Overpopulation - a myth?

[Marulus]

Overpopulation? -- 10 Myths
by Dr. Jacqueline R. Kasun, Economist and Author

It's a day like any other. Your child comes home from school with an assignment. Only today, the assignment is to detail the problems that "overpopulation" is causing the world's ecosystem.

And part of this assignment is to educate you about the world's population "problem."

What do you do? Do you go along with what s/he's being taught? After all, this is what you've been hearing on television and in the newspapers for decades. Or do you have some counter-arguments? Might you, in fact, need to defend yourself and your child from a very real threat?

You should be aware that the question of "overpopulation" is no longer merely a topic of conversation, if it ever was. It is a burning matter of policy and action at the local, national and international level. Our national government is actually committed by law and by international agreement to reducing the worldwide rate of population growth.

Government spokesmen, such as Ambassador Timothy Wirth, insist that this effort must also apply to the population of the United States. Your chances of having grandchildren depend on whether and how this program is carried out. In many countries already, governments sterilize and abort their citizens by force, often with financial help from the United Nations, the United States and government-supported private agencies such as Planned Parenthood.

There are many government policies that make it difficult for families to bring children into the world, and for those children's fathers to support them and their mothers to stay home and raise them. Those policies include levying heavy taxes on families with children, discrimination against men in the job market, building codes and land use restrictions which increase the cost of housing, regulations which discourage productive activity. The groups which have supported these policies have plainly stated their intent to reduce population growth.

The United States government and the United Nations have promoted sex education in the schools, teaching children that there are too many -- far too many -- people in the world. The programs teach that abortion, sterilization and contraception are necessary to reduce "excessive" population growth.

If you familiarize yourself with the myths surrounding "overpopulation," you'll be in a better position to defend yourself and your family against these idealogical threats.

MYTH 1: The world is overcrowded and population growth is adding overwhelming numbers of humans to a small planet.

In fact, people do live in crowded conditions, and always have. We cluster together in cities and villages in order to exchange goods and services with one another. But while we crowd together for economic reasons in our great metropolitan areas, most of the world is empty, as we can see when we fly over it. It has been estimated by Paul Ehrlich and others that human beings actually occupy no more than 1-3% of the earth's land surface.

If you allotted 1250 square feet to each person, all the people in the world would fit into the state of Texas. Try the math yourself: 7,438,152,268,800 square feet in Texas, divided by the world population of 5,860,000,000, equals 1269 square feet per person. The population density of this giant city would be about 21,000 -- somewhat more than San Francisco and less than the Bronx.

Another fact: World population growth is rapidly declining. United Nations figures show that the 79 countries that comprise 40% of the world's population now have fertility rates too low to prevent population decline. The rate in Asia fell from 2.4 in 1965-70 to 1.5 in 1990-95. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the rate fell from 2.75 in 1960-65 to 1.70 in 1990-95. In Europe, the rate fell to 0.16 -- that is, effectively zero -- in 1990-95.And the annual rate of change in world population fell from 2% in 1965-70 to less than 1.5% in 1990-95.

Worldwide, the number of children the typical woman had during her lifetime (total fertility) fell from 5 in 1950-55 to less than 3 in 1990-95. (The number necessary just to "replace" the current generation is 2.1.) In the more developed regions, total fertility fell from 2.77 to 1.68 over the same period. In the less developed regions it fell from more than 6 to 3.3. Total fertility in Mexico was 3.1 in 1990-95. In Spain it stood at 1.3, and in Italy, it was 1.2.

Official forecasts of eventual world population size have been steadily falling. In 1992-93, the World Bank predicted world population would exceed 10 billion by the year 2050. In 1996, the UN predicted 9 billion for 2050. If the trend continues, the next estimate will be lower still.

MYTH 2: Overpopulation is causing global warming.

The message that is most likely to arouse the fervor of young people is that overpopulation is destroying the environment and the biosphere. On this point, the first thing to keep in mind is that some of the most beautiful parts of the world, with the highest environmental quality, are in densely populated countries such as western Germany, which has more than 600 persons per square mile, and the Netherlands, which has almost 1200 persons per square mile, compared with 330 in China. Several myths promote the belief that we are engulfed in an environmental catastrophe.

For instance, Vice-President Al Gore and some scientists say population growth is causing global warming. But there is much disagreement in the scientific community about this. Seventy-nine scientists issued the "Leipzig Declaration" in 1995 saying "...There does not exist today a general scientific consensus about ... greenhouse warming ...." Additionally, the satellite readings of global temperature, available on the NASA Web site at www.nasa.com, do not show a warming trend. And further, respected climatologists such as Hugh Ellsaesser, Richard S. Lindzen and Robert C. Balling vigorously dispute the notion of a global warming danger.

MYTH 3: Overpopulation causes ozone depletion.

Like global warming, the cause and significance of the so-called ozone "hole" is a matter of intense scientific dispute, although the United States and other nations have agreed to reductions in the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were alleged to have caused it. S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist who participated in the earliest ozone measurements, calls the ozone scare a "misuse of science." In fact, many think the chief function of the CFC ban has been to help big chemical companies establish highly profitable new monopolies on the CFC substitutes which they developed.

MYTH 4: The world's forests are disappearing because of overpopulation.

This is an important matter because forests are an essential part of the world's environment and, therefore, humanity's well-being. The Psalmists spoke in awe of the cedars of Lebanon. Today we know that trees inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, which means that they are a first line of defense against air pollution and the specter of global warming. The world forested area, estimated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), currently amounts to four billion hectares, covering 30% of the land surface of the earth. Few people realize this is the same figure as in the 1950s.

In the United States, vast forests cover a third of the land, according to the US Forest Service. That's equivalent to two-thirds of the amount of land that was forested when the Europeans arrived in the 1600s. This acreage has not declined since 1920. In fact, annual forest growth today is more than 3-1/2 times what it was in 1920. Two-thirds of the nation's forests are classed as timberland, capable of producing at least 20 cubic feet per acre of industrial wood annually. Another fact: Trees are growing 33% faster than they are being cut.

