World Population Growth
I am 60 years old. When I was born the total world population was 2.5 billion people. Now in 2009 the world population has grown to 7 billion.
When I was in college we learned about the population explosion and the ideas of the economist Thomas Malthus regarding the dangers of continued world population growth. I was a member of Zero Population Growth, and after my wife had one child I got a vasectomy.
Many people later thought that Malthusian Economics had been proven false by the “green revolution” which used large amounts of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers in agriculture; and large amounts of antibiotics in the meat supply. Now the various health and ecological dangers of the widespread use of all these chemicals is well known.
All over the planet supplies of fresh water are already being pushed to their limits. Providing the vast amounts of energy needed to continue the American and European standards of living is polluting the planet and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The energy usage and pollution coming from China and India will soon be greater than wasteful America. The consequences of global warming are hard for any of us to understand. Sea level rise, changes in climate. Who knows? But the results of the carbon binge mankind has been on since the industrial revolution began will surely be massive.
Forty years ago it was well known that in order to keep the world’s population within tolerable limits one of the most effective things was to provide education for women. And that birth control (such as condoms) needed to be readily available.
I am shocked and disappointed at how little humanity has learned in the last 40 years. The fundamentalist Muslims are growing, and their opposition to girls going to school is increasing. This week the Pope was in Africa, and he said that condom usage would make AIDS/HIV even worse. I can’t imagine this. He is a well educated, worldly wise man, and he comes out with something destructive like this.
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