Gavin Heap
WRTG 150
Rachel Gilman
10 November 2016
Population Control and Overpopulation: Myth or Reality
According to the U.S. Census Bureau at 3:55 P.M. on November 10, 2016 there are 7,351,453,700 people who roam the Earth. By the time you read this I’m sure that number will be much higher. Population control is something that we hear and discuss often about animals and plants, but when we apply this to humans we get quiet. Are we afraid of our own wellbeing? Human population control is something that needs to be studied and discussed now. It isn’t something we can put off. Take climate change for example. Our ancestors we’re uninformed about how their actions affect the climate, and now we, the living population, are making up for some of their mistakes so we don’t lose our time on Earth. If this goes undiscussed we could be leaving our future kids with a tough situation to troubleshoot. Like any issue, two sides form. First, some people believe our population is rising at a greater rate than our Earth can sustain. This group of people believe we need to fix it either through limiting the number of kids we have or exploring solutions to increase Earth’s capacity for human life. Second, some people believe that our population is rising (indisputably) but believe that we will be able to sustain ourselves, also many people that believe population control is immoral fall into this category.
Critics argue that population is something that needs to be discussed. Opponents will say that many problems that humans face on a global scale, such as climate change and world hunger are related to overpopulation. These people think that if we follow the rate of growth we’ve been seeing there won’t be room for people to live and food for people to eat. When limiting the number of children one may have, like they did in China, opponents claim that this is more humane then having kids born into this uncertain and cruel world. I believe that these critics are tacking an old problem onto newer issues. When it comes to climate change, humans are not the root of that problem. Our society is based upon the burning of fossil fuels, dramatically reducing the number of humans would not solve the problem. China should not be a country in which the U.S. develops its policies after. China’s attempt at population control ended in failure. China’s rationale in this controversial policy was to increase the standard of living among its one billion citizens. So instead of policy change or other methods of improving the standard of living, China attempted to encourage having one or two children through state benefits, and punishing those with big families through taxation and stripping these families of certain government benefits. Now what we’ve seen in China is a dramatic increase in the number of male children. Chinese couples, since only allowed one child, would try and have a boy to carry on the family name. Population control, although a sensitive subject, needs to be discussed and solutions need to be explored, although limiting the number of humans on the Earth may seem like a plausible solution it’s not, it’s immoral, it’s a lazy answer, and it’s not creating the problems we are seeing.
Population control is purposeful alterations among the growth of a population. This concept was explored as early as 500 B.C. by Confucius. Confucius argued that when there are too many people it threatens the livelihood of the day laborer, and when food supply is insufficient mortality rates go up. Plato and Aristotle were even discussing population control in their time. They discussed manipulating population to acquire the ideal number of people in each city-state. If there weren’t enough people they encouraged procreation and immigration, and if there were too many people they advocated for emigration. The father of the “population planning movement” in modern times is Thomas Malthus. He wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 that shaped a lot of our thoughts on population control. He talked about different “checks” to population. The two checks were “positive,” which included things like disease, war, famine, natural disaster and genocide, and then “preventative,” which included abstinence, birth control, and moral restraint. Malthus predicted that “positive checks,” would ultimately be the only way to save humans, and that devastation wasn’t a matter of if but a matter of when. Often we see exponentially growing graphs of total human population. What we rarely see is the rate at which it is increasing. The world population growth rate, believe it or not, is going down. In the 1960’s it peaked at around 2.2%, and now in 2016 it is around 1.1%. So, although the total population is still increasing, the rate at which it is rising is slowing down.
The opposition will say that overpopulation is the root of many environmental problems facing the Earth today. These problems include, global warming, habitat loss, world hunger, and consumption of natural resources faster than they can regenerate such as water, and fossil fuels. Per a U.N. study, 75% Earth is covered in water, and 30% of that is freshwater. Now among that 30%, most of it isn’t accessible or too polluted for human consumption this leaves just 3% available for humans to use readily, this is just .003% of the total water on Earth. Experts predict that by the year 2025 50% of the people on Earth will not have sufficient water supply. People among the opposition will say that leaving a smaller carbon footprint isn’t enough, we need less feet to begin with. A study conducted in 2009 by Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax concluded that the “carbon legacy” of one child in the United States is 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide. In the conclusion of the study they say “Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle.” (Murtaugh 18). Their claim is false. What they should say is, the potential savings from changes in lifestyle are huge compared to the savings from reduced reproduction. I believe the changes in lifestyle we would have to make wouldn’t be hard. A lot of the changes can simply be made in the home. If every household was better insulated and had energy-efficient appliances the changes we would see would be immense. Imagine if some of these small changes made everybody’s carbon legacy 9440 metric tons. Now I know this is a miniscule change, but that’s over 7,000,000,000 people saving 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide. So, added up that’s 7,000,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide saved. That is equivalent to 741,447 children. Instead of changing policy or human behavior they, the opposition and believers of overpopulation, challenge humans themselves. As opponents and experts place the blame on humans they rarely offer a plausible solution. Telling people they can’t have kids anymore isn’t a solution, and never will be. So, if we can’t control the amount of kids we’re having shouldn’t that lead to denser, and unsustainable populations? The short answer is no.
