alarming "Nova" last night, RE: over population

[Deep13]

Apparently, the USA is the only industrial country in the world with a growing population. While birthrates remain low, the population is growing from immigration. By mid-century, we will have 400 million residents. That's up from 300 mil. in 2000 and 280(?) mil. in 1990. It seems that cheap labor from abroad, including cheap educated labor from Asia mostly, and extravagant energy usage is fueling the economy. America makes 1/4 of the world's greenhouse gas pollution. Further, every American leaves the same environmental footprint as 30 people from India.

It is a vicious circle. Population increases and energy gluttony fuel a booming economy which creates a demand for more population and energy use. Big business conspires with the government to allow unlawful immigration in particular for cheap labor. This is NAFTA in reverse. Instead of sending jobs to Mexico or Asia, we allow cheap labor to come here. All the while the value of labor is debased. Supply and demand affect people the same way it affects everything else. The more of us there are, the less each one of us is worth. Also, it seems that it is cheaper to import educated labor from India than it is to fund adequately our own education system.

All the while the Earth suffers. Every person in this country is a scar on the land. We loose farm land and wild areas to sprawl every day. Why are we considering drilling in ANWAR and fighting in Iraq? There seems to be no choice but to seek out energy anyplace it exists, unless we radically change our wasteful ways. I for one do not want the whole nation looking like the North East. Wild areas and open space should be the norm, not the rare exception.

Population is a global problem, but we cannot do anything about how things are in China or India. All we can do is tend our own yard. The first obvious step is to enforce existing immigration laws, then to cut back on cheap educated labor. Also, we have to stop being such gluttons. (I'm preaching to the choir on that one!) This is a pressing problem and it must be addressed unless we want the country to become one big, crowded slum.

[Jamison]

1. Good post!

Everything you said is all the more reason to support zero population growth.

My big fear is that if we as human beings don't keep the population in check mother nature will step in and do it for us. The latter would be the worst scenario as mother nature could unleash some horrid never before seen virus that wipes out 1/4 of the world's population.

[Massacure]

7. I doubt it will be a virus. Famine sounds more realistic.

[sui generis]

2. I don't agree with everything you're saying

those 30 people in India have far fewer resources and live in abject poverty. There are too many people in India for the available resources. It's not a valid comparison, and it hurts environmental causes to use it because it is an easy target/tangent.

Every person in this country is not a scar on the land. The derivation of what you're saying is that it is more appropriate to live in hunter gatherer societies. This is not generally accepted as a good future for humans or the development of humanity.

We need responsible agriculture and use of our natural resources, and a sustainable local economy. We need to cultivate and be caretakers to the environment, and we need to change our value system to valuing nature and the global environment more than we value a good deal at Wal-Mart. Speaking of economies - they're like chemical reactions - they tend to go from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser concentration. Without barriers such as tarriffs and trade agreements and outsourcing disincentives (along with immigration reform), it is inevitable that our jobs will disappear overseas, together with our ability to care about anything more than just getting food on the table for the kids tomorrow.

[jus_the_facts]

4. there aren't enough people who care to SEE that reason and logic.....

.....most think GOD will take care of all that and we should just keep on *goin' forth and prosper*...sad but true. :(

[Deep13]

12. The comparison ...

... was to demonstrate that fewer people here use more resources and create more pollution than many people there. That's all. I was not implying that we ought to be living by neolithic standards. All I meant is that there needs to be far fewer of us globally and here.

[jus_the_facts]

3. why anyone would want to breed when the future is so bleek.....

..is beyond me....these stats have been known for a long time and nobody ever wants to look at the bigger picture long enough to realize how it will affect future generations....logic and reason always losing to ignorance and greed...I'll never be able to conceive..literally and figuratively...how anyone would want to bring more life into this world when it's obvious we've sealed their fates with our gluttonous consumption and refusal to change eventhough we've known what the consequences were going to be... :nopity:

[SoCalDem]

5. Damn.. I meant to record that, but somehow got Reno911 instead

:eyes:

I guess I'll have to watch it online now :)

[Double T]

6. Over Population Is The Greatest Threat To The Continuation....

and survival of this planet.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Our way of life exacerbates the effects of population growth

If we learned from societies older than ours about how to conserve land and resources, we could mitigate some of the effects.

However, the corporations and other business interestes keep telling us to consume, consume, consume, and that bigger is better.

[Strelnikov_]

9. It Appears That Energy (Peak Oil) Is Going To Be The Limiting Factor

on the growth of industrial society.

Food will probably be the limiting factor in population growth. This is also tied to peak oil in that the decline of petroleum and natural gas energy sources will limit any increase in agricultural output.