The highest volumes of growth occur on privately-owned forest industry land, while the government-owned national forests, where the trees are older, have the lowest volumes of tree growth. The National Wilderness Preservation System grew from nine million acres in 1964 to 96 million acres in 1993. But this is not enough for the environmentalists of The Wildlands Project, who hope to turn fully half of the land area of the United States into wilderness areas inhabited by grizzly bears, wolverines and mountain lions, and make it off-limits to humans. There has also been great agitation about the "destruction of the tropical rainforests." Someone has claimed that an area twice the size of Belgium is now being logged worldwide each year, but people don't realize Belgium could fit into the world's tropical forests 500 times, and in the meantime, the rest of the world's trees -- 99.6% of them -- are continuing to grow. One of the greatest of these tropical stands exists in Brazil, with more than half of the forests of South America.

FAO and Brazilian government figures suggest that logging takes about 0.2% of forest acreage per year, and in 1993, Brazilian forests covered 58% of the country's total land area. Such figures hardly suggest a catastrophic decline. Another thing that's misleading is that FAO figures show a "decline" in forest cover even when forest land is appropriated for use as public parks, and not a single tree is cut down. And if in fact some deforestation is occurring in Brazil, it can scarcely be the result of overpopulation; Brazil has less than half as many people per square mile (31.2) as the world average (101).

MYTH 5: Air pollution is the result of overpopulation, and acid rain, a byproduct of air pollution, is destroying lakes, rivers and forests.

In fact, air and water pollution levels have been highest in the centrally-planned economies of Eastern Europe and China, where population growth is low or negative. Legendary air pollution in Poland and Russia has occurred in areas with thinly-settled populations. In the United States, air pollution is declining significantly. The federal government's National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program recently reported "no widespread forest or crop damage in the United States" related to acid rain.

MYTH 6: Many plants and animals are disappearing because of the growth in human numbers.

There is absolutely no scientific data whatsoever to support this claim. Even a scientist such as David Jablonski, who believes species will decline, says, "We have no idea how many species are out there and how many are dying." Some species, such as blue whales, spotted owls and blackfooted ferrets, have been found to be more numerous than was once thought. Since many species exist in forests and the earth's forest cover is remaining about the same, the claims of massive species extinction appear doubtful.

MYTH 7: Overpopulation is threatening the world food supply.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, world food supplies exceed requirements in all world areas, amounting to a surplus approaching 50% in 1990 in the developed countries, and 17% in the developing regions. "Globally, food supplies have more than doubled in the last 40 years ... between 1962 and 1991, average daily per caput food supplies increased more than 15% ... at a global level, there is probably no obstacle to food production rising to meet demand," according to FAO documents prepared for the 1996 World Food Summit. The FAO also reported that less than a third as many people had less than 2100 calories per person per day in 1990-92 as had been the case in 1969-71.

At present, farmers use less than half of the world's arable land. The conversion of land to urban and built-up uses to accommodate a larger population will absorb less than 2% of the world's land, and "is not likely to seriously diminish the supply of land for agricultural production," according to Paul Waggoner, writing for the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology in 1994.

MYTH 8: Overpopulation is the chief cause of poverty.

In reality, problems commonly blamed on "overpopulation" are the result of bad economic policy. For example, Western journalists blamed the Ethiopian famine on "overpopulation," but that was simply not true. The Ethiopian government caused it by confiscating the food stocks of traders and farmers and exporting them to buy arms. That country's leftist regime, not its population, caused the tragedy. In fact, Africa, beset with problems often blamed on "overpopulation," has only one-fifth the population density of Europe, and has an unexploited food-raising potential that could feed twice the present population of the world, according to estimates by Roger Revelle of Harvard and the University of San Diego. Economists writing for the International Monetary Fund in 1994 said that African economic problems result from excessive government spending, high taxes on farmers, inflation, restrictions on trade, too much government ownership, and overregulation of private economic activity. There was no mention of overpopulation.

The government of the Philippines relies on foreign aid to control population growth, but protects monopolies which buy farmers' outputs at artificially low prices, and sell them inputs at artificially high prices, causing widespread poverty. Advocates of population control blame "overpopulation" for poverty in Bangladesh. But the government dominates the buying and processing of jute, the major cash crop, so that farmers receive less for their efforts than they would in a free market. Impoverished farmers flee to the city, but the government owns 40% of industry and regulates the rest with price controls, high taxes and unpublished rules administered by a huge, corrupt, foreign-aid dependent bureaucracy. Jobs are hard to find and poverty is rampant. This crowding leads to problems such as sporadic or inefficient food distribution, but this problem is caused -- as in Ethiopia -- by that country's flawed domestic policies.

It is often claimed that poverty in China is the result of "overpopulation." But Taiwan, with a population density five times as great as mainland China's, produces many times as much per capita. The Republic of Korea, with a population density 3.6 times as great as China's, has a per capita output almost 16 times as great. The Malaysian government abandoned population control in 1984, ushering in remarkable economic growth under free market reforms, while Ecuador, Uruguay, Bulgaria and other countries complained at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo that though they had reduced their population growth, they still had deteriorating economies.

MYTH 9: Women and men throughout the world are begging for the means to control their fertility.

Not so, according to reports from such places as Bangladesh, Africa and the Philippines. The fact is, surplus condoms and birth control pills fill warehouses in the less developed world and women flee the birth control workers and beg to have their implants and IUDs removed.

US foreign assistance law requires countries receiving American foreign aid to take steps to reduce population growth [you can find this in 22 US Code, sec. 2151-1; 22 US Code, sec. 2151(b)]. Far from meeting an "unmet need" for birth control, foreign-supported family planners in India, Bangladesh and other countries must pay, or force, their clients to accept it, according to reports from these countries. Foreign-supported population control is so unpopular in Bangladesh that riots over this issue prevented the prime minister from attending the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.

Dr. Margaret Ogola, a Kenyan pediatrician, disputed the claim of "unmet need" for family planning at the International Conference on Population and Develop-ment in Cairo in 1994. She said that foreign aid givers have lavished pills, condoms and IUDs on hospitals and clinics in Kenya, but that simple medicines for common diseases remain unavailable. A United Nations survey of abortion and birth control policies throughout the world found that high proportions of women were familiar with and were using "traditional" methods (NFP) of limiting births.

