Essay - Population Crisis

In the year 1960, barely before my mother was born, the world had a population of 3 billion people. It had taken 33 years since it was at 2 billion in 1927, and the world’s first billion people was over 100 years before that in 1804. In barely more than 50 years since the world reached 3 billion people, we have more than doubled our population, reaching 7 billion in 2011.

                At the world’s current population growth, we add another billion people every 13 years. Every person on this planet needs food, water, healthcare, and other resources to survive. At what point are there not going to be enough of those resources for the billions upon billions of people that we have created?

                Already, people in third-world countries go without the basics that many of us consider to be necessary for survival: sanitation, clean water, a variety of nutritious foods, and basic healthcare, just to name a few. But many people say that this is mere selfishness of the first-world countries, where we are wasteful and over-indulge, that there is, in fact, enough to go around if it was actually evenly spread.

                The question is, how much can the world take? With current trends, we are eating up resources faster than we can figure out how to replace them, and outside of the first world, education is a privilege, not something that is seen as required. And as people continue to flood urban areas, because that’s where the jobs are, housing becomes more and more scarce. If you look at China and how they have people who have moved to the urban areas then live in horrid conditions, you can get a glimpse of what the rest of the world could be if we continue current trends of population and urbanization.

                 Along with the rapid growth in population has come the industrialization of the world. In the last hundred years, we have effectively ruined the world’s environment almost beyond repair. By constantly burning fossil fuels to power the things that make our lives easier, we have created an unsustainable way of life, not only for ourselves, but also for the planet.

                The topic of population control is almost a taboo in today’s society. How can we possibly tell people how many children they are allowed to have, or worse, stop them from having them altogether? Religion and lack of education have continued the belief that more children is better and taking away the right of people to choose that would cause a complete uproar.

                But here is a question that very few are willing to ask, and even more ignore completely: how can we possibly sustain our species on this planet with population growth happening the way it is. 1 billion people every thirteen years means that by 2115, only 100 years from now, the world’s population will be at 15 billion people.

                Is there enough farmland to sustain that many people? Probably not. Is there enough oxygen for that many people to breathe? If we keep cutting down the rainforests there won’t be. Is there enough clean drinking water for that many people to live? Remember that water is required to grow food as well. Sure 80% of the earth is water, but most of that is salt water. How can we possibly sustain this level of growth and still be able to survive?

                In the past, disease and infant mortality have kept the human race from rapid growth. With modern medicine, fatal communicable diseases are almost non-existent, infants live even when they’re born with what could have been fatal conditions, and people live twice as long as they did only a couple of hundred years ago. Modern medicine is considered a miracle, and I would not disagree with that. But life itself is a miracle and if we save every life, how can we keep all of life from ceasing to exist?

                The human race is incredibly egotistical. Because we’ve figured out how to communicate with one another and have opposable thumbs, we think this world is ours. It does belong to us, but it also belongs to every other living thing on this planet. And if this planet is ours, we need to start taking better care of our things. If this world was a classic car, it would be barely running with body damage and a terrible paint job and running out of gas in the middle of the desert with nowhere to fill up. It would also only have one seat left and ten more people to pick up before it reached the station.

                Globalization has done one major thing: it has forced us to see the world, not just our country; at least some of us, anyway. We see that people live every day without things we prize above our lives. We see that the Western way of life is destroying the ability to live for everyone on the planet, and most of them don’t live in a Western society.

                Education is the only remedy to the world’s current crisis. Educate the third world about reproductive health and make birth control available to them. Educate the Western society about the truth of global warming and the astronomical effects it will have on this world we live in. Educate the world about the need to slow down population growth before it’s too late. And educate the people who won’t listen. Educate the people who refuse to see. Only when there are more people who stand up for these things than people who won’t listen will there be real change. If that doesn’t happen, I fear for the lives my grandchildren may be forced to live, or maybe not be able to have at all.