For me, then, the question is how much we have overshot the population that can be maintained with the energy sources of the future.

[barb162]

10. I hope they show this porgram a few more times

they usually have a transcript on their website.

[rman]

11. The problem is not over population but wealth distribution

Regardless of what the causes are exactly, birthrates are particularly high where there is much poverty.

There's literally a couple of hundred billionairs who combined own half of the earth wealth.

How is it again? The US has like 5% of the global population but uses 25% of the world's energy? It's something like that. It is similar with other wealthy nations, just less extreme. On a smaller scale you find the same situation within virtually all nations both rich and poor; a top few percent own/control the vast majority of the wealth.

Class warfare you say? You bet it is class warfare, there always has been. And if you want to know who is winning, just look at who is getting richer, who's getting poorer, and who's dying.

If the wealthy nations and individuals would not be hoarding wealth and would be less wasteful, there'd be lower birthrates over all and plenty of people could live comfortably.

[Igel]

13. It's a really vicious circle, poverty and overpopulation.

Pakistan keeps wringing its hands over the fact that *India* has a much higher per capita GDP than Pakistan, when they started off pretty equal at the breakup back in the late '40s.

Population growth accounts for much of the difference: if you start with Pakistan's population at independence, and apply India's fertility rates since then, you wind up with a Pakistani per capita GDP not much lower than India's. Poverty doesn't just yield high birthrates, high birthrates yield poverty.

Even in this country, it holds true. My wife and I weren't poor when we had our child. We weren't poor after we had the child. If we had 4 more, we'd have bee in poverty.

[rman]

19. imo it's greed and poverty that makes a vicious circle

Btw in India 2/3 of the population is still below the poverty line, in spite of India's economic growth.

Even in the US, with all the advances in technology and all the economic growth over the past few decades, the top few % of the income scale has increased several 100% while low income workers make longer hours for lower wages. Why is that? A question rarely asked, an issue rarely addressed.

You seem to be arguing poor people are poor because the have to many kids; that they would not be poor if they had fewer or no kids.

In countries like India and Pakistan the poor are poor no matter how many or how few children they have. With $1 dollar per day income and no kids, how will you manage to bring in enough food by begging and scouraging the trash? Kids = additional hands, particularly usefull by the time you yourself are of old age. A kid requires less food then an adult, but may still bring home an entire loaf of bread.

[Igel]

22. My point seems relatively secure.

I am not saying they would not be poor if they had fewer kids.

I'm saying they wouldn't be as poor in the long term, or as poor in the short term in an urban setting. Income / people = per capita income; Pakistan has a lower per capita income not because it's poorer (which is just a tautology), but because it's produced far too many poor kids. Had India not taken steps to produce smaller families, Pakistan reasons, India would be no better off. Your point that there's a wage disparity is, presumably, the same point.

Take an urban setting. You get families with low incomes and lots of kids. Income / mouths << survival level. The kids go to work (child labor!) or beg (!). This is done because the parents' income is too small to maintain the family, even by community standards. The income's boosted, in the short term, but the kids grow up to have impoverished families. We have great intergenerational stability. Such a pity.

If you had families with low incomes and few kids, it's more likely that the parents' income would be sufficient to maintain the family. They'd still be poor, but the kids wouldn't have to work or beg. They might even learn something that would enable them to be not poor when they grow up.

This isn't a novel insight.

[Deep13]

14. That's part of it.

The "west" has had a free ride on resource usage for a long time. That's over now. Imperialist policies have really hurt non-whites globally. Yes, generally, it is so-called third world countries that have the steepest population curves. Industrial countries generally have negative growth, except for the USA which is expanding due to immigration.

[Igel]

15. The first paragraph in your post is one reason I don't

mind having kids.

It doesn't matter in 20 years if the new worker results from my kid or an immigrant. From the view entirely inside the US borders, that is.

Expand the view outside the US borders, and still it's not adding to the overpopulation problem, even though the US does consume far more than it should (although few would be happy with the results if you redistributed the resources you use ... some technology and comforts require a certain level of consumption). We bleed off some of the rest of the world's overpopulation, as does Europe.

Even then the middle-term prospects are that there's a large population bulge that will fairly quickly, in the next 100 years, subside, making for a population maximum sometime 2040 or so. (The date keeps shifting earlier as fertility rates decline.) By then we should see a pronounced decrease in the planet's racial diversity, and an even larger one in diversity of species.