In 1981, the typical Bangladeshi woman was having seven children during her lifetime; since then the number has fallen to 3.4. According to Bangladesh press reports in 1994, the secretary of health acknowledged that "coercion, blackmail [and] abuse of payment provisions" were problems in the population control program. Alarmed by extremely low fertility, South Korea reported to the International Conference in Cairo that it has slashed its government expenditures on birth control. Singapore, faced with below-replacement fertility, reported that it now offers tax rebates to couples with more than two children. Government-supported "family planning" agencies in the United States, such as Planned Parenthood, claim their services save public assistance costs. In fact, published research has shown that states which spend large amounts on birth control subsequently have higher costs of public assistance. Research also shows that states which require parental consent for a minor to have an abortion have lower rates of adolescent pregnancy.

MYTH 10: Overpopulation causes war and revolution.

The most war-torn continent on earth -- Africa -- is also one of the least densely populated, with about half as many people per square mile as in the world as a whole. Bad governments, propped up by ineptly and unjustly managed foreign aid, are more probably the root of strife.

The worldwide movement which promotes population control is not small or weak. It is a powerful alliance of United Nations agencies, national governments, foundations and "nongovernmental organizations." It commands many billions of dollars in resources. Its members include family planning agencies, radical leftist environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund, development planners, international financial institutions such as the World Bank, foreign relations agencies such as the US Agency for International Development, and "research" organizations such as Worldwatch Institute. Its ideology increasingly dominates school and college instructional programs and textbook publishing.

Ultimately, however, its power rests on public ignorance in countries such as the United States. For the billions of people who inhabit God's creation, and for the billions more He intends it for, it's up to us to find out the truth about "overpopulation," and to share it with as many people as will listen.

Dr. Jacqueline R. Kasun is an economist and the author of The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control (Ignatius, 1988, 1998).
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http://www.envoymagazine.com/backissues/2.3/coverstory.html
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Family News in Focus
The Myth of Too Many
by Michael Fumento


Too many people, too little food. That's what the population-control lobby says when it pushes for abortion. Just one problem: The food supply is growing.
We've heard it for decades: The world is overpopulated, its natural resources can't sustain so many people, and we're headed toward mass starvation and other forms of human misery unless we slash the birth rate, dramatically. That scenario's scary enough to come in handy for groups with their own policy agendas: Planned Parenthood, for example, has used it to impose abortion, sterilization and contraception on countries where large families are treasured and abortion is shunned. After all, if overpopulation is going to lead to global catastrophe, the niceties we like to value in other contexts (like respect for other cultures) are just going to have to go on the back burner for a while. We're talking about the fate of the world, y'know.

Well, actually, we're not. At least not the way most people think.

Ever since Paul Ehrlich published his landmark book "The Population Bomb" in 1968 and introduced the term "overpopulation," dire threats of global starvation and energy shortages have become a normal part of public discourse. Yet after all these years (and with a world population that's since grown by more than a billion), Ehrlich and his acolytes have yet to prove we're overpopulated; they merely assert that we are. In fact, population growth is slowing dramatically, and by the reckoning of virtually all demographers, it will end during this century.

You can't estimate population growth with a calculator because simple mathematical formulas don't take into account underlying circumstances such as fertility rates. But we do know that in almost every nation women are having fewer children, with those in about 60 nations already giving birth at a rate far less than the replacement rate.

Want some numbers? While world population has more than doubled since 1950 to the current 6.3 billion, according to the United Nations, the population will top out between 2050 and 2075. Demographer and American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt says it's likely to come on the earlier end of that estimate, when the world hits 8 billion by 2050. "I think it's perfectly plausible that world population could peak by 2050 or even sooner and perhaps at a level below 8 billion," says Eberstadt, noting the past 35 years of declining fertility rates.

Thus the world in the next half century will have fewer additional people to take care of than it did in the last half century. In percentage terms, while it handled 100% more people in the last 50 years, it will only have to deal with 27% more in the next 50. Granted, that's still a lot of people. But it's a long way from apocalyptic.

It's true that parts of the world tend to be pretty crowded. (Ehrlich has admitted the impetus for the book came when he found himself in the crush of humanity in a large city in India.) But while "overcrowding" may sound frightening, it's a misleading term because it's defined by individual and cultural lifestyles and circumstances -- which have little to do with the scientific definition of "overpopulation." People in India were crammed together not because there were too many for the land to hold, but because like people the world over, they prefer urban centers to rural areas. That's why some Manhattan high-rises practically house more people than South Dakota. Overcrowding may be a problem, but it's not overpopulation.

The Food Explosion

Ehrlich's other prophecies of doom haven't proven any more reliable. "The Population Bomb" initially focused on the prospect of famine, with Ehrlich predicting, "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . [and] hundreds of millions of people [including Americans] are going to starve to death." As it happened, he was off by, oh, hundreds of millions.

In Ehrlich's 1990 sequel, "The Population Explosion," he claimed that world grain production peaked in 1986. Wrong. In 1986 about 1.8 million metric tons of cereals (the most important grain) were produced, an increase over previous years, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nation. By 2001, that number had increased to 20.7 million metric tons.

"Global food production per person peaked earlier, in 1984," Ehrlich further claimed, "and has slid downward since then." His fellow doomsayer, founder and president of the Worldwatch Institute Lester Brown (along with Ehrlich, another winner of the MacArthur Foundation "genius award") wrote in 1981, "The period of global food security is over."

Wrong and wrong again. From 1981 to 1989, grain production per person increased by more than 5%. Since then, it's increased another 4% more per person. Yet we haven't had to plow under the face of the earth to get this extra food. In 2001, 304 million acres were used to grow the world's cereals, slightly less than in 1968 when Ehrlich's bombastic bomb book appeared and far less than the 330 million acres used in the peak year of 1991.

The figure that counts the most, however, is that calories available per person reached an all-time high of 2,800 by 1999, up from 2,371 in 1968. We are finally growing enough calories per person to keep the world's population well fed -- if those calories were evenly distributed.
Unfortunately, far too many are sustaining the American obesity epidemic and still too few are going to the underdeveloped world. (Though, as the World Health Organization recently reported, obesity is now a problem even in many of the poorest nations.)

