| SamuelRSmith said: I was going to ignore these posts at first, it usually just isn't worth it. But seeing that so many people seem to have this belief, I'd like to point out the fallacy. Human population is NOWHERE near the earth's capacity. Seriously, people have been worrying about this for over a century now. And yet, we live in more abundance now than ever. The people who have little in this world is not the result of over-population. It's a result of under-development. There are plethora of reasons why those regions are under-developed, but global overpopulation is not one of them. Humans could, right now, double, triple, quintuple, what ever is needed, food production within just a few years, if the profit motive was there. People starving in this world is not because of others overeating, or wasting food, or just too many rich people. Did you know that European and American Governments pay farmers to NOT produce food? Disease is another common misconception. I think this is a population-density thing. If people are all crowded together, then it must be easy for diseases to spread? I live in Hong Kong. Did you know that in some districts of Hong Kong, there are almost 35,000 people per square mile? By comparison, New York City has a mere 1,300 per square mile. Hong Kong does not suffer from any plague like events. You could increase the population of NYC by a factor of 25, and viral disease would not be much of an issue (for population reasons alone, of course, vaccine programs and the such play a role in this). Remember, the worst plague in human history was the Black Death, from the 1300s. The total human population at that time was estimated to be between 300 and 400 million. Human population has increased by a factor of 20. By many estimates, more people live in the USA now than lived on the entire planet at that time. War is another one. As if war is some product of over-population, it isn't. That's such a cartoonish view of things, it almost doesn't even warrant mention. I will point out that at the time of WW2, the largest war in human history, human population was 2.3 billion. This post is getting a bit long, so I won't carry on. But I can keep going on, in relation to water, oil, etc. I won't, but I will summarise: people have been complaining about over-population for more than a century. Those people have been wrong for more than a century. At this point, it's like betting against the Harlem Globetrotters. |
I will chime in here also. There was a report done over a decade ago about the problem is Resource mismanagement and not having too much population. The went on to give the following illustration which I love. If ever person for the last 6 thousand years were still alive, roughly 10 billion people, and we give each person 5 achres of land each, which is about 5 city blocks for better visualization, for a house and food production use The entire population whould easily fit in an area of North America, leaving the rest of the world untouched. (I adjusted the math because I found the illustration and people are forgetting the point it is an illustration.)
So it kind of drive home the point that we suck at managing our resources to almost a surperlative degree, and how destructive we are a species. I would also like to also point out that the reason we are so bad is we usally put "profits" first and humanitity's well being second. Because the profits are not there we allow perfectly good food stuffs to go bad and get tossed when it goes bad, we dump out perfectly good food to drive up the prices when we do go over. We allow food stuff to rot in containers earmarked for other contries because of profits, tariffs and other political non-sense. And because of climate changes caused by our misamanagment the furtile regions are changing in already under-developed regions.
