Preview

Population Overgrowth

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
2092 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Population Overgrowth
Image this: One day, you wake up and 240,000 more people are living in your mansion. It is a big mansion with normally ample supplies to sustain your lifestyle. However, with 240,000 more people inhabiting that same area, it has become cramped and small. The next day, 240,000 people more come to live with you. This happens everyday for many years, soon supplies start to stretch thin and space starts to be a rarity. Unfortunately, this is not fiction. It is reality. Everyday, 240,000 babies are born around the world, according to United Nations ' Population Fund (UNFPA). This figure works out to be about 12,000,000 people over the next 50 years, if the growth stays, steady. However, as stated by World Population Profile: 1998, the population of our plant will reach 9.6 billion people by 2050, a discouraging number. That should frighten every citizen of earth, because the enormous population will affect every person. Unless, people understand the causes and the problems they create.
Experts list various reasons that the population has boomed. One is a desire for large families. Experts estimate that twenty percent of the projected growth over the next fifty years- or 660 million people- will come from families that may have access to family planning services but choose to have more than two children. Another reason that the population is growing at a rapid pace is that family planning services are not available to all people. Many governments ban or restrict valuable methods of contraception. In Japan, regulations discourage the use of birth control pills and encourage the use of condoms. However, condoms prove to be only 90-98% effective under the best circumstances, while, if taken correctly, the pill is 99.67% effective against unplanned pregnancy (" 'NO ' and Other Methods of Birth Control" back of pamphlet) This is at least a 1% difference. Therefore, one woman out of one hundred using condoms will get pregnant. That would mean 647,200 women



Cited: Abernethy, Virgina Deane. "Allowing fertility decline:200 years after Malthus 's Essay on Population." Environmental Law, Winter 1997v27n4p1097-1109. Campaign Issues: Facing the Facts. Face to Face. 29 February 2000 <http://www.facecampaign.org/tmpls/issues.html>. Glossary. World Bank. 25 February 2000 <http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/modules/glossary.htm#momentum>. Mitchell, Jennifer D. "Before the Next Doubling." World Watch 11 (January/February 1998): 20-27. "No" and other Methods of Birth Control. Contraceptive pamphlet. Kenilworth, Illinois: Private Line, 1996. 6 Billion: A Time for Choices. United Nation Population Fund. 29 February 2000 <http://www.unpfa.org>. 6,000,000,000 Consumption Machines. National Wildlife Foundation. 7 March 2000 <http://www.nwf.org/intlwild/1998/6billionso.html>. World Population Continues to Grow. ENN News Archive. 17 February 2000 <http://www.enn.com/enn-news-archieve/1999/04/040599/population_2496.asp>. World Population: Special Report. BBC news. 27 February 2000 <http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/special_report/1999/06/99/world_population/newsid_381000/381043.stm>. Zero Population Growth. The Central Oregon Chapter of Zero Population Growth. 17 February 2000 <http://www.envirocenter.org/groups/zeropop/zeropop.html>.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    With several fonts of information embedded in this article from TIMES magazine, Olivia Waxman articulates the momentum in which American society is tuning on the issue of overpopulation. The consensus is, again, the need to control the birthrate, thus diminishing (or try to) population growth. One of the sources the author uses is Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich who argues that “it was time for a population-control movement. Without it, the world would face shortages of food, water and more.”…

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    ZPG Battle

    • 644 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Zero population growth (ZPG) may be described as the state in which a country, state, or region is in during a time where the population does not increase nor decrease. At this state, the average total fertility rate is 2.1. As of now, the zero population growth movement is targeting underdeveloped countries and regions that have an exploding population, such as India and Sub-Saharan Africa. While ZPG may contradict with religious beliefs in these underdeveloped areas, there are ways to achieve a population that remains the same, such as birth control (condoms, pills), family planning, and pushing higher education on the poor. Birth control would prevent pregnancies. Family planning would help poor families to determine how to handle the situation of having two kids. Putting education into the equation would cause a better economy in India and Sub-Saharan Africa, which would then detour families from having a large number of kids. The neo-Malthusians believe that while population increases exponentially (1 person, 2 people, 4 people, 8 people, 16 people), food supply only increases arithmetically (1 tomato, 2 tomatoes, 3 tomatoes, 4 tomatoes).1 During the rapid increase of population, neo-Malthusians have a strong feeling that the food supply will run out, and thus, they agree with the zero population growth movement. However, to contradict this, the Cornucopians believe that the earth has a limitless natural resource base and that we humans can constantly expand without a problem.2…

