Perils of Overpopulation
Introduction
Overpopulation is a leading cause of much of the conflict in the world. Below you will find examples of the problems caused by the existence too many people.
March 21, 2008
Fresh Water Out of Reach for Many Worldwide
Listen to the episode, and pay attention to the projections of how water demands will increase along with population gains despite conservation. Listen also to how many people worldwide will be lacking water. Now, how can a person who is not a complete sociopath listen to this and then proceed to procreate irresponsibly? If a person has the intelligence and education to understand that water shortages are coming, and yet chooses to add to the population more humans that will exacerbate the water problem, how can we not judge that person as destructively selfish? What other judgement is there?
March 11, 2008
Author Struggles to Stay Removed from Slave Trade
The important question to ask yourself after listening to this story is: would those people, many of them children, be in a position of being sold into slavery if they had never been born. One of the primary reasons for the continued existence of slavery is that there are too many people. If strict controls of procreation are imposed in order to drastically reduce population, especially in a third-world countries like Haiti, there simply will not be slaves available. You can argue 'til you are blue in the face that slavery is immoral and that those involved in the slave trade should be severely punished, but it is a fact of human existence that wherever there are people living in conditions of vulnerability, other people will exploit them. Attempts to eliminate human vulnerability through social programs have thus far been a failure all over the world. Attempts to limit population have rarely been tried, but undeniable logic tells you that they would have to be effective. A person who does not exist cannot be a slave!
January 30, 2008
Children Try to Make a Living on Afghan Streets
Listen to the story, but do not feel sympathy for the children. Sympathy leads to irrational decisions that actually increase the level of suffering in the world. Instead, think rationally about what actions can be taken to prevent the disastrous condition in which these children live. Given the evidence that is plainly available about the conditions of impoverished peoples around the world, a rational person has to conclude that the solution to this situation has to include a regulation of procreation. Humans, in the absence of education, will procreate unless prevented by some authority. Many people will say that it is cruel to prevent a person from choosing to have a child. This is a backwards way of looking at the issue. It is cruel to allow a person to have a child when all the evidence shows that there is a likelihood that having that child will lead both the person and the child into a life of poverty.
Those who do accept that a solution to poverty includes regulation of procreation might yet fail to realize that procreation must be controlled not just in third-world countries, but in the developed world as well. Opponents might point out that birth rates have dropped in many developed countries. While that is great for us Americans, our lowered birth rate and higher standard of living isn't going to help catapult the Third World out of poverty. We must regulate our population in order to set an example for other countries, and example that we can then impose on other countries through various means of coercion. Attempting to impose population controls on other countries without doing it ourselves first will almost certainly result in accusations of imperialism and, even worse, genocide. The only way for the U.S. and other developed countries to promote population control across the globe is to first implement it amongs ourselves.
January 11, 2008
Lester Brown - Plan B 3.0
The guest touched on the topic only briefly, but given how infrequently the issue of overpopulation is addressed, any mention of this issue is important. The entire segment is worth listening to, but I focus on the part where the guest refers to a "demographic trap" where "rapid population growth begets poverty" and "poverty begets rapid population growth". It is the responsiblity of the United States and the other powerful nations to intervene to break these countries out of this demographic trap. Why? Because we are the ones most capable.
October 15, 2007
Credit Unions Seek Payday Loan Consumers
The issue of predatory lending has been reported often in recent years, but to my knowledge no report has ever broadened its scope to address the root causes. Some reports do mention that we need to tackle poverty, but no mention is made of the root causes of poverty. My guess is that many of the people who patronize payday lenders do so out of desperation, in order to provide necessities for their families. And that is one of the root causes, the very existence of families without sufficient means of support. If there existed fewer families in need, then it would be easier for society to provide a safety net, but the sheer amount of irresponsible procreation strains and breaks the system.
A second root cause is the pattern of poor decisions made by people who are undereducated and suffering from character flaws, and that issue should be addressed too, but it will take longer. Overpopulation could be addressed immediately if we had leaders who cared more about solving problems than their own political future.
The report makes me think of a friend from high school who is trying to raise money to tackle predatory lending. I have to wonder if he plans to attack merely the symptoms of the problem, or the root causes.
August 28, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13997892
If you listen to the story, you will hear the shopowner explain that the amount of food rationed out is not enough for one person, let alone most of the families of six or seven. That's a problem, the existence of such large families in a country that is so unstable that pretty much everybody is vulnerable. When the majority of people in society are vulnerable, the logical course of action is to prevent the expansion of that vulnerability by strictly controlling procreation. Arguably, the most destructive acts performed by the government in Zimbabwe are the policies that have led to the rampant inflation. But nearly as bad is the fact that they allow their population to continue to expand under these conditions. It is nothing short of a crime against humanity to allow children to be born into such conditions. And it is not only Zimbabwe that is to blame, but the governments of the developed countries who do nothing. Rather than fucking around in Iraq, I predict that the Western powers had enough military might to go into Zimbabwe, depose the government, and then impose strict control over procreation through a combination of birth control, abortion, sterilization, and whatever other technological means exist. Of course that would lead to an accusation of genocide, and the only response to that is for the Western powers to visibly demontrate that they are following their own policies and regulating procreation back home. Never mind the fact that birth rates are actually dropping in many of the developed countries--population must still be regulated both to set an example and to start the process of improving the human race. That is the only ultimate solution to humanity's problems.
July 29, 2007
Is Ancient People's End a Warning for the Future?
Of course I do not expect the water shortage in the Southwest, nor in the rest of the world, to lead to the destruction of an entire society. But according to this report, and other reports that seem to come on a regular basis now, water shortage will cause big disruptions in life, and those disruptions are likely to have to worst effects on the poor and vulnerable. It is hard to see how the populations in area experiencing water shortages cannot conclude that they need to curtail population growth and start population reduction in order to forestal these effects. Or perhaps on some level they do see but cannot overcome their animal natures and take rational action.
July 29, 2007
Kenyan Tribes Battle for Shrinking Resources
Just to be clear, there is nothing particularly unusual about this story. These humans are acting exactly in the same way that humans throughout the centuries have acted when faced with a scarcity of resources. The ultimate solution to this conflict is twofold: human nature must be changed; available resources must be synchronized with the population, either by increasing the amount of resources or the efficiency of their consumption, or by decreasing the population. In much of the developed world, technology has faciliated the latter. But resources can only be stretched so far, and it should be obvious to any rational person that a solution to conflict involves control of the population. The availability of contraception and abortion has helped control the birth rate in much of the developed world, but even in the United States there are countless communities suffering from poverty and conflict due to overpopulation.
What can you do? Make the ultimate sacrifice and choose not to procreate, and furthermore take medical steps to ensure that you cannot, in a moment of weakness, or by accident, change your mind. But my community is not short of resources, you say? Well, that is true, but the true reason for the well-off to sacrifice procreation is so that they can better help the impoverished to control their populations. The wealthy cannot tell the poor not to procreate while themselves having as many children as desired without being accused of elitism, racism, or even attempted genocide.