"In the natural community, whenever a population's food supply increases, the population increases. As the population increases, its food supply decreases, and as its food supply decreases, that population decreases. This interaction between food populations and feeder populations is what keeps everything in balance.....Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated.....You end up with a community in which diversity is progressively destroyed in order to support the expansion of a single species."
- Excerpt from Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
- Excerpt from Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn
Although I had heard about the issue of overpopulation, it had never really concerned me until I read Ishmael. (It's a fantastic book if you ever get the chance read it) There are many lessons one can learn from this little novel but I think everyone who has read it can agree that it was mainly written to describe humanity's place in the world. However, like most pieces of philosophical literature it led to more questions than answers, but as Socrates once said, "The unexamined life is a life not worth living." So maybe the questions I began to ask myself were a good thing.
There is something genuinely frustrating about philosophy. We keep searching for answers only to realize we are even more clueless than before, which is partly the point I suppose, but after a while it just seems like these books and magazine articles I read are just like one long episode of LOST. I may now know that Sawyer has a daughter somewhere but it is completely irrelevant to my question of what the hell that sand monster is.
I keep reading more and though my understanding of what is going on in the world increases, there is still no clear cut solution, and as a person who likes to take action I find that sooooo irritating. After I read Ishmael I did some research on overpopulation, and found out that it is in fact deeply entwined with most of our political and environmental problems. Every cocky human being has that idea in the back of their head that if things get bad here we can always go somewhere else. If the Earth gets too fucked up we'll just move to Mars or something. Number one, it is not that easy. Number two, I like this planet, and number three, there has to be a solution. It just may not be as easy as the one of sitting back while the world gets destroyed a little more each day. We might each have to work for it as individuals.
Perhaps the first time we became aware of the overpopulation issue was in 1798 when Thomas Malthus predicted that our population would outrun our food supply, leading to a mass famine, but more than 200 years later we are still here. Our numbers are still booming. We have been both lucky and smart enough to find different ways to combat this problem, however the main way has largely been through deforestation in order to make way for more farmland. Over time our soil has been depleted of many of its nutrients, which means the vegetables we eat today do not have the same nutritional value that they had 20 years ago.
The greatest spurts in population growth tend to be seen in developing countries, such as many African nations and third-world countries such as India. This leads to war over scarce resources, lack of employment since there are not enough jobs to go around, crime, starvation, and disease. The more people there are, the more difficult it is to find clean water, and diseases are allowed to thrive. What I found to be particularly strange, was the trend in which citizens of countries who are more prosperous have less children than citizens of nations plagued by war and famine. As a result of this pattern many researchers have concluded that improving the way citizens are taken care of within a nation could help reduce the amount of children they have each year. This means the issue of human overpopulation could largely be solved by an increase in stable governments throughout the world who are able to bring peace to their nations. The general fertility rate of women also goes down when they are able to reach high places in society, and become educated about their own sexual health.
These two solutions must be used in conjunction with better farming techniques in areas throughout the world. This includes rotating the crops to prevent depletion of nutrients. Citizens of more prosperous countries, such as the United States, have to stop seeing water as something that just comes out of a faucet. We need to see it as a finite resource and learn to both appreciate it and conserve it the way those who have to walk miles each day just to bring a few buckets home to their families do. Conservation means more clean water, and more clean water means less disease. In addition, the more we conserve, the more food and water there is for all the other people we share our beautiful planet with.
It is reassuring to me that overpopulation is something that can be solved by helping other people live more stable and secure lives.
So how do you take action? You know I wouldn't leave you hanging without any ways to help!
To Do Your Research:
To Help Out :D :
Visit http://www.sraproject.org/opposing/ to learn how farmers can transition to environmentally friendly techniques and how you can make more informed decisions as a consumer
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-mission-and-the-movement/page.do?id=1101178 Amnesty International has a goal of providing basic human rights to everyone on the planet. As you just read not only is it important that every human is able to thrive in their own environment but it also helps to prevent overpopulation. One of their leading campaigns strives to prevent violence against women around the world. When women are no longer seen as second-class citizens, they are then able to make their own choices when it comes to sex and fertility.
http://www.unfpa.org/public/ This is the most important website out of all of these. Not only does it list the causes for overpopulation in detail but it also gives solutions and tells you how you can help! Check it Out!
As usual, I hope you learned something new and you share something good with the world because of reading this.
XO,
MIMI
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