The Time magazine, on 12th May 2008, has an article about how overpopulation will affect climate change and how we can help by having fewer children. It says,
Michael Hayden should have some insight on the biggest threats facing the U.S. But when Hayden recently described what he saw the most troublesome trend over the next several decades, it wasn't terrorism or climate change. It was overpopulation in the poorest parts of the world.
The sudden spike in both food and fuel prices is raising concerns that we may not be able to grow forever, that even with the best technological innovation, the planet may have limits. It's becoming increasingly clear that if we can't curb carbon emissions in a world of 6.8 billion, it may be impossible to do when there are 9 billion of us.
The question remains though: what can we do about population? State-mandated birth control is essentially unfair. The key to limiting population growth, he [Engleman] says, is to give control over procreation to women. In society after society, even in countries where large families have always been the norm, when women take control over family size, birth rates shrink.
The population of the Earth continues to increase and the affects on climate change are going to increase along with it. Therefore we need to stop families having too many children by giving woman the control to dictate when they get pregnant.
The article also had something interesting to say about the same thing being said before in 1970.
That era, which saw the birth of the modern environmental movement, was obsessed with the idea of global limits, that without drastic intervention, we were doomed to overpopulation. Books like Paul Erhlich's The Population Bomb warned that the Earth was reaching the end of its carrying capacity, and that within decades, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death.
Fast-forward 30 years, however, and the situation has changed. The mass famines that Erhlich and others prophesized never happened, and while population growth has continued — an estimated 6.8 billion people nowlive on Earth — and on the whole, the world is better off today than it has ever been.
They got it wrong before therefore it is possible they have got it wrong again. But over 30 years have past and there is a new generation of people to scare.
The book is “More: Population, Nature and What Women Want” by Robert Engelman.
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There's an aspect of population growth that is completely overlooked. I am the author of "Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America." I think you may find this book to be very interesting because population density lies at the heart of this new economic theory. To make a long story short, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption of products begins to decline out of the need to conserve space. People who live in crowded conditions simply don’t have enough space to use and store many products. This declining per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty.
For most people who see never-ending population growth as a problem, their concerns are rooted in a concern for the environment. Economists, on the other hand, shrug off such concerns, claiming that man is ingenious enough to overcome any obstacles to population growth. Resources can be used more efficiently and recycled, pollution can be abated, and so on. Making matters worse, they can’t envision how an economy can remain healthy without further population growth. So our government and business leaders hold fast to their “pro growth” approach.
This book, however, finally offers the “ultimate weapon” for environmentalists and anyone concerned about population growth - a solid economic argument for a reduced population. It explains how everyone’s wallet is directly impacted by growth which has become cancerous, driving up unemployment and eroding their finances and quality of life. It’s written in plain language, not economic gibberish, and is aimed at average Americans.
If you’re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, I invite you to visit my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com. There you can read the preface for free, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like. (It's also available at Amazon.com.)
Please forgive the somewhat “spammish” nature of this reply to your post, but I don't know how else to inject this new perspective into the debate about overpopulation without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.
Keep up your efforts to raise concern about our growing population problem!
Pete Murphy
Author, Five Short Blasts
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