[maxsolomon]

16. why i find it hard to get worked up over famines

its cold & heartless, i know. but the prospect of famine in an impoverished, overpopulated place like burkina faso doesn't make me bust out the checkbook thinking i can "save the children". it will happen more, as birth rates continue as they always have in agricultural cultures (high), & infant mortality rates decline due to improved medical care.

america will close the doors & fence the borders soon enough. just wait until the fossil fuel crisis takes permanent grip & we elect some reactionary hayseed president who'll make bush look like ghandhi.

our per capita consumption rate will fall, too. you think we can continue this pace for another 25 years? 50? 100? indefinitely?
no way. what, do you think we'll get energy from the SUN OR SOMETHING? you crazy!

[KlatooBNikto]

17. The specter of overpopulation, dwindling resources, catastrophe

has been with us since the days of Malthus.They have been completely discredited time after time.The Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich who projected worldwide famine by the year 1990 had to eat his words after he lost a bet with Professor Julian Simon, who predicted, correctly as it turns out that India and China will not merely be able to feed themselves but will become net exporters of food.Simon's optimism about the future was based on his odd concept that people are a resource and the more they become educated the more that resource becomes an asset.

I do not agree with any of the posts here.I have seen this in my own lifetime.In the 50's it was not unusual to see pictures of starving people in Bombay or Shanghai.You would be hard pressed to find them now even though Shanghai's population is approaching 75 million and Bombay is not that far behind.

In my own personal life, my wife and I, poor students that we were, never felt that our children were ever a burden to us.We have seven of them now,my eldest daughters have all become successful physicians and surgeons contributing to the health of people in our own town and have served with Doctors without borders in Africa, Sri Lanka and Indonesia recently.

I think we need to put people first.Everything else is hogwash.

[anarch]

18. the fact that it hasn't happened globally...

doesn't negate the validity of the concept: when population outstrips resources, nature tends to balance out the equation. The common example from human history is Easter Island, where resources were used to the point of exhaustion, soon followed by a dramatic decline in population:

http://dieoff.org/page145.htm

Here's something else interesting...

http://www.whole-systems.org/population.html

It's important to keep in mind that the standard of living enjoyed in any industrial society is largely dependent on the use of fossil fuels. Asian nations have most certainly bettered their overall standard of living in the past half-century, but at the cost of greatly increased energy consumption--especially oil. I don't think there are too many people at this point who would argue that cheap oil is going to last very much longer....

Nevertheless, I'll go along with the "people first" sentiment. And kudos for the humanitarian work!

[JanMichael]

21. Specific predictions aside our air and water are not immune to too many...

...people.

I don't believe for a moment that there is unlimited capasity for human population without eventual collapse. One of the things that we've never had to deal with is the rate of growth over the last few decades, it's unprecidented.

Ecologically there must be a change in the way we treat our environment and volunteerism isn't working.

[MisterP]

26. "put people first"? that's code-speak,

like the people who always want this or that animal rubbed out whenever their profits dip slightly, or "developers" who want to pave over a marsh, Dow Chemical, polluting industry, and other sundry friends

[Kraklen]

28. That's right.

This exponential growth of the human population can go on forever. Just like Jesus wanted.

[Deep13]

29. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

There are 6.5 billion people. By mid century there will be twice that. The plain arithmatic proves you wrong.

Are you really suggesting that this finite earth will support that kind of growth forever? Where is the acreage to support them? How will we breath when the forests are gone? What will stop a runaway greenhouse effect? What will we do when the last fish is caught and the last tree is felled?

This was not a crisis before because there were never this many people before. Besides, the idea is to do something before it is a crisis. Crisis has been averted in the past by expanding human occupation into wild areas and relying on technology that pollutes and accelerates the consumption of finite resources, chemical fertilizers and desert irrigation for example. This has meant continuous extinction, pollution and just plain ugliness. Is this really the kind of world you want to live in? 75 million in one city? Jesus Christ! Glad I don't live there! That is a case study on why we need to avert this disaster.

Your suppositions are anecdotal and do not amount to real evidence.

[kittenpants]

20. it's even more serious when you count the snowflake babies!

those wee, frosty little beings:eyes:

[Deep13]

23. Sounds like a breakfast cereal.

[anarch]

27. try our new "snowflake babies" frosted being cereal

from the makers of Soylent Green

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

24. I'd favor a world with one-tenth the present population

There are simply too many of us. Isn't there a limit to how much population this fragile rock can support?

[Deep13]

30. That would be a nice place.

And each of us would be valuable.

[SoCalDem]

25. It's all so simple, and yet impossible to solve..

If Mom makes dinner for 4, and you bring home 3 friends., unannounced, either some will not eat, or everyone will eat less.. It;s all supply and demand.:(