Posted on 06/14/2011 10:44:04 PM PDT by TheDingoAteMyBaby
Perhaps one of the most persistent and pervasive myths that have shaped the thinking of many people and, subsequently, public policy is the myth that the world’s population is spiraling out of control and that it will ultimately lead to catastrophic shortages of the essential resources necessary to sustain life.
This whole concept of “overpopulation” can be traced to Thomas Malthus, the British scholar and Anglican clergyman (albeit a very misguided one) who, without any specific knowledge other than his own speculations, predicted in 1789 that the planet’s rapid increase in population would soon outstrip the planet’s ability to produce food, resulting in massive worldwide starvation.
Malthus’s predicted famine never materialized, of course; he could not have predicted the industrial revolution or the enormous impact subsequent technological innovations would have on our ability to produce food. Recall that today our federal government actually pays farmers not to grow crops due to the abundance of food produced on considerably less farmland than existed just a century ago.
Even the United Nations, historically a rabid advocate of population control, has conceded that the world’s current infrastructure is capable of supporting a worldwide population of more than 9 billion people.
Furthermore, according to the most recent estimates, the planet’s population will most likely continue to climb from its current level until 2050, when it will peak at 9 billion; other predictions have the world’s population peaking at 7.5 billion in 2040. In either case, global population levels will begin a sharp decline sometime during the middle of the twenty-first century. Present fertility rates actually indicate a massive underpopulation crisis is coming, particularly among Western nations.
The question of overpopulation is not merely a topic for conversation; it is a burning matter of policy and action at the local, national, and international levels. Our national government is actually committed by law and by international agreement to reducing the worldwide rate of population growth.
Government officials, such as former Assistant Secretary of State for Global Affairs in the Clinton administration, Timothy Wirth, insist that this effort must also apply to the population of the United States. Wirth, as you may recall, was at the center of controversy when the Clinton administration decided to deport 13 Chinese women who sought asylum in the United States to avoid forced abortion under communist China’s notorious one-child policy.
By offering asylum to these women, Wirth explained, “we could potentially open ourselves up to just about everybody in the world saying ‘I don't want to plan my family, therefore I deserve political asylum.’” Apparently, Wirth believes government-forced abortions and sterilization constitutes “family planning.”
Today, there are governments that compel their citizens to undergo sterilization and abortions, often with financial help from the United Nations and U.S. government-supported private agencies such as Planned Parenthood.
Motivated in part by the overpopulation myth coupled with Darwinism, Margaret Sanger, who in 1934 was the founder of the American Birth Control League (which later became Planned Parenthood), advocated contraception and abortion as means of “negative eugenics” in order to limit the population of what she termed “the lower races.” (Positive eugenics was the form employed by the Nazis in their attempt to eradicate the Jewish people.)
For this reason Sanger opposed helping the poor. Humanitarianism and philanthropy, she wrote merely “perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents.… These dangers are inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste.” This same sentiment was common to Darwin and his early advocates, who saw Christian compassion as counterproductive to “natural selection” and human evolution. Recall the original full title of Darwin’s now-famous work, On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Frankly, if one wants to be consistent with evolutionary theory, one is compelled to think this same way and not borrow from Christian morality and ethics, as these have no logical place in the naturalistic worldview. Darwin very clearly understood this fact.
Ironically it was Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population that had a profound impact on Charles Darwin and proved instrumental in the development of his theory of evolution. Darwin attests to this in his autobiography:
In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work.
The myth of overpopulation first put forth by Malthus, coupled with Darwinian theories that promote propagation of the “fit” and reduction of the “unfit,” has been instrumental in legitimizing abortion, forced sterilization, government subsidized contraception, and, in the most extreme cases, eugenics as practiced by the Nazis and others. (The term eugenics-meaning “good births”-was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Eugenics, he believed, would encourage more children from the fit, and fewer or no children from the unfit, with the ultimate goal of engineering the evolutionary ascent of man.)
In every case these false notions undermine God’s commandment to “multiply” and further serve to undermine the intrinsic value of every human as being made in the image of God.
I get 4.89 square feet.
The world’s population could live in the state of Texas if you grouped everyone in families of 4, with 75 acres, and a 1500 square foot house.
6.92 billion people in 268581 square miles is over 40 per acre, so if they were grouped in families of 4, every family would have 1/10 of an acre.
Overpopulation of the world is a lie ...
In my lifetime I have seen many negative effects of the increase in population. I'm surprised that you haven't noticed any.
So each person gets an area approximately 33 feet by 33 feet to live on. Plenty of room!
My bad.
The square foot space is right for 4 square feet is less than 4.89 square feet.
You are right on the acreage. 1/10 of an acre would be about right.
When I was a teen 84% of Maine was woods. Now it is about 86% thus the impact of population ‘growth’ has been miniscule here - although I have lived in Boston, Manila and on Oahu where it seemed crowded.