    • 644 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    He thought that if we did not restrict reproduction that homegrown food would eventually run out or we would not be able to produce enough. This could be true, but you could never stop growing food. There is endless amounts of seeds to grow food and there will always be water somewhere, whether it is raining or coming from a river or faucet. The article stated that, “As a solution, Malthus urged “moral restraint”.” This is pretty much promoting abstinence.…

    • 467 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Overpopulation In Sparta

    • 926 Words
    • 4 Pages

    It is obvious that the population is growing every day, at an average rate of 80 million every year. These people born of families with children of 3 or more plague our streets and decrease our natural resources for the future generations.…

    • 926 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When given the task to analyze “Overpopulation is not a problem” written by Erle C. Ellis and “The Island of plenty” written by Johnson C. Montgomery one may quickly realize how opposed these two articles are to each other. Johnson C. Montgomery was a California attorney and a member of the organization Zero Population Growth. He talks about how the United States shouldn’t be sharing its resources with this “polluted world of people”. Mr. Ellis is an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland. He believes that “The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been”. He thinks humans have been supporting big populations for years by engineering ecosystems and using technologies. For Montgomery overpopulation is obviously an issue while for Ellis it is not.…

    • 836 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    World Population Awareness. (2010). Environmental Impacts from Unsustainable Population Growth. Retrieved from Google at http://www.overpopulation.org/impact.html.…

    • 805 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin (1968) argues that over-population is a “no technical solution problem.” A technical solution, according to Hardin…

    • 1377 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thomas Malthus was a pessimist , his theory is that the growth of human populations always tends to outstrip the productive capabilities of land resources. The result is that resources place a restriction on population growth and size and ‘positive’ checks (famine and disease) or preventative checks (limitation of family size) work to reduce population growth.…

    • 940 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Let me start off by explaining what overpopulation is to the 37% of the class who does not know. According to dictionary.com, overpopulation is when an organism’s number exceeds the carrying capacity of its habitat and the habitat is no longer a suitable environment to live on. It refers to more than just the number of people; it refers to our relationship to mother earth. To better explain this concept, imagine an environment that is holding 10 people but there is only enough space, food and drinking water for 7 people that is overpopulation. Thomas Malthus proposed in his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population that resources grow linearly while population grows exponentially. He argued that, if left unrestricted, human population would continue to grow until they will become too large to be supported by the food grown on available agricultural land, causing…

    • 905 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thomas Malthus' Theory of Population that was proposed more than two centuries ago, foretold the problems of food shortage that the world is facing today, due to uncontrolled increase in population.…

    • 1319 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Over Population

    • 1312 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Today, 1.3 billion of the world's people are living on the equivalent of a dollar a day or less. Imagine how many more would be living on that limited amount of food, and clothing if the population expands too much more. Education would be rare among the high population, and jobs scarce. Sooner or later, there will be no more room on the earth for everybody to live, and a major problem will have to be faced.…

    • 1312 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Overpopulation

    • 298 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Today our planet earth is overpopulated; our population is estimated to be 6 billion and by 2050 that number is expected to jump to 9 billion. It is expected that’s why governments were able to find ways and solutions to provide people a living.…

    • 298 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    overpopulation

    • 1218 Words
    • 5 Pages

    For more than five decades, Paul R. Ehrlich has been alerting people to the importance of overpopulation and the threats that it may pose. In his 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich more specifically declared, "In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Famines on that scale never arrived. The most important question in this essay is what are the threats that overpopulation will pose? Poverty is one main problem, if the number of people exceeds the capacity of the environment or habitat then there will be a huge number of demands and not all the people will have their needs fulfilled, and countries will be unable to provide services for all the people, which will lead to great poverty. Another threat is air pollution. Basically it is a chain effect. If more people are born, more people emit waste and throw out garbage. This will lead to bad health issues. And any issue that causes damage to the health of a person must be solved as soon as possible. Overpopulation may cause scarcity. Scarce food sources and loss of habitat as will occur mentioned that there will be more demand and not everyone will be given all the needs…

    • 1218 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Population Problem

    • 3028 Words
    • 13 Pages

    increase to over 10 billion by 2050, two times what it was in 1990 (Bongaarts…

    • 3028 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    According to the U.S Census Bureau, the world population is growing at a mindboggling rate. The world reached 1 billion people in 1800, 2 billion by 1922, and over 6 billion by 2000. It is estimated that the population will swell to over 9 billion by 2050. This means that if the world’s natural recourses were evenly distributed, people in 2050 will only have 25% of the resources per capita that people in 1950 had. As of today Americans…

    • 512 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays