Overpopulation

The definition of overpopulation is one that is often misunderstood. Most people think it’s simply when there are too many people, and while that is part of it, it’s not the whole meaning. Overpopulation is not a high density of people per landmass, overpopulation as a definition is a state of society where the amount of resources produced is insufficient to sustain the population for the foreseeable future. This means that there are a few other factors and issues which influences over population with the main one being resource management which is directly linked to our definition. This shifts a lot of focus to rapidly developing third world countries which require more and more resources as their society advances, but it also is heavily impacted by the lifestyles of those highly developed countries, each individual’s rapid consumption of resources and the resources used for technology to provide them. In other words, as we use up more and more of the Earth’s resources, its capacity to maintain the population we have now is constantly decreasing. Solving this rapid resource consumption is what I feel is at the heart of solving the overpopulation crisis we are in but in society’s present state; it’s a task that could be proved impossible. Alternatively, I think there are plenty of other solutions and although they may not be as effective they are definitely more practical, easy to implement and I feel they are the way to go. In this report I am going to attempt to identify causes for overpopulation and provide the common accepted model of population expansion known as demographic transition, demonstrate the impact overpopulation has on the environment and society and analyse proposed solutions to the main problem which is overpopulation.

Before explaining what causes overpopulation in more detail, I feel it is necessary to provide data of the rapid population growth over the past few hundred years. The prediction made on this graph is debated and we will get to that later, but it does accurately show a clear history of the Earth’s population. We can see that it was taken thousands of years to reach 1 billion people on Earth, but only around 100 years for that to double to 2 billion, and even shorter time periods of each successive billion. This is known as the exponential human population growth, but what triggered the sudden boom in the population? It has mainly been the development of increasingly advanced technology, most notably the advent of improved farming and agriculture methods which increased quality of life which led to higher birth rates, and technological advancements in the field of medicine. Both of these advancements also increased life expectancy through lowered mortality rates. But now, we are seeing lowered birth rates throughout the world which implies Earth’s population will peak at some point, while in turn we are also seeing increased resource consumption which oddly enough, is also caused by further technological advancements. This hints that while the population may peak due to poor resource management we could possibly still be overpopulated for a while now; even if the population starts to go on the decline. These causes for a sudden population explosion and the prediction of where the population of the world is heading can be explained well with the demographic transition model or theory.

The demographic transition model explains how lowered death rates followed by lowered birth rates increases the population of society as it progresses from a non-industrialised society to an industrialised one through increase of available technologies and resources. The model divides a society or region’s population growth into five stages which will be explained now.

- Stage One occurs in a pre-industrialised society which basically means a society which is devoid of all technological advancements that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Birth and death rates are high and heavily impacted by environmental causes such as drought. High birth rates are influenced by a children’s necessity to a family’s household economy by doing tasks such as cooking, cleaning and working in the fields for food. It is accepted that all countries have passed this stage.

- Stage Two is the decrease of death rates and the initial increase of a population. Lowered death rates are influenced by improvements in food production and better transportation to prevent starvation and improvements in public health to lower deaths, particularly ones of younger children. Improved water supply, sewerage system and general knowledge of personal hygiene are also important. As many third-world countries are currently progressing through stage two, the gap between deaths and births increases, as in deaths lowering before births has a chance to catch up. The large numbers of countries currently experiencing this population explosion is a main concern of the population explosion occurring worldwide.

- Stage Three is the stabilisation of the world’s population through decreased birth rates, which is what some say the world’s population as a whole is approaching. Some characteristics of stage three which causes this are the realisation that perhaps having a lot of children is not a necessary investment for parents to make to ensure a comfortable old age, increasing costs to support children in the family, changing ideals towards women and their role as primarily child-raisers and housewives to a more independent status and development of contraceptive technology has become an ever increasing factor.

- Stage Four is when both birth and death rates are low and the population is constant. Most well developed countries such as Australia, America and Canada are currently in this stage. Demographers debate that the population will remain at this stage and that this is the final stage where as some debate that a fifth stage of population decline will occur.

- Stage Five is when fertility rates are low enough that children being born no longer exceed the population of their parent’s generation. It is noted to occur from a de-industrialisation of a society, in other words a shift from manufacturing industries to information and communication industries.

As we can see from the demographic transition model, overpopulation is almost a direct result of the mortality and birth rates of a society and how they change over time because of various societal attitudes and economic and technological breakthroughs. But a factor that this model does not entirely touch upon is resource management. As we can see, through technological advancements, population increases through raised birth rates and lowered mortality rates, but as technology advances further, more resources are used to accommodate an ever increasingly demanding lifestyle. The fact is that even if the world’s population peaks, if we are still consuming the same amount of resources as we are now the world will still be overpopulated, therefore we must improve resource management and reduce excessive unnecessary expenditure of resources which could otherwise be used in more appropriate ways. This leads on to solutions which simply are necessary to be put into place in order to combat this overpopulation issue.

