Population Control

Overpopulation. The world, among circles, has worried about the number of people living on this planet and the ability of the planet to sustain such numbers. China has a one-baby policy, but what about the rest of the world?

Paul Ehrlich “Population Bomb” - “The first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involved the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.”

David Brower - “Child-bearing should be a punishable crime against society. Unless the parents hold a governmental license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing the antidotes to citizens chosen for child-bearing.”

The idea is that overpopulation will not only drastically lower living conditions and all of the consequences connected to that, but overpopulation will decimate the environment, using up all of the natural resources, the ecosystem will fail, the atmosphere dissipate, and the world will begin to die. Some argue it is dying already. 

This eccentric and erroneous idea that we are on the verge of over-population and a dying planet is an extreme exaggeration stemming from a misunderstanding of population patterns. 

If the world population grows as it has, then surely it is possible such extravagant dooms-day prophecies would come true, but studies of population trends tell a dramatically different story. Any society whose population trends can be studied show a peak. A peak, meaning that once the society reaches a certain population the population growth tends to decrease, even to the point of redirection (or a decrease in population). Population on the earth will never reach exorbitant amounts because this trend is repetitive and trustworthy. Once a population reaches it’s height, it begins to decline. 

So many choose China as an example. Bad example. China is still quite communistic in it’s dictations. What many people do not know or fail to take into account is that China did not always have a one-child policy. The Chinese were very good at motivation. The Communist party in China first child policy was one of mass production. The plan was to over-populate their competition. They encouraged families to have as many children as possible. 8, 9, 10 children. But when they learned they had not the resources even to feed all of these people, the policy quickly became one of the opposite extreme. One child per family. This shows only the ineptitude of government control of something that belongs in the public sector to personal, individual choice. If China continues on it’s one-child policy path, it is foreseeable that China’s population will begin to decline very quickly very soon. 

Population overgrowth is not in the statistics and not an estimable scenario that can be placated. China is only an example of ill planning and forceful interference in an area of universal freedom and population control is only one more chink in the chain of attempts to control the populace, for if you think about what the green movement is advocating here, if the government decided who would raise children, the government would decide who raised the future. Ideas, Ideals, the future, would all be in the hands of the government. If you disagreed with the party line, what would you expect the probabilities of you being granted the privilege of raising a child of your own? Sounds like big brother, but so does mass sterilants in the water. 

Jared Williams