Overpopulation is the big underlying cause of most of the world’s problems. It produces habitat destruction, pollution, and affects animal populations reducing biodiversity.
It needs dealing with as a priority before nature is driven out of business.
a. Make it a priority and publicise it.
b. Provide pensions and social welfare so people do not depend on their children when sick or in old age.
c. Provide good education for girls.
d. Educate the world.
e. Provide good sex education
f. Provide contraception and contraception advice.
g. Provide incentives for families of two or less.
h. Provide disincentives for larger families.
AI presents us with a huge opportunity. We could embrace it and spread the profits. Use AI to reduce the need for a workforce and direct people into the caring industries! Or else we leave it with the wealthy continuing to exploit us with the workforce thrown on the scrapheap as surplus to requirements.
Hi, Opher,
I’ve mentioned this before, but it deserves repetition. I might claim the world overpopulation problem is on the road to solving itself. When animals begin to outgrow their food supply, a number of things start to happen. First, reproduction begins to slow. There’s more disease, more fighting and other violence, and even more homosexuality.
Human beings are busy poisoning the environment with industrial chemicals and waste, as well as agricultural chemicals. While others are concerned about climate change, I’m more concerned with the buildup of environmental toxins. We also have all the wars, all the jockeying for political supremacy, and all the terrorism and random violence. With globalization, there is the world-wide spread of disease that used to live in isolated pockets.
I heard on the radio just yesterday how Asian chestnut trees imported to the US spread a blight that killed something like 4 billion native American chestnuts. So plant, animal, and human diseases have the potential of wiping out not only people, but crucial links in the food chain. You probably know that the birth rate in developed countries is already going down. Life expectancy in the US is also going down
Hi Katharine – yes the trend in developed countries is for a stabilisation of population but that is currently not the case in undeveloped countries. We will be up to over 11 billion by 2050. It is salutary to think that the increase in population in the next 30 years (4 billion) will be greater than the entire population of the world when I was born! All those people need food, water and housing, roads, vehicles and goods. That takes up room and that destroys habitat and kills animals. That pollutes and requires intensive agriculture with all the chemicals that are incumbent. I do not think this is in any way sustainable.
I reckon a sustainable level for humans is around 4 billion – about half of what we have now.
Yes you are right to point out that overcrowding results in drops in fertility and increased homosexuality but you can see this is by no means sufficient. We might well have wiped out all animal life before that kicks in.
Yes I am concerned with the build up of chemicals. Pesticides are in all our bodies. But I am more concerned with biodiversity and the total destruction of the natural environment. Insects are being eradicated and they are an essential element of the food chain. We are playing with dynamite (quite apart from the terrible plight of so much of our beautiful wildlife).
Yes – our globalisation is introducing plant, animal and human diseases for which there in no natural immunity. Perhaps we will unleash Pandora’s box and provide the solution from our own thoughtless greedy actions?
But I would prefer an intelligent, well thought through strategy myself. It’s not beyond us.