Population alarmists believe that the world’s growing population will strip the Earth of its useable resources and will outpace innovation and rates of production. This, they believe, will cause diminishing standards of living, more poverty, more hunger, famine and starvation, water shortages, pestilence, war and conflict over diminishing resources, the evisceration of wildlife habitats, and environmental catastrophes (i.e. global climate change).
In 1968, in his best-selling book, Population Bomb, author Paul Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death because the earth was overpopulated.
However, in Earth Report 2000, Robert Bailey summarized what has
really happened:
- As the world’s population quintupled, the world’s economies grew 40 fold. (In other words, due to technology, we are doing much more with far less.)
- There is literally too much food in the world and plenty of land.
- Starvation is a political disaster, not a natural one (i.e., the real problem is the allocation and distribution of food, not its physical availability).
- You could move the entire world population inside medium-sized homes, and they’d all fit inside Texas, yielding a population density similar to that of Paris.
According to Dr. Phillip Longman, some 59 countries, comprising roughly 44 percent of the world’s total population, are currently not producing enough children to avoid population decline, and the phenomenon continues to spread. By 2045, according to the latest UN projections, the world’s fertility rate as a whole will have fallen below replacement levels.
The world is not facing a population explosion. Rather, the world is facing a population implosion. Many countries are not producing enough children to replace their aging populations. Some countries such as France, Russia, Australia and Italy are actually paying women to have more children, and other countries are considering implementing such programs. One region in Russia went so far as to declare a national holiday entitled “Day of Conception.” Everyone gets the day off to go home and do his patriotic duty.
This population implosion is having a devastating effect on these economies. No babies ultimately means no workforce. Who will support the elderly who are now living longer?
The overpopulation theory is a myth that deserves
to be cast in the dustbin of history. Many of the most densely populated
countries in the world are among the most developed and the most
environmentally sensitive—nations like Hong Kong, Singapore, Holland, and many
others. Some of the poorest and most polluted are relatively sparsely
populated.
- Population Research Institute: What Is The Myth Of Overpopulation?
- Family Watch International: Stand For the Family
- Darrow Miller and Friends: Exploding the Myth of Overpopulation
- Countries with Below Replacement Fertility Levels (Projected: 2020-2025)
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