Eating one fewer Big Mac a day will help us stay healthier, but it won't do Africans or Indians any good. Talk about "equitable distribution of food" is just that, talk. What's needed is a rising tide to raise all boats. Neo-Marxist groups like Greenpeace insist that all we have to do is to evenly divide up the world's food; but that's no more likely than dividing up the world's wealth. (Which they would also love to do.) Just as increasing wealth among the poorest requires increasing wealth generally, so too must we continue to increase the amount of food available for all to help those with the greatest need. This is even more important because lesser-developed countries are acquiring a taste for more meat, which requires far more crops than eating the crops directly would. The question is, are we up to the task of providing all those calories?

Norman Borlaug should know. He's a Nobel Peace Prize winner and "father of the Green Revolution," which brought dramatic increases in cereal-grain yields in many developing countries beginning in the late 1960s, due largely to use of genetically improved varieties. In his chapter in the just-released book Global Warming and Other Myths, he claims that "the world has the technology -- either available or well-advanced in the research pipeline -- to feed a population of 10 billion people." More specifically, "Even without using advances in plant biotechnology, yields can be increased by 50-70% in much of the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and by 100-150% in sub-Saharan Africa."

There also are tremendous advances in biotechnology that make the scenario even brighter.

Consider a single crop: rice. Swiss researchers have added genes from daffodils to so-called "Golden Rice" to give it Vitamin A, the lack of which causes about 2 million deaths annually. (It's also the leading cause of preventable blindness in anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 children.) Then they added a gene from a fungus that creates an enzyme allowing the human digestive system to break down the iron in rice that's otherwise unavailable to us. Still other researchers are adding genes to rice crops that increase yields by 20 to 40%.

Of course, the ability to feed mankind is not our sole worry in terms of whether we can sustain a growing population. Yet time and again, we've stubbornly refused to run out of things that were supposed to have been depleted long ago.

Needed: More People

Ehrlich in his 1974 book "The End of Affluence" declared that, "Before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity ... in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." He was hardly alone; a group called the Club of Rome issued a much-publicized report in 1972 that had us running out of virtually everything by now but sand and cockroaches.

Yet no minerals -- "key" or otherwise -- are today in danger of being depleted. Price over the long run (as opposed to temporary gyrations) is a direct indicator of scarcity. But the International Monetary Fund's price index for metals is now the lowest it has ever been.

Similarly, while the Department of the Interior originally predicted that oil would run out in 1954 and later moved that back to 1964 because of technology breakthroughs improving the discovery and extraction of oil, reserves are more numerous than ever.

Still, there is one vital resource in which we may develop a shortage in the next few decades: us.

That's because the world's population won't just conveniently level off after it peaks; more likely it will drop like a stone.

According to UN Population Division Director Joseph Chamie, current population projections assume the earth is moving toward an average fertility level of 1.85 children per woman. Considering that a 2.1 level is needed to sustain a population, the planet's population would peak at 7.5 billion by 2050 and fall to 5.3 billion by 2150.

And that has interesting political implications, since the decline will not be evenly distributed among nations. The populations of several Soviet-bloc nations already are falling because of declining birth rates and emigration. Japan is expecting its population to peak in 2006 and then drop by 14% (almost 20 million people) by 2050. Germany expects a similar decline, while Italy and Hungary may lose 25% of their populations and Russia a third. These nations already are becoming giant "leisure worlds," with Depends outselling Pampers.
Still, as the population shrinks, there's one thing for which we simply won't be able to make up.

Of all the population prophets, the one whose predictions got the least recognition was also the most accurate. That was the late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon. He saw humanity not as a plague of locusts but rather as what he called "the ultimate resource" in a 1981 book by the same name. "The standard of living has risen along with the size of the world's population since the beginning of recorded time," Simon observed in that book. "And with increases in income and population have come less severe shortages, lower costs, and an increased availability of resources." True, he wrote, "Adding more people will cause [temporary] problems, but at the same time there will be more people to solve these problems."

To Simon, the cry of a little baby represented not just one more mouth to feed, but perhaps the next Pascal, the next Kepler, the next Michelangelo, the next Bach.

We don't know how many of these won't be born. But we'll grieve their loss just the same.
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Michael Fumento is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. His next book, BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World, will be published in the spring by Encounter Books.

[source]

[Truth-Finder]

Originally Posted by Source

Paul Ehrlich and others that human beings actually occupy no more than 1-3% of the earth's land surface

Quite low estimation 30% would look more accurate to mee

[Marulus]

Is Human Population
Really the Problem?
Views of Jeff Lindsay


Newspapers have become overpopulated, so to speak, with warnings about human overpopulation. Such warnings have been issued regularly for decades - even centuries - with consistently incorrect predictions. On the first Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, was widely quoted. He predicted that by 1985, the "population explosion" would lead to world famine, the death of the oceans, a reduction in life expectancy to 42 years, and the wasting of the Midwest into a vast desert. He was about as accurate as Malthus himself, the Englishman who, in 1798, predicted catastrophic food shortages that never came.

The population doomsayers usually offer the solution of global government - BIG government - to determine, in Gaylord Nelson's words, "the optimum number of people." Ironically, where there is famine, the problem usually is not an excess of people but an excess of government, which leads to gross misallocation and misuse of resources as corrupt bureaucrats or dictators seek power more than the welfare their subjects.

Just what is "overpopulation"? How does one determine when a nation is overpopulated? There are no clear demographic indicators for this fuzzy notion. If population density is used as the criterion, then Bermuda and Monaco would be crisis zones, while Nigeria and Ethiopia should be paradise. Other factors, like population growth rate, also provide metrics riddled with inconsistencies. Yes, there are places where people lack resources and go hungry, but eliminating neighbors is not the solution to the condition of poverty. If we are worried about those who go hungry, let us recognize that the hungry are suffering from poverty, not from overpopulation.

But isn't poverty directly related to population size or to rapid population growth? Absolutely not. The population control crowd is now embarrassed by the light of scientific study into the relationship between population and economic development. A wide variety of recent economic studies on this issue have shattered the myth that population growth is bad for a nation's economy. Though rarely reported by the media, this has led to a remarkable revolution in the scientific (not the political) community. This scientific revolution is documented by Dr. Julian Simon, Univ. of Maryland, in Jay Lehr's book Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Van Nostrand Reinhold Publ., 1992. Now the real scientific debate centers on whether population growth has a neutral or positive effect, but there clearly is no significant negative effect.