But what does overpopulation actually mean to us and implications will it have on the world we live in? Unfortunately, overpopulation has been imminent for a while now and it does have serious implications on both society and the environment. Here are some of them:

- The increased difficulty to provide fresh, clean drinking water to everyone.

- The increased difficulty to provide sewerage treatment and deal with increasing waste disposal.

- Increased waste disposal leads to higher levels of air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination etc.

- With an increasing population, more resources are being used, further aggravating the issue.

- An increasing need for resources causes oceans to become overfished and excessive amounts of land to be cleared for urban developments to house the increasing number of people. This could damage or even destroy many different ecosystems.

- The increase in consumption of resources could lead to starvation or malnutrition.

- Diseases are easily spread in a more overcrowded population and also with improper waste management; it only makes the disease issue worse.

- If worse comes to worse, higher crime rates could also become a factor as people may resort to stealing and other illegal acts to survive.

With the causes and implications in mind, we realise the solutions that must be put in place have to either increase mortality rates, decrease birth rates or implement wiser resource management and conservation techniques to overcome the excessive consumption. Increasing mortality rates would definitely be considered immoral, especially on a large scale which is necessary. This leaves resource management or conservation and decreasing birth rates.

According to some demographers, the proposed stage 5 of demographic transition will be the peak of human population expansion where birth and death rates are low and the population with either remain stable or start declining. But that still leaves the issue of lack of resources and I for one do not see how it can just sort itself out when population size is not the sole factor. There are quite a few solutions being splashed around, and some already seriously overpopulated places like China have already put into place regulations to help mitigate the problem.

Perhaps the simplest solution to put in place and successfully enforce is laws to control the amount of children that each parent can give birth to. This is similar to what has already been implemented in China. In China each woman is restricted to one child and this law is heavily supported by most people. This 'one-child policy' has been proven successful in overly populated areas like China, is easy to enforce and solves one of the basic foundation causes of overpopulation. China's birth rate per woman is now low enough that the amount of children being born is not enough to replace the previous generation’s population and although it won’t for a few generations, China's population should eventually peak and decline. Perhaps a worldwide implementation of this policy by the UN would benefit the issue greatly.

A very controversial solution is to release a contagious virus to make most of the world's population infertile, without any other negative implications to health; forced sterilisation in other words. At a glance it does actually seem like an effective solution as it is certain to reduce population. It is easy to produce, release and does not harm any humans who are already alive. Though it may seem effective, it would be near impossible to control if it happened to get out of hand. The main problem is not that it is hard to implement, it's that there are also many obvious ethical and moral arguments against this. The simple fact is that it is not consensual and is unfair on unsuspecting people who may want children of their own sometime. It could also be considered an invasion of privacy and is an example of the state taking away the freedom of people, forcing them to make a relatively personal choice which may not be one everyone wants.

Aside from reducing birth rates the other issue to tackle is rapid consumption of resources, in particular fossil fuels. As society's dependence on fossil fuels increases and we see an unwillingness to change, the environment suffers through other pressing issues such as climate change. But these issues are interrelated. As the population increases, there is typically going to be a greater need for fossil fuels and more will inevitably be consumed. This means more greenhouse gas emissions which contributes to climate change. The more need and usage, the more demand which means it becomes even more economically viable to produce more and more fossil fuels for the ever increasing number of people. But the more that is produced, the less we end up with which makes both our society's dependence on fossil fuels and their inevitable complete depletion an awful prospect for both the overpopulation and global warming issue, and this cycle appears to simply repeat over and over again. Thus, solutions which will benefit climate change like a switch to low emission, greener, renewable energy sources can also greatly benefit the resource crisis which makes overpopulation worse.

Typically, most instant quick fix solutions involving reduction of birth rates, such as the virus idea, are seen as mainly unethical, immoral and too drastic to be practical and widely accepted. This leaves us with either better resource usage or a worldwide implementation of China’s one-child policy. The obvious more definitive solution which is a benefit to much more than solely the overpopulation issue is a switch to renewable energy. This provides plenty of resources for each individual and also helps stifle the impact of climate change, but the issue is that after taking into account society’s attitudes towards giving up fossil fuels in favour of a cleaner greener energy source, for that change to be implemented immediately it seems highly unlikely. I feel that while this solution by far the best and most beneficial, when it comes to practicality, relevance to attitudes today, ease of implementation, something that a very large majority of people can support and without any moral or ethical boundaries to step around, a worldwide implementation of China’s one-child policy may be what is necessary to ensure a sustainable society, protect the environment from human overpopulation and allow some other plant and animal life to survive with us.