Most of the world’s problems today can be attributed, in one way or another, to unrestricted population growth. Traditionally, this proliferation has been controlled by disease, wars and natural disasters, but our advances in medicine, food production and global communication and interaction has severely restricted these “natural” effects on human population growth.
A growing population uses more of earth’s resources, pollutes those that are left and speeds up natural cycles that threaten the planet’s environment, and even humans’ own existence. Human ingenuity has been able to combat some of these trends, but we always seem to react way too late for these to be as effective as they could be. We seem to be in a downward spiral that may well result in our own extermination and, perhaps, our planet’s (it’s a rather self-centered, arrogant, description to call it “our” planet) survival. Quite honestly, the planet is probably more likely to survive than we are!
We have been talking about the dangers of population growth for nearly as long as we could talk, and doing very little about it in the process. The Greek philosopher, Plato, decried his local population boom, suggesting that the ideal population of Athens, and indeed for any city, was 5,040 – Athens, today, is home to 3 million. Mexico City holds 27 million. The question, therefore, has to be asked, “How many people can the Earth, theoretically, support? A question that is probably impossible to answer with any degree of credibility, but the only certain fact is that that number is finite.
The Global Footprint Network, a U.S. independent think tank, calculates that, what they call, the Earth’s Overshoot Day – the day on the calendar year where we humans have used up our annual allotment of the total Earth’s resources – was, for 2025, July 24th. That’s barely the halfway point in the year. Even if that is remotely true, it’s totally unsustainable, and yet we blithely continue on as if the potentially inevitable conclusion will never be reached, so we don’t have to seriously worry about it. There seems to be a publicly unacknowledged feeling that, somehow, it will be taken care of without us actually having to do anything. Maybe “Mother Nature” will bring a huge pandemic, an asteroid will wipe out a significant number of the world’s people, a la the extinction of the dinosaurs. Anything to avoid the human responsibility of being primary custodians of the planet.
The article I recently read, which prompted these thoughts, sought to introduce some good news into this discussion, while stating the obvious fact that we are failing as custodians. One sentence in that article asks, “Do we continue to steal from the future to feed our insatiable present?” Right now, the answer is definitely yes.
The positive news from that article is that the United Nations is predicting that the human population of the Earth will actually peak at 10.3 billion in the 2080’s and then decline to 10.2 billion by the end of the century. I’m not sure which crystal ball they are using for that conclusion, but it seems to me that such a report is nothing more than “kicking the can down the street” as an excuse for not facing reality now.
The article ends by hoping that minor adjustments, such as education, equal rights of women, and economics, will lead to lower fertility rates, or controlled immigration (I can’t see how that will reduce the population!), and will buy countries enough time to adapt.
I have several major problems with that approach: (1) Hope is an irresponsible response to a problem; (2) This is not a country-by-country problem, it is a global problem with only global solutions; (3) Immigration doesn’t solve anything in terms of numbers; (4) Economics will only come into play in rich countries; and, finally, (5) History tells us that “wishful thinking” rarely achieves anything.
The only good thing I can say about the article is that it exists, and that someone in a position of influence (an editor) thought it was worth giving the problem space in a major magazine. That, alone, gives me some hope!! It raises the possibility that we might wake up in time, and have the courage to address the issue of earth’s over-population seriously in time to avoid catastrophe.
