keep adding bodies until the world is groaning at the weight of eleven billion of us and more; nine billion is probably closer to the truth, before the population starts to decline. No, fertility rates are not astronomically high in developing countries; many of them are at or below replacement rate.

No, Africa is not a chronically impoverished continent doomed to forever grow its population while lacking the resources to sustain it; the continent is dynamic, its economies are in flux, and birth rates are falling rapidly. No, African Americans and Latino Americans are not overwhelming white America with their higher fertility rates. The fertility rates of all three groups have essentially converged. Delaying the escape from extreme poverty just increases the population. Every generation kept in extreme poverty will produce an even larger next generation. The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty and give people better lives. parents then have chosen for themselves to have fewer children.

This transformation has happened across the world but it has never happened without lowering child mortality. When feverish dreams of doom are used to justify controlling the lives of others, restricting personal and economic freedom, expect more poverty and environmental degradation with real overpopulation like that of North Korea. It is capitalism and freedom that lift humanity out of poverty, vanquish overpopulation, and offer a sustainable future. Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry's essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

Please, enable JavaScript and reload the page to enjoy our modern features. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. Please do not edit the piece, ensure that you attribute the author and mention that this article was originally published on FEE. Latest Stories. The Myth That Our Planet Faces an Overpopulation Crisis The world is not in danger of being overpopulated, so why do so many insist it is? Barry Brownstein. Politics Overpopulation Population Control Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb Environment. Today people live like animals in North Korea. They, too, eat grass and bark off trees. Barry Brownstein Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.

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The Myth That Our Planet Faces an Overpopulation Crisis,Malthusian Doom

WebOverpopulation is one of the most serious threats to blogger.compulation is a serious problem that will eventually have an extremely negative effect on our countries and our WebAs a result of human actions, overpopulation on the planet became a major factor, negatively affecting the cumulative life of the world, all its life forms and the planet WebAs of June , the world population stands at about billion people. There is one birth every 8 seconds and one death every 12 seconds, which means that there is WebThere is a growing sense among scholars that the topic of overpopulation — which has faded from public consciousness as the world’s population growth rate has declined ... read more

Essay on Communication Essay. Barry Brownstein Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. There are many reasons for overpopulation will we will discuss further in the essay. In a broader perspective the term overpopulation is also used for planet earth, because of the incessant rise in human population. Back in the s, the English thought that there were too many Irish people, which is why they didn't bother helping to feed them during the potato famine. The more specialization and exchange, the wealthier and better fed a growing population will be.

As the number of people using a specific resource increases, is the world overpopulated essay, its fast consumption results in rapid depletion. Poverty in India is considered to be one of the prime causes of overpopulation. Furthermore, they had little is the world overpopulated essay no access to modern birth control, so they ended up with even more kids than they would have otherwise chosen. Based on the sources I found, limiting family size is fraught with problems, but implementing a truly effective sustainability policy to increase the carrying capacity of the planet poses major political challenges. This in turn can lead to higher unemployment, higher taxes, and poorer living standards. Overpopulation In India Words 4 Pages. Overpopulation Is Not An Issue.