Erik Assadourian, World Watch - Stabilizing population is urgent. The goal should not simply be to nudge along a little less growth so population stabilizes at 9 billion rather than 9.5 or 10 billion. Instead, we need to make a long term plan to get population back to a manageable range... Some, including Paul Ehrlich, have suggested the ideal population range is around 1-3 billion, depending on how badly we have damaged the Earth’s systems and how much we want to consume moving forward.
Reducing the global population is essential in addressing humanity’s impact on the planet—along with reducing overall consumption (affluence) and the use of unsustainable technologies.
3 comments:
Educate women and give them access to family planning services and birth control, anything less will be too little to late.
And that would be too little too late too!
The Chinese policy, because it wasn't enforced, never stabilised their population. It continued to grow, year after year.
The only way to solve the human overpopulation problem without killing people is to give everyone the opportunity of 1 live birth, followed by medical sterilisation of both parents. Any males who get 2 or more women pregnant at the same time except by bona-fide accident lose their dangly bits and spend at leat 5 years in prison.
Do it even-handedly around the world, no exceptions, not in-vitro, no special pleadings, and we could have the problem solved: a global human population ca. 100M, which is what it was when Poplicola declared the Roman Republic and the first experiments in democracy were being made in Greece. The entire 100M could all enjoy the benefits of high technology in a world where no species was going extinct because of human predation or habitat destruction.
We'd even be smarter through better oxygenation due to natural reforestation.
It would take about 150 years (I did a spreadsheet using UN pop projections), and would be tough to keep everyone alive until we pass the hump later this century.
But the alternative increasingly seems to be that this century will see pan-extinction of all life of a higher order than cockroach. I hope that no one except perhaps a few lunatics and psychopaths think that would be preferable.
8:38
Educating women and giving them birth control and family planning services works, it's the only thing that has been proven to work. For example, look at Italy who went from huge families as the norm to a current 1.37 births per woman all through education and access to family planning. These efforts need to stop being piecemeal, and become comprehensive globally. Add training for everyone in soil building farming/ gardening methods and overpopulation will have more time to be remedied gently.
I doubt many would want to live on the prison planet you endorse. Your method will requires jackbooted thugs on every street corner enforcing your plan, and there is a huge risk that many places would end up like China with terrible imbalance between the sexes like China's 100 females for 122 males. In China, men unable to marry are called to "bare branches" and they go to great lengths to attempt to find wives. This gives China quite a large unmarried population available for a military draft and war on everyone else. War and the militaries that engage in it, are the most egregious waste of resources and a giant source of pollution.
Now tell me who is going to pay for all those jack booted thugs to make your policy work? Won't all those thugs be a ready military force to waste and destroy the planet? Why will these thugs get to stand around harassing people, when they could be gardening and producing food?
Large scale agriculture is as much of and issue as overpopulation, and makes overpopulation much worse. Modern large scale agriculture destroys soil, and these methods are loosing top soil at an alarming rate while releasing carbon to the atmosphere, and damaging the ability for soils to hold water or grow food. Until soil building farming techniques becomes the norm, food insecurity and peak soil will probably take care of overpopulation problems in the most brutal way.
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