Fascinating case studies can be found in pairs of similar nations having centrally-planned and market economies, such as China and Taiwan or the former East and West Germany. Though the centrally-planned nations began with similar resources and similar birth rates, and even lower population densities, than their market-based counterparts, the market economies prospered, in spite of the higher "population pressure." Even with high population density, enterprise-based economies flourish while centrally-planned nations stagnate and become addicted to foreign aid. The real problem is not excess people, but excess government.
How can the "obvious" logic of the population control lobby be wrong? Because the resources of the planet are not a fixed pie that dwindle with each birth. The resources are whatever we can make of this planet - or solar system - and it takes the work of human beings to transform raw materials and energy into useful resources. Humans are not a liability, but a resource that we need! On this topic, I recommend the work of Drs. C. Maurice and C. Smithson of Texas A&M, The Doomsday Myth, Hoover Instit. Press, Stanford Univ., 1984. (This gem will help you have a lot more fun and success in debates with the doomsaying crowd.)

Our technological society, fueled by the precious resource of abundant working, thinking human beings, has enabled crop lands to skyrocket in productivity and has enabled humans to live vastly longer than ever before. The resulting large population, living at a higher standard than ever before, breathing cleaner air and drinking purer water, is a cause for celebration, not for doomsaying. Once-neglected resources - solar energy, sand, radioactive minerals, salt water, carbon dioxide, the vast interior mantle of the earth itself - may provide the foundations for future economies beyond anything we have today. The future could be bright, unless we surrender what's left of our free economy for a global, centrally-planned economy in which political elitists rule and decide how many of us must live to achieve "the optimum number of human beings."

Population density: comparisons

The following table compares population density with life expectancy and income for a variety of countries. An examination of the facts may challenge commonly repeated assumptions about the need to reduce population size. The data below are extracted from a table by Gale Lyle Pooley, Environmentalism and the Gospel, Analytica, Sun Valley, Idaho, 1995, p. 92 (note: Pooley's excellent and heavily documented book was written for an LDS audience). Pooley's sources were the 1992 World Population Data Sheet from the Population Reference Bureau, Inc., Washington, D.C., and the 1993 World Almanac, U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis. You can obtain similar data yourself using the The CIA World Factbook.

Statistics on Population and Prosperity:
Is There an Effect?

Country Population per square mile. Pop. per sq. mile arable land. Income per capita. Life exp. Bangladesh 2,0042,990$18056.2; China3153,146$37069.8; Denmark 313513$15,20074.5; Germany 5851,950$19,94374.6; India 6951,264$30052.3; Israel 6483,814$10,50075.6; Japan 8656,657$27,32179.1; Mexico 115960$2,93664.2. New Jersey*1,0465,505$25,37277.9; Switzerland 4334,329$18,70077.3; Taiwan 1,6696,956$8,08370.2; United Kingdom 6112,108$15,00075.5; United States 71354$22,21274.9.

*Many scholars note that New Jersey is technically a part of the United States and not a separate country.

The high population density of China pales in comparison with that of prosperous Taiwan or rich and clean Switzerland. New Jersey also has a much higher population density than China, but only the most hardened would advocate forced sterilizations and forced abortions to save New Jersey from collapse. Having been in Switzerland, New Jersey, and China, I can say that the quality of life (environmental quality, income, life expectancy, and health care) is vastly superior in the first two, where the population density is higher. What's the difference? The political and economic systems must be taken into account. If a system hinders rather than rewards human productivity and impedes efficient utilization of resources through central planning, then the problem may not be due to numbers of people.

But could it be that we are running out of space? Walk through New York, Calcutta, or Hong Kong and experience the incredible crowding: surely there just isn't room for all these people. Yes, there are crowded places in the world. There are strong economic and social incentives for people to cluster together. If Manhattan were spread out over the state of Montana, it's economic power would be greatly diminished (and a lot of moose would be mugged). Yet leave these population centers, and we find a remarkably unpopulated planet.

How much land does it take to hold 6 billion people? To give you an idea, consider the small nation of Japan. It has about 143,000 square miles of area. One square mile has 5280 * 5280 = 27.9 million square feet. Japan has a total of about 4 trillion square feet, enough to give each person of the earth 670 square feet. If we housed people in families of four in simple two-level buildings (8 people per building, one family of four per level), each building could be on a lot of over 5300 square feet. (Of course, I've ignored that fact that many parts of Japan would be unsuitable for dwelling places, and I've neglected the land needed for roads, parks, schools, etc.) In a land area as small as Japan, the entire population of the earth could be housed on lots of 5300 square feet, with 8 people per lot. That's smaller than the typical American lot of about 8000 square feet, but it's not unbearably small.If we insisted on American standards, with only 4 people per lot of at least 8,000 square feet, then Gale Lyle Pooley shows that an area the size of Texas plus Nevada would be adequate (op. cit., p. 93). That would make those two states less attractive, perhaps, but it would leave the rest of the world for food production, animal reserves, nature movies, Woodstock festivals, or whatever. In terms of the real resources of this planet, we are not overpopulated.
Declining Fertility Rates

A remarkable phenomenon has been observed in the past two centuries: a sustained decline in fertility, yielding long-term reductions in family size in many countries, particularly in Europe. But in the past few decades the trend has also been seen on other countries like Japan, Cyprus, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica (Nicholas Eberstadt, "Population, Food, and Income: Global Trends in the Twentieth Century," in The True State of the Planet, ed. Ronald Bailey, New York: The Free Press, 1995, pp. 7-47, esp. pp. 15-16). Total fertility rate (TFR), the average number of births per woman during childbearing years, has been tracked by the United Nations and shows a consistent decline in the past few decades for both developed and less developed countries. Around 1950 TFR was around 5, but by 1995 dropped to about 3 -- a 40% decline (Eberstadt, pp. 18-19). Some countries have TFR rates below the replacement level of 2.1, so that the population of those countries is currently shrinking (this is true of sixty-one countries according to the article "Total Fertility Rates" at Overpopulation.com). In fact, officials at the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs in the United Nations have expressed concern over the implications of the low fertility rates, as discussed by Austin Russe in the online article, "United Nations Warns About Declining Population." The UN report can be found at http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/migration/migration.htm. See also "U.N. Study Ends Overpopulation Fears."


