Defusing the population bomb
There is nothing more precious than a newborn baby; to see a new life emerging is a God-given wonder. However, the millions of new babies that are born every year are creating an earth that is becoming increasingly hostile to large numbers of its inhabitants and straining its already short food and resource supply. That puts a negative cloud over that tiny life.
The population of the earth is 7.7 billion and is increasing at an alarming rate. Around 3,000 babies are born every 20 minutes. Even if we do everything right environmentally, if we don’t do something about the population explosion, all of our environmental work would be in vain.
To understand this, we need to look at the earth as a global village. That phrase is used to show how the financial linkage between Asia and Europe and the United States works together. In the same way, the resources of the world and the people of the world are all interconnected. Thomas Friedman wrote a book a decade ago titled The World is Flat, in which he points out that the world’s peoples are all socially and business interconnected. As the decades pass, we will become even more connected.
The United States is facing an unprecedented wave of immigrants who are trying to come to the U. S. because we have more resources available to them than the country they left. They may say they seek asylum, but in reality it is more about economics.
Consider where these immigrants are from: places such as Haiti, Bangladesh, India, Mexico and Central America. Why are these refugees flooding our shores? Population growth in the Third World is almost unbelievable, and that strains the resources available. In the next 20 years, Kenya is projected to add 25 million people to an already overcrowded country; an extra 25 million people who must subsist on a land that can barely hold the 50 million it has now.
However, in considering population worldwide, we are mistaken if we think population growth is a Third World problem. Consider this: Americans use around 50 times as much energy as the 80 poorest countries of the world.
Our wasteful lifestyle means we can’t have a worldwide utopia where the rest of the world is similar to our society. There is very little chance for all the world’s people ever reaching the level of material affluence enjoyed by Americans and western Europeans.
Even though oil seems to be plentiful today, multiply that demand by 10 or 50 or 100 times, and it will become obvious there is not enough oil to supply everyone in the world with energy on a scale equal to ours. There is not enough wood. Not enough coal. Not enough natural gas, and it is going to take decades of work to make renewable energy cut into the overall energy growth. The rest of the world can never afford to live like we do, because we are dissipating our natural resources at an unsustainable rate.
In 20 years, if projections are right, there will be another 2 billion people in this world. That will create huge urban sprawl in cities like Tokyo, Mexico City, and Shanghai. These cities will become 30-million to 40-million population centers. They’ll have rampant unemployment because there is no way to create that many jobs. We will see traffic congestion you can’t even imagine, cities packed with homeless people, resource depletion when Third World countries develop greater demands for fuel, overwhelming air and water pollution. And I can see the destruction of wildlife occurring at an unprecedented rate.
Then, when you couple all of the above with climate change caused by global warming, the prospects for a worldwide catastrophe are truly scary. As the arable land is reduced by rising sea levels combined with the climate-changing droughts, life on our planet will be horrible for millions. We will have unprecedented immigration problems that will dwarf what we have now, and the rush to enter this country and Europe will strain the very fabric of western society.
We must reverse this trend or all is lost.
What should we do? Most of the reports I’ve read indicate the population of our country should be around 300 million people to be at its optimum level, but as of Dec. 17, the population of the United States was 332,763,070 and growing. Our country should lead the world in population control.
We should encourage smaller families through tax incentives, and refuse foreign aid to countries without population control. If we don’t have that kind of approach, we will have draconian methods in the 22nd century. After all, when a world starts starving to death because of a lack of food, combined with the lack of resources, terrible things will occur.
Population control is everybody’s baby. We need to face it today as responsible Americans. In the distant past, large families were needed because of high infant mortality rates, and the resources available for the average person were plentiful.
An American baby will consume hundreds of times more of the planet’s resources than will an Ethiopian child. So don’t have that third or fourth child if you want to be a responsible citizen of the world. As the future looms, whether we like it or not, we will one day be a one-world community, and the child in Ethiopia will be your neighbor as much as the one from Texas.