Over Population

Nature seems to have ways to regulate the population of animals and insects. When an animal species grows at an abnormal rate, the rate of predators also increases, sort of maintaining an ecological balance. Nature first allows multiplicity of offspring to insure continuity of the species, considering the number that will never survive into adulthood—lots of babies, few survivors. Balance. But mankind seems to have circumvented Nature, our numbers growing at a frightening rate. Will Nature visit on us some awful disease to curb our growth, or will she simply count on war and terrorist killings to do it? Maybe another world-wide Bubonic plague or that cataclysmic nuclear holocaust we’ve feared for the last seventy years. I hope we can solve this over-population problem before Nature solves it for us. Some stats from that bottomless source of information on the Internet, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: 35,000 years ago, 3 million people; 12,000 years ago, 15 million; 1804, one billion; 1927, two billion; 1959, three billion; 1974, four billion; 1987, five billion; 1999, six billion; 2011, seven billion; projected for 2026, eight billion; projected for 2042, nine billion.

A long time ago, I read John Brunner’s science fiction classic Stand on Zanzibar in which he warned of a time when each human on the planet might have only a very limited amount of space. I remember also reading about the threat of “The Golden Hordes” of India and China overrunning the industrialized nations of the world for their wealth.

India and China currently account for more than two and a half billion of the earth’s inhabitants, but neither have sent hordes to our nation unless you consider the number of Indian doctors and tech advisors we now have here. And China implemented a one-child per married couple as a means of stemming its growth. Demographic experts agree that sometime in the near future, world population figures will stabilize at around nine billion. I’m not sure how that will be achieved with the Catholic Church’s continued stance against abortion and contraception; achieved with 3rd World countries’ continued population growth through ignorance and lack of contraception. “Go forth and multiply” may have been a legitimate command in Genesis when it was necessary to preserve humanity’s continuance. Farmers needed to give birth to farm workers; racial groups needed to grow to protect their numbers from outside dangers. But neither of those reasons apply any longer. I look at my and my wife’s parents who, in the last hundred years, have gone from four (our two sets of parents) to 61 (all their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren). That number would be much higher if it included the offspring beyond that fourth ancestral layer, but the ratio of 4/61 exemplifies how population can expand exponentially.

I won’t be around to see if we ever achieve a population balance, but I certainly hope it will happen before that epidemic or nuclear war occurs.