Sub-Saharan Africa, unlike most of the rest of the world, has not yet shown the dramatic decline in fertility. Nicholas Eberstadt, a respected demographer and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard's Center for Population Studies, discusses and documents these trends (ibid.), and notes that it is impossible to predict when or if Africa will show a similar drop in TFR, as it was impossible to predict that other countries would show that trend. Who would have guessed that over a 25-year period, the TFR for Thailand would drop by more than 50%, for Colombia would drop by 60% and for Hong Kong by 75%? But the continued decline in TFR, probably associated which changes in attitudes about families, contraception, and economic factors, challenges the position of overpopulation alarmists, who rely on simple extrapolations based on the assumption that current growth rates and current resources won't change. This kind of thinking have led Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, and many others to make failed predictions of massive catastrophes that seem silly in retrospect.

United Nation projections and those of the US Census Bureau suggest that the TFR across the world can be expected to continue declining. Some details are provided at
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/basic_information/total_fertility_rate/.

Clearly, human population has been increasing in recent years. How can this be if fertility has declined so dramatically? The obvious but often ignored answer is that current population growth is largely due to the increase in human longevity. As Eberstadt explains (ibid., p. 21):

At the start of our century, a rough guess would place global life expectancy at birth at about 30 years. By the early 1990s, global life expectancy is thought to have risen to about 64 years, more than doubling over these nine decades. Since it is further believed that life expectancy in earlier times could not have been much lower than 20 over any long period without raising the prospect of extinction, it would seem that over three-fourths of the total improvement in human longevity since the origin of our species has been achieved since 1900. This worldwide health explosion explains the global "population explosion." Rapid population growth commenced not because human beings suddenly started breeding like rabbits but rather because they finally stopped dying like flies.

Contributing to the longevity of humans has been the increasingly abundant food resources over the past century. Eberstadt reports that in the postwar era, the real price of food grains has been gradually and significantly declining (ibid., p. 28). A World Bank study published in 1988 showed that the real price of food grains dropped by over 40% in the twentieth century (Enzo R. Grilli and Maw Chen Yang, "Primary Commodity PRices, Manufactured Goods Prices, and Terms of Trade: What the Long Run Shows," World Bank Economic Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1988), pp. 1-47, as cited by Eberstadt, ibid., p. 28), and prices have continued to drop since that study. If there were too many mouths to feed, the price of food would be increasing, but in spite of the global population tripling in the past century, food has become less scarce.


There has been famine, but it is typically associated with repressive governments, not a scarcity of resources. Eberstadt (p. 40) gives key examples:

The Soviet famine of 1934, for example, was the consequence of the official collectivation campaign in the Ukraine. Stalin specifically intended to use starvation as a weapon to break Ukrainian resistance to his policies, which is why the historian Robert COnquest has termed the hunger a "terror-famine." The Bengal famine of 1943 took place at a time when local harvests were quite good but when British officials, fearing a possible Japanese invasion from neighboring Burma, had systematically removed local grain supplies. The Chinese famine followed immediately upon Mao's Great Leap Forward, a collectivation campaign that inadvertently shattered the agricultural system in a low-income population. Mass starvation erupted in Ethiopia in the 1980s after its communist government inflicted a series of harsh and injurious policies on a population whose living standard was typically only slightly above the subsistence level. In each of these instances, the reckless or intentionally punitive policies embraced by presiding government would have been expected to result in massive loss of life, no matter what the local fertility level or population growth rate.

Were it not for excesses of corrupt and excessive governments and the wars and afflictions they bring, the populations of the world would have much cause to rejoice. Humans are living longer. Disease is being eradicated. Food is cheaper and more available than ever. This is wonderful news, but for doomsayers, it's bad news when humans live longer, better lives. The doomsayers want us to panic and put them in charge of a new world, so they can rebuild the world in their image, running our lives and grudgingly passing out resources that, under their guidance, would surely become increasingly scarce. It's time to reject their agenda and move forward with sanity, not fear.


2005 Update: A fascinating new article by a prominent environmentalist points out what should be obvious: the overpopulation scare was just a scare, and now it's time to move on. I refer to "Environmental Heresies" by Stewart Brand, the founder of The Farmers Almanac, printed in MIT Technology Review, May 2005. He makes the following points:

For 50 years, the demographers in charge of human population projections for the United Nations released hard numbers that substantiated environmentalists' greatest fears about indefinite exponential population increase. For a while, those projections proved fairly accurate. However, in the 1990s, the U.N. started taking a closer look at fertility patterns, and in 2002, it adopted a new theory that shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow. Most environmentalists still haven't got the word. Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia--whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30 percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over time.
That's great news for environmentalists (or it will be when finally noticed), but they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world's women didn't suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.
Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent. The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters--which Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion--is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall environmental impact.

A Useful Educational Resource for Parents

Facts, Not Fear: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment, by Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C., 1996.


This book is my pick for one of the most helpful educational tools available for parents and students. With logic, facts, and science, this book takes on the many frightening myths and exaggerations that school children often hear about the environment. Far from an apology for environmental destruction, this book teaches responsibility and respect for the planet while exposing the lack of substance behind many of the dire "doomsday" scenarios that are presented to our kids as facts. Is overpopulation really the crisis that the schools say it is? Will billions starve? Is there really no more room for landfills? Are millions going to die from skin cancer due to ozone depletion? Are we really running out of trees and other resources? Are we "deforesting the U.S. at the fastest pace in our history" as the Sierra Club claims? Is the planet overheating? These questions require facts, not fear, and the authors deliver the former while discussing reasonable solutions to real environmental problems.

