Is the world overpopulated? Are we heading toward a global population "crash"? In the late 1960s and early 1970s some environmentalists began making sensational claims that the worldâs ever increasing population would soon outstrip the planetâs limited resources leading to an environmental cataclysm of horrific proportions. In these scenarios, a massive worldwide famine was just around the corner. The number of people would keep increasing while the amount of available food would stay the same or even decline. The inevitable result, the experts argued, was famine by the early 1980s at the latest. The only way to lessen the severity of the impending disaster was to adopt strict policies to control population. Today, many of those predictions could be right around the corner as world population has topped 6 billion and severe repercussions are inevitable if population growth continues at such rates.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Concern that population growth would strain resources is a worry that goes back literally thousands of years. The most prominent advocate of this view in more recent history was the Rev. Thomas Malthus who became famous for his 18th century book, Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted that the growing European population would quickly outstrip available resources. Many of Malthusâ immediate concerns about population growth and the possibility of the world reaching its carrying capacity quickly were rendered obsolete with the coming of the industrial revolution. Agricultural advances that allowed the speed of food production to continue to stay in front of population growth is beginning to be a major concern to population experts worldwide. In many areas food production has fallen behind population growth and has resulted in dire consequences.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich and his wife are the most authoritative source on 20th century population trends and their effects on agriculture, environment and health. Ehrlich (1969) picked up where Malthus left off with his book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich combined the ideas of Malthus and others with sensationalistic imagery about the horrors of a world with too many people. The Population Bomb predicted that tens of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s following an inevitable crash of the global food supply. Dwindling natural resources such as oil would soon be used up and the world ran a real risk of returning to a pre-industrial dark age. Also of concern to Ehrlich are the current problems with ecosystem health. He believes that population growth is highly correlated with greenhouse warming, acid rain, depletion of the ozone layer, and other environmental disasters. He believes this happens because humans interact with the worldâs ecosystem, but as the number of humansâ increases this interaction begins to tax the ecosystem beyond its capacity.
Pierre R. Crosson and Kenneth D. Frederick (1977) express their fears about growing populations in their book, The World Food Situation. They attribute the entire worldâs food production and distribution problems to two ominous trendsâ"the addition of millions of already starving and malnourished people each year and their dependence upon imported food to support their inadequate amounts of food production. They say that the food consumption of the poorest 15-20 percent of the world population has remained at an inadequate level while their numbers increased by 200 million from 1952 to 1972. The problem is most acute in developing regions where two-thirds of the developing countries are unable to meet their food demands. They believe that this problem is only going to get worse because the lower-income countries, not including communist countries, account for 83 percent of the world population growth. This trend is only going to continue until these countries can produce more themselves or get more from other countries¾ both of which they have been unable to do in the past. This study was done in the late 1970s and the problem, we are sure, is much worse today. All the sources we were able to locate agreed that population growth is a serious problem and if allowed to go unchecked will only get worse. It seemed that the majority of our sources dealt primarily with agricultural problems but all at least touched on environment repercussions. After reading the literature we made some of our own assumptions based on our own intuitions about population growth.
AN INITITAL INVESTIGATION
Of course what failed were the apocalyptic predictions. Most indicators of human well being improved dramatically in the last quarter of the 20th century. Regardless of the fact that much of the literature has proved to be quite dramatic, there is some truth in the authorâs claims of a worldwide population problem. We have set out to explore many of our own assumptions and determine through statistical analysis where the actual problems lie. We will examine agriculture, ecosystem health, human health and national attributes by running various multivariate statistical analyses to determine the actual importance of each variable in relation to population growth. This process will allow us to either find confirmation of our predictions or show if our assumptions are disconfirmed. The confirmed variables directly corresponding to population growth and its concurrent problems will show areas where help is most needed and allow prescriptions for future policy initiatives to be directed toward the right places.
GENERAL PREDICTIONS
Our research group started with some basic assumptions about the findings regarding population growth. Generally speaking and based on the literature, we supposed that certain things would be greatly affected by population growth. We expected that poorer health conditions would occur in areas of high population growth. We also supposed that as population increases, the amount of arable land per capita would fall, but that the percentage of arable land in relation to the total amount of land in a particular country would increase. We predicted that CO2 emissions would rise as populations increased. We predicted that there would be higher numbers of AIDS patients and tuberculosis cases in areas of high population growth. Our final assumption regarding the effects of population growth was that the general level of environmental and ecological conditions would degenerate, as populations in countries increased.
Again, would be nice if you cited the source. Having to Google quotes to find, in this case, that you're copying wholesale from an academic paper without permission is actually concerning, as it's also not allowed under fair-use law.
In this case, it's kinda even worse as I suspect that maybe three people on the whole of these forums would even understand somewhat the actual meaning of the statistical analysis used (myself being one of them).
@ Hippyonfire:
Either you're trolling, or you're spamming, or you haven't read the rules.
coming from china and India. they are using a lot of pollutants, like us so it is our job to help the community now. yea, that stinks but its good for some people who plays games everyday 24/7. i dont know if they seen outside since they were born!!!
That is one of the reasons that the price of food is rising, but there is another more prominent reason. That would be the price of gasoline. Since the price of gas has risen the price of food has risen, because you have to use gas to transport the product from the factory/fields to the factory/store.
But you can't just stop people from having sex. And reproduction will always be a problem... Because the land mass of the world isn't increasing, it's decreasing due to erosion.
And one last that I have to say about population.... Why are we wasting money on ethanol fuel, when were buying corn field, and making them into houses... lol? doesn't that defeat the whole damn purpose of the ethanol... no corn no ethanol....
@kielzanie: well, I don't think people should be playing their xbox 24/7, but a little frisbee outside isn't something I'm going to dissuade anyone from.
I agree though, that the first world should be sharing technology with India and China to help them reach first-world standards without over-polluting. First world countries also tend to have a lower birth-rate, which would help their population problems
@snowman1474: The price of gas is rising, but a lot of that has to do with the dollar going down the toilet. Europe has had 4 euro/LITER gasoline for a while, and they seem to be doing just fine.
I totally agree that restricting reproduction is the wrong way to solve population problems. The right way is education, both so people understand birth control, and so they can get better jobs (since upper class people tend to have fewer children than lower-class people).
And the corn->ethanol argument... I think you're confused, because it's basic economics. People want cheap land for houses more than for corn, so that's what they pay for. If corn was worth it, we'd tear down houses to make cornfields and pay people to move into apartment complexes.
@eddie13: You're right that any means of lowering the population isn't going to be successful unless we take unethical measures. Then again, some European countries have negative population growth, so maybe we just need to shuffle people around to make things work.
I totally agree that restricting reproduction is the wrong way to solve population problems. The right way is education
QFT!
Would it be oversimplifying things to say that Europe's population decline is linked to their focus on public infrastructure and economic conservatism as opposed to relatively free-market capitalism?
@ Ricador:
Maybe if people were more careful they have sex and ONLY have planned parenthoods the world would not be as overpopulated as it is now.
if human werent too greedy there would be enough food for everyone and if a world with enough food would exist then all the world's major cities wouldnt be overcrowd because they dont need to find jobs
