This subject has been touched on recently in other threads but, as far as I am aware it has not been debated as a subject in its own right.
This link
http://www.jonathonporritt.com/pages/2008/11/population_1.html
is to an recent article by Jonathon Porrit which is a good starting point.
There’s not much I can add to it except that to say that the overpopulation problem is a third world problem is just wrong. India and China sure have big populations but they are big countries. Western Europe is more densely populate than China and Britain is more densely populated than Western Europe. And each Western European consumes many times the resources than does a Chinese or Indian.
The fact that the human sperm count is falling far from being a problem should be seen as a blessing.
But how does one go about maintaining or even reducing the size of human population?
Originally Posted by newatheist
It seems to be a correlation that education equals lower birth rates, so that must be a good starting point.
It may help if the Catholic Church could learn that contraception and abortion are not immoral and ungodly.
I am not on solid ground here, but think that Islam encourages breeding for the good of the spread of the faith.
Of course, Britain and Europe need to set examples to the rest of the World, but surely in sheer numbers versus capability to support those numbers, India, China and Africa are where the biggest changes are needed.
This is a hugely complex and thorny subject, but one I have mentioned before and have been concerned about for a long time. I repeat a stat mentioned previously. Approx 2.5 Billion 1954 to 6.5 Billion+ now. It really does seem to me to be the number one issue.
I think that the cost and how qickly a method might reduce population size is also important.
And its not just islam that is to blame, in Bangladesh having many children is/was considered useful and lucky because you have more people to help earn money or help out in the farm (I suspect this is common in many developing countries.
I think that there are three factors which tend to combine to reduce the birth rate:
1. A health service good enough to ensure that most babies survive to adulthood.
2. The ready availability of contraception for women (i.e. their fertility is under their control - condoms won't achieve this).
3. Better opportunities for women in terms of education and employment.
It's basically women who hold the key: once offered an opportunity to do other things than be permanent baby factories, most of them grab it.
The question of what population size the world can cope with in a sustainable way is often quoted as around 4 billion, but it depends on a number of factors. Improvements to agriculture, including genetically modified crops, could see food production rise. But the current production levels are heavily dependent on oil for fertiliser and mechanised farming, so as that gets used up or more expensive, that could hit production. Perhaps the worst constraint will prove to be lack of fresh water, exacerbated by climate change.
4. Decent state care for older people, so they don't feel in earlier life that the only way to get anyone to look after them later is to breed their own.
I do so wish people would listen to the unpleasant people in the "Optimum Population Trust" - they are not only nasty but wrong.
European rates of fertility are at a historic low - we should worry as much about the prospect of us declining as a species as we should about population growth.
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/1620
The evidence (unlike the rubbish that Green Fascists like Porrit spout) suggests a direct link between economic growth & well-being plus female education and rapid declines in rates of fertility.
This article (http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~hpkohler/p...rope-final.pdf) points out that over half the world's population is now in countries with below replacement levels of fertility.
The main reason for rapid rises in population is developing countries is that the babies and children aren't dying quite so readily - thanks to the intervention of western medicine. Fecundity rates have hardly budged.Across Europe, birth rates are falling and family sizes are shrinking. The total fertility rate is now less than two children per woman in every member nation in the European Union (see Figure 1). As a result, European populations are either growing very slowly or beginning to decrease. (http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_br...26/index1.html)
Tony Williams is right but the evidence says education is way more important than the availability of contraception.
In the immortal words of Billy Connolly:
Anyone for a long pig bbq?Look at this way; if we all ate one person, the problem would be halved over-night. Think about it, I could eat someone you don't like, you could eat someone I don't like, where's the fucking damage?
skb
I'll start worrying about our decline as a species once our numbers get down to a level the Earth can comfortably accommodate. As I estimate that would be after a reduction to about 10% of the current population, I don't think that's going to happen in my lifetime.
More piffle - perhaps you could evidence this silly assertion?
Responses like that might be a way to win arguments in the House, or wherever it is that you do your politics, but they won't cut any ice on a skeptics forum!
When was the last time in the history of human population when our species could support itself without resorting to the consumption of non-renewable resources?
(In that category I include resources which are technically renewable, but which were consumed at a faster rate than they could be renewed, such as wood or fish. Even coal and oil are renewable if you can wait a few hundred million years.)
Last edited by Trinoc; 9th February 2009 at 11:20 AM.
I have always appreciated Rabbinical argument in its proper place but fail to see why I have to research your question rather than for you to provide some evidence to substantiate it? I could get boring and explain why economics shows you to be wrong in your assertion (not of resource use but of human unsustainability) but then perhaps you're not aware there's a whole science that studies the use and distribution of scarce resources?
You made an unsubstantiated, unevidenced assertion and I do not see that me asking for some evidence is out of place on a sceptics forum?
The economy may be able to sustain a huge human population but will individuals be happy? As jobs are increasingly automated away (even the skilled ones), anyone who doesn't own valuable assets or have a (scarce) job is in for a pretty miserable time. I think the current recession is showing us what life could be like on a routine basis in a few decades time.
Whatever economics says, exponential growth simply can not be sustained. If every organism on Earth had reproduced at its maximum capability then the entire mass of the known universe would probably be a big ball of bacteria by now. Or possibly rabbits. Except of course it would have run into a brick wall when the ball of life was expanding at almost the speed of light.
As for the justification for sustainable population at 10% of current level, there are too many unknowns to make any more than an educated guess, but I think a reasonable upper bound would be the population at the start of the industrial revolution. Since that point we have undeniably been using resources faster than they are renewed.
To a reasonable approximation, life on Earth consists of unicellular organisms.
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