A phrase opponents use to explain the problems we are seeing is “overpopulation.” Overpopulation is a hard term to put parameters around. According Merriam-Webster overpopulation is “the condition of having a population so dense as to cause environmental deterioration, an impaired quality of life, or a population crash. So, as we see environmental deterioration and impaired quality of life throughout the world we must find the root of the problem. But by this definition there isn’t a certain number or parameter to define something that is overpopulated. Is Australia overpopulated because they have a 1.8% annual population growth? If it is then would the post-revolutionary United States be considered overpopulated with a 2.6% population change in the late 1700’s? Opponents would then talk about how the number may not be as important as the density of the population. So, by this definition the country of Monaco would be the most overpopulated with 42,143 people per square mile. And a country like Ethiopia who only hosts 173 people per square mile should be better off. But Monaco has the highest number of millionaires and billionaires per square mile in the world. What we see here are the disparities that arise due to the oppositions loose grasp on what’s going on. Ironically enough poverty and hunger are problems facing Ethiopians. But we just determined that Ethiopia has one of the sparsest populations on planet Earth, so shouldn’t they not see the problems that come with overpopulation such as famine and hunger? The fact of the matter is, overpopulation isn’t determining some of the problems we see in populous countries.
Overpopulation is easy to define under a closed environment. In these parameters, we’d say a population is overpopulated when the resources don’t match the populations need. So, let’s say the doors to this convention center, where we’re gathered today, closed. All 100 of us would now be part of a closed environment. The only resources we have are the refreshments in the very back of this ballroom. Now I know and appreciate that most of us are in our 20’s, but let’s imagine that our ages varied. Would we encourage euthanizing the old, and sterilizing the young to control the population? Those people aren’t to blame, the ones who shut the doors should be held responsible. Now let’s transfer this analogy to a populous city. I think there is a lot of confusion between overcrowded and overpopulated. Overcrowded cities need to be addressed by city planners and overpopulated places need to be addressed by population controllers, not the other way around. I believe that the allocation of resources, especially within the U.S. is too blame. Just as overcrowding doesn’t mean overpopulation, scarcity doesn’t mean overpopulation either. The United Nations sponsored World Food Programme is a humanitarian agency that battles world hunger. They recently released an article describing components that lead to world hunger. They are “poverty, conflict (war), natural disasters, over-exploitation of the environment, and poor agricultural infrastructure.” (Population Research Institute 12). Notice that overpopulation didn’t make this list. That is, again, because overpopulation isn’t causing the problems we are seeing in the world today.
Over the past century we’ve seen the world population rise by 4.4 billion. But also in this same time, prices of staple foods like rice, wheat, and corn dropped. So, if the opponents say scarcity is a component of overpopulation is America less overpopulated today than it was 100 years ago? Studies have proven that we do grow enough food to sustain the world’s population and more, but the problems we are seeing with wide spread famine are that of poverty, and land on which to grow food. Some families are simply too poor to purchase the food that is being grown. Also, some nations, especially those in Africa, don’t have the right land to grow food on. OxFam, an international organization that attempts to alleviate poverty throughout the world, says “the world produces 17% more food per person today than 30 years ago.” Even the World Food Programme says “there is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life.” The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization did a study that concluded enough food is grown for every person on the Earth to have 2,868 calories. That is 868 more than the average amount needed per person. They also concluded that 2,500,000,000 tons of food will be harvested throughout the world, while 833,000,000 will be wasted or used for livestock before ready for human consumption. So, based off these renowned groups position, data, and conclusions, we know the root of the problem to be in the distribution and use of raw food materials. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a Food Recovery Hierarchy chart that lists the ways we can help prevent food waste: “source reduction, reduce the volume of surplus food generated, feed hungry people, donate extra food to food banks, soup kitchens, and shelters, feed animals, divert food scraps to animal feed, industrial uses, provide waste oils for rendering and fuel conversion and food scraps for digestion to recover energy, composting, create a nutrient-rich soil amendment, and landfill/incineration, last resort to disposal.” This is an optimal example of how a little extra thought could prove to be more help, than indolently saying overpopulation is causing the problems we are seeing.