The chapter on overpopulation and starvation shows that realistic projected population growth predictions have an S-shaped curved in which a period of rapid growth ends in a plateau at a relatively stable level. Unfortunately, many textbooks truncate the predictions around or shortly after the year 2000 to give a curve that appears to show steady exponential growth, or frightening population growth out of control. What most textbooks don't reveal is the fact that the population growth rate has been declining significantly since the 1960s, falling from 2% per year then to about 1.7% today, with a projected rate of less than 1% by 2030. Many demographers think that the rapid population growth of this century was an unusual occurrence due to dramatic decline in death rates. Death rates dropped because of health care (including antibiotics, vaccination, and new drugs), sanitation, wonderful gains in nutrition and agriculture, better child care, and more available technology. (I'm amazed to see that some people, instead of rejoicing in the miracles that have provided longer life and a higher quality of life for many people, bemoan the advances and call for totalitarian population controls and harsher, less abundant lifestyles - for everyone else but them, that is.)

The authors discuss the failed predictions of Malthus and the importance of human work and ingenuity in providing increased resources to support human life at much higher population levels. In spite of the grossly failed predictions of Paul Ehrlich and other doomsayers, the world has increasing supplies of food, with global production of both wheat and rice increasing faster than population growth (a 2% growth rate for wheat and a 3.5% rate for rice, compared to a 1.7% growth rate for population). Further, the world currently has abundant idle cropland that could be used to support large numbers of people (e.g., 60 million acres of idle cropland in the U.S.).

Most chapters of the book have been reviewed for technical content by two or more scholars in relevant areas, whose names and affiliations are given. For example, Chapter 6, "Will Billions Starve," which addresses critical facts about the alleged overpopulation crisis, was reviewed by Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and by Dr. Thomas Poleman, Professor of International Food in the Economics Department at Cornell University. Chapter 17, "Don't Eat That Apple!" (dealing with the overblown fears of chemicals in foods) was reviewed by Dr. Gordon Gribble, Professor of Chemistry at Dartmouth University; by Dr. Joseph D. Rosen, Professor of Food Chemistry at Rutgers University; and Dr. Steven Safe, Distinguished Professor of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology at Texas A&M University. Chapter 18, "A Garbage Crisis?" was reviewed by Dr. M.B. Hocking, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Victoria; by William Rathje, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and Director of the internationally recognized Garbage Project; and by Dr. Clark Wiseman, Professor of Economics at Gonzaga University.

Parents will learn what school textbooks are saying about the environment, and will find helpful information and documentation to balance what is incorrect or exaggerated. Parents will also find helpful discussion topics and recommended exercises and activities to help their children better understand and think about the environment and our stewardship.
I recommend Facts, not Fear by Sanera and Shaw. And again, I strongly recommend Jay Lehr's book, Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, Van Nostrand Reinhold Publ., 1992. It's time for rational thought, not panic, when discussing population and the environment.

[source]

[Milesian]

Originally Posted by searcher of truth

Quite low estimation 30% would look more accurate to mee

I think 30% sounds rather high.
Even within densely populated countries such as the UK, vast areas of the country are sparsely populated or unpopulated. It's only the cities that are dense. About 1-3% sounds about right to me.

[Marulus]

A sort of Christian perspective...

World Population

Rich Milne

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines; hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.

So predicted Stanford professor Paul Erhlich in his widely influential 1968 book The Population Bomb. It sold more than three million copies but its many predictions of global catastrophe never came true. Most famines in the 70s and 80s were in African countries saddled with Marxist governments or political turmoil.

Has Erhlich admitted these errors? No, in 1989 he wrote The Population Explosion. Without comment on his past mistakes he merely moves them into the future again, like those who predict the end of the world. Erhlich wrote,

The Population Bomb tried to alert people to the connection of population growth to such events...but society has turned a deaf ear. Meanwhile, a largely prospective disaster has turned into the real thing.... There still may be time to limit the scope of the impending catastrophe, but not much time.

Are we really that close to disaster? In September of 1989 the Scientific American published a series of articles on "Managing Planet Earth." While somewhat pessimistic in tone, they are generally balanced in their reviews. In an article on "Strategies for Agriculture" the authors conclude, "World food production could grow significantly more slowly than the current rate and there would still be enough food for 10 million mouths by the time they arrive."


In 1968 Erhlich forecast "[i]f...our population growth, and our water use continue, in 1984 the United States will quite literally be drying up." He also declared "Lake Erie has died.... Lake Michigan will soon follow it in extinction." In fact, Lake Erie has been reclaimed, and we have not exactly dried up either.


In 1980 Julian Simon, an advocate of population growth to fuel economic growth, bet Paul Erhlich $1,000 that prices of five non- renewable metals would go down. For years, Ehrlich and others had been prophesying that the world would soon run out of many metals, halting industrial growth. They claimed that the world's supplies of oil and gas would soon be exhausted and the West would be subjected to crippling shortages. In 1990 Erhlich quietly paid Simon the $1,000. Not only had the price of all five metals dropped, but the known world reserves has gone up!

In his 1989 book, The Population Explosion, Erhlich not only continues to predict apocalyptic devastation, but he connects population growth to many social problems we are currently facing. Most people are unaware," he writes, "of the role that overpopulation plays in many of the problems oppressing them.... Visitors to our nation's capital find homeless people sleeping in the park opposite the White House, and drug abuse and crime sprees fill the evening news. News about the AIDS epidemic seems to be everywhere."


It is certainly true that homelessness and AIDS are terrible problems, but to blame them on overpopulation in America seems either a display of great ignorance (unlikely, as Erhlich is a Stanford professor) or willful misinformation.

Are There Really Too Many People?


In the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were given the command to multiply and fill the earth. In Genesis 9 Noah is given the same charge. We must consider the rest of the creation as we determine if we have yet fulfilled that command. But world population is not the problem.


We share the planet with 5.7 billion people. If one could stand all the people in the world, men, women and children two feet apart, how much of the world would they take up? All of Africa? All of North America? New York state? If every person alive today stood two feet apart they would fill less than the area of Dallas County! And there would still be room for all the buildings! If the world's people were put together into families of four living on 50' by 100' lots, they could all live in the state of Texas, with more than seven thousand square miles left over. So the total number of people is not the real problem, at least at this point.


One of the statements one hears with depressing regularity in discussions of world population is "If the present rate continues. ..." But in fact the "present rate" is almost never continuing. Consider a frequently used figure, the doubling time for a country. This is the time it takes for a nation of 100 million people to reach 200 million. It is also a measure of how fast new food supplies must be found. The faster the doubling time the more urgent the need for agricultural development.