I will next argue the morality of population control. When speaking of population control people go to the two ends of life, the elderly and the children. Population control is responsible for the modern devaluation of children. This issue of population control strikes at the heart of the fundamental issue of choice – also called agency or free will. If you believe that all mankind should be free to choose and that procreation is a right given from God, then population control that is compulsory would be considered immoral. An infringement upon a basic human right. That is one of the biggest reasons communist China is capable of enacting restrictions, but America can’t. As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and students at Brigham Young University we need to stand up for what we believe in. We believe in conceiving for a reason and purpose and caring for the children. There are also logical explanations of why population control is not an answer, with specific examples in society today. While it is true that birth control has overall brought more benefits (children who are desired by parents tend to be better cared for, more loved, more likely to succeed in society – while also bettering relations for parents both emotionally and sexually), there are some drawbacks when a population becomes more secular and sees children as undesirable or a burden and opts to have either no children or only 1 children. We can see this with Planned Parenthood receiving more government funding and an increase in abortions annually. If couples have less than 2 children on average, a population does not replace itself. This is what has happened in many countries in Europe including Italy and Germany. It is simple math, that eventually negative population growth will lead to a nationality (or whatever specific population) disappearing entirely. European countries have needed to bring in many immigrants to sustain their economies and socialist government programs. You cannot promise a population health care, retirement benefits, free education and other governmental programs unless you have a sufficient work force paying into the system to pay for all these programs. This immigration has led to both economic and cultural problems in Europe.
Overpopulation is a myth. When people imagine a graph of the world’s population they see an exponentially growing graph, but data shows that that isn’t necessarily true. We’ve estimated that the Earth gains about 1,000,000,000 every 15 years. To keep this up, exponentially, the population wouldn’t need to rise by 1,000,000,000 every 15 years but rather double whatever the current number is, which simply isn’t happening. As I mentioned earlier, the rate at which the population is growing is slowing down dramatically. This can be attributed to the Global Total Fertility Rate (GTFR). This number roughly shows about how many kids women are having. From 1950-1970 the GTFR was a little under 5. But the latest numbers retrieved from the years 2010-2015 show that women are having a little over 2 kids each. Experts predict that we will see a population peak in the next 25 years then a decrease because the current population is not replacing itself.
There are many implications to be drawn. First is that Thomas Malthus, the “father of overpopulation” created a mass hysteria, and movement with little to no backing. Malthus himself predicted that we’d be out of food in the year 1890. Malthus, I believe, was off the mark, because I’m here typing this paper, in the year 2016, with a piece of pepperoni pizza by my side. He believed that the food production increased incrementally while people reproduced exponentially, so being the “mathematician” he claimed to be concluded that Britain should start ridding the streets of the undesirables. Paul Ehrilich, an entomologist, took up some of the beliefs of Malthus and concluded that we’d see widespread famines and massive deaths in the 1970s. Yet again, here I am in 2016 not famished, and not overwhelmed with the number of people on the Earth. In Ehrlich’s controversial book, The Population Bomb, it reads “at this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” According to the The World Bank, the world death rate in 1968, when the book was released, was 12.4 per 1000. But the most recent data taken in 2014 proved that there were 7.7 deaths per 1000. Another disparity among the opposition. Since the time of Malthus, this “imminent” problem has yet to take place, and has been rescheduled time and time again over the past 200 years.
Works Cited
Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. New York, Ballantine Books, 1968.
“Food Recovery Hierarchy.” Sustainable Management of Food, Environmental Protection
Agency, 31 Mar. 2016, www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-recovery-
hierarchy.
Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. London, J. Johnson, 1798.
Morse, Anne, and Steven Mosher. “Debunking the Myth of Overpopulation.” Debunking the
Myth of Overpopulation | PRI, Population Research Institute, 30 Sept. 2013,
www.pop.org/content/debunking-myth-overpopulation.
Murtaugh, Paul, and Michael Schlax. “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacy of Individuals.”
Global Environmental Change, vol. 19, 30 Oct. 2008, pp. 14–20.
www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/pdfs/OSUCarbonSt
udy.pdf.
“Overpopulation Effects – Everything Connects.” Everythingconnects.org, 20 Nov. 2013,
www.everythingconnects.org/overpopulation-effects.html.
“Overpopulation Is a Myth.” Pop101, Population Research Institute,
www.overpopulationisamyth.com.
“Population Density.” The World Bank, United Nations,
data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST.
“Total Fertility Rate.” The World Bank, United Nations,
data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN.
“U.S. and World Population Clock.” World Population Clock, United States Census Bureau,
www.census.gov/popclock/world.