In 1968 the world's doubling time was about every 35 years. This was frequently used as the basis for pronouncements that "if the present rates continue" the world will be faced with mass starvation in some small number of years.


But the "present rate" was already declining, and the world now doubles about every 82 years. And more conservative scholars had pointed this out years ago. As the standard of living of a country increases, its doubling time also increases. Thus the developed nations are close to stability now, and as less developed nations become more industrialized their population growth also slows. That is the basis on which many experts predict that the world population will stabilize at about ten to eleven billion people.

Malthus's essay "On the Principle of Population," has, as he himself said, "a melancholy hue" about it. It was Malthus, with his view that human populations would soon overtake food production, who inspired the labeling of economics as the "dismal science." But was Malthus right?

Malthus assumed that food supplies would always limit population growth. But in the two hundred years since he wrote, this has not been the case. By one means or another farmers and agricultural scientists have always found a way to increase farm production to keep up with population growth. But we have yet to find efficient ways to get food from where it is produced to where it is needed most.


One Christian has seriously suggested that old oil tankers, which now sit unused because of the huge world supply of oil, could be put back into service cheaply transporting grain from producers to consumers.

The fact that we have 5.7 billion people in the world is not why we have starving people. We have the surplus food to feed all the world's people. What we do not have are stable governments and economic opportunities that allow people to earn a fair wage for their labor.

Alarmism and Faulty Predictions


In his 1968 book The Population Explosion, Paul Erhlich announces the approaching food crisis. "'Then, in 1965-66 came the first dramatic blow...mankind suffered a shocking defeat in...the war on hunger.' In 1966, while the population of the world increased by some 70 million people, there was no compensatory increase in food production." He continues by laying out likely scenarios of the world being rocked by food rebellions that will lead to nuclear war and the devastation of the planet, possibly leaving cockroaches as the most intelligent creatures on earth.
Fortunately Erhlich was wrong. Food production continued to increase and more than keep pace with the population. So what did Erhlich learn?

In 1989 he wrote another book, The Population Explosion. Doom was again close: "In 1988, for the first time since World War II, the United States consumed more grain than it grew...only the presence of large carryover stocks prevented a serious food crisis. It is not clear how easy it will be to restore those stocks."

Again, thankfully, Erhlich was wrong. By 1990, world grain production was up 50% from 1988! And it has continued to increase to the present.

Erhlich's inaccurate prophecies are numerous. In 1968 he quotes Louis H. Bean approvingly: "My examination of the trend of India's grain production over the last eighteen years leads me to the conclusion that the present 1967 1968 production...is at a maximum level." But in seven years India increased its grain production by nearly 26%! By 1992 it had increased it 112%!


Famines are the exception in most countries, and even then absolute lack of food is usually not the problem. In a Scientific American article on world population one author says: "Food surpluses exist in many nations, and even when famines do occur the cause is much less the absence of food than its maldistribution which is often accentuated by politics and civil war, as in the Sudan." This passing comment touches on the real problem. Most famines in the last twenty years are a direct result of internal wars in African nations.


Whether in Ethiopia, Sudan, or Somalia, the devastating famines and the hopeless faces of dying children we have all seen on TV are the result of politics. As one segment of the population wars against another, starvation is often a political weapon. And in each of the famine-torn countries of Africa one can show that it has been disrupted distribution more than low food production that has caused people to starve to death.

The Bible itself gives evidence that population pressures do not cause famines. When is the first famine in the Bible? In Abraham's time, when the world population could not have been a problem. There have always been famines, but wise leaders have also known how to prepare for famines, as did Joseph later in Egypt.


Many researchers expect the world's population to level off between ten and eleven billion people. Two specialists predicted that "world food production could grow significantly more slowly than the current rate, and there would still be enough food for 10 billion mouths by the time they come."


The earth can provide all the food needed for the foreseeable future. So why are so many saying we must take powerful measures, like widespread abortion, to control world population?

Environmentalism and World Population


One of the driving forces behind much of the population explosion movement is that of environmental concern. People are afraid that the earth is being rapidly ruined, and they are sure that world population is one of the worst problems. Unfortunately there is some truth to this. There are areas in the world where too many people have been squeezed into one place, or where too many animals are grazing the grass to the ground. But these happen because other people do not care to help. The environment is damaged when people must choose between death by starvation and cutting down trees or overgrazing fields. What we need to protest is the way the people are treated, not their existence.

Many of the role models put forward by the environmental zealots often have very mixed messages. Paul Erhlich praises Prince Philip of Great Britain for having "taken courageous stands in the population issue and its connection to environmental problems." But this is the same Prince Philip who, when asked what he would like to be reincarnated as, replied: a "killer virus to lower human population levels." Certainly a princely thing to say.


There are also ecological movements that hate people. The Deep Ecology movement is one such loosely organized movement. Groups like Green Peace, Earth First!, and the Animal Liberation Front tend to see the human race as a cancer on the environment, something to be suspected and tolerated, but only in small numbers. Some want to see no more than 250 million people on earth; others wouldn't mind if humans died out altogether. These people see any large population as a problem, and are ready to take action to make the earth "right" again. Others have openly said that the AIDS virus is a good thing in that it will eliminate at least some people who are ruining the environment. Often the extreme positions of groups like these make other ecological organizations seem almost conservative by comparison.


Much of the time, people accept the argument that the earth is too crowded because that is all they hear. The media are usually not interested in reasoned, factual responses to problems because they lack the shock appeal that gets people to tune in, or read a paper, or buy a magazine. Thus, TV is filled with those who have extreme views, or who can speak eloquently about the latest crisis.

So how can Christians make a difference in all of this confusion? First, by actually being involved in caring for the creation God has given us charge of. Too many of us read in our Bibles about how God created the world and cares for it, but fail to act as if it were really true. Let us be actively involved in saving the creation, and then we may earn the right to speak about why we are doing it.


Most Christians were slow in protesting abortion; so too many of us have been slow in showing an active concern for the environment. The earth that God created can provide places to live and food for all that God has made. But just as we must take care of our own houses if we want them to last, so too we must take care of the earth God