While living in the city I would dream of the Maine woods.
From what I have seen the negative effects of ‘growth’ has not been from overpopulation as much as misuse.
I would be happier if we had fewer people and less crowding.
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Going outdoors shouldn’t be a travel trip.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. You expect to open your front door and see wilderness? You don't want to walk/drive to a park/green space in your town? Move to the Arizona desert area if you like the heat. People tend to clump. There were ancient cities that had as many people as some of our largest cities. If you really want to get away from it all, when President Palin reinstates NASA's real mission, there will be a moon or Mars colony. You can live in the pristine lunar landscape with out being bothered by the rest of us.
Prophetic words. We opened the door and... “The thief comes inside. The Bandits raid outside. Now their exploits surround and encircle them.” (Hosea 7:1-2)
You realize why that is, I hope.
Most people, rationally, travel from city to city along the interstate highways.
For equally logical reasons businesses tend to cluster along those highways, while towns and roads away from them tend to stagnate or fall back in population.
Even in our most populous states, such as CA or FL, there are still large areas that are almost deserted. For instance, take the Florida Turnpike north from the coast to Orlando. Almost nothing along the entire 100+ miles but cows.
Similarly I-5 in CA from Stockton to Bakersfield, not even in the real desert, is very much like driving across Wyoming.
If you fly from coast to coast, long stretches across the western US there is nothing to see below except an occasional road. No houses, no towns.
IOW, you choose to live and drive where everybody else chooses to live and drive, then complain that it's too crowded. I agree with you, BTW, but I at least recognize that it's my choice to go where all the people are. You or I have the choice to go where there are very few other people.
Freepmail me and I'll be glad to send you some suggestions.
marker
I do believe that out of control Leftist, Liberal, Socialist, Progressive, Communist policies will ultimately lead to catastrophic shortages of the essential resources necessary to sustain life because of their proclivity to discourage entrepreneurship, work and creativity.Cases in point:
Nearly all the famines in Africa are the direct result of government policy, even those that are touched off by drought.
The federal government buying up land, then limiting usage and denying human access also increases the “overpopulation” feel. Around a quarter of the country is no-go, no-graze, no-farm, no-mine. It makes the rest of the land feel over-crowded.
You should try reading my post for your answers.
You are talking to one of the best travelled in America people that you could know, I have been travelling this country in every mode of transportation for 55 years, I have lived in many, many states, I was what used to be called a drifter for much of my life, I even lived for years as the classic drifter as a hitchhiking traveler with no destination, living on odd jobs and such, all the time seeing the nation from close up, back roads, Interstates, and everything in between. The majority of my life has been spent in the west and southwest, I am well aware that from a plane, there is vast amounts of empty space.
The reason America appears overcrowded to me is that it is, more than doubling our population in my life time has been a setback for the quality of life here.
When I was a youth and our schools taught American, they taught us about the over populated hell holes of the world, like India and China, (The United States was a distant third in population at the time) now we are approaching what those nations populations were at that time.
Personally I liked America better a 100 or even a 150 million people ago.
Don’t disagree. Merely pointing out that much of the perception of population density is because those who decry it choose to hang out where everybody else chooses to hang out.
A great deal of the country is less densely populated than 50 or 100 years ago. I have backpacked through areas of Utah and Colorado where miner’s and homesteader’s abandoned cabins are common. Nobody lives there anymore. Same for the Ozarks of MO and AR, only more so.
My parents both grew up in Kansas. Their hometowns are today more or less ghost towns. Nobody wants to live there anymore.
The country has become at the same time both more densely populated and the population more concentrated than it used to be.
Overpopulation is not really about empty space versus open spaces, there will always be vast open spaces, even if we have 50 billion people in the world.
Using very rough, very general numbers, we can say that the American population stabilized at about 200 million in 1970 or so, the 1965 Immigration Act destroyed that stability that our native population had reached.
To me 150, or even 200 million people was all that we ever needed, yet with all those people we still could maintain a high quality of life in our cities and in the resources close to our cities, back then we did not have to travel for hours to reach the outdoor activities. As I said earlier, even in big cities we knew each other, didn’t need keys and locks and our communities were manageable, today most Americans lives more resemble organized farm production type lives.
In 1970 I thought that we were headed to be something like I imagine Switzerland is, a clean, peaceful combination of city and country, a population that is calm, united, that rather than being forced to constantly focus on survival and keeping the machine from collapsing, that we would actually become more advanced and futuristic, and advanced. I saw more refinement of our urban public space, urban forests, the conquest of outer space and the oceans, not that we would be crushed as bureaucrats struggled to manage an ever growing mass of humanity and the paving over of massive regions to accommodate them, and the necessity of the state having to takeover regional resources to deal with the water and sewage needs of the people farms to keep production humming and riots from breaking out.
There will always be enough land, food and water, but that doesn’t mean that there are not too many people.
Get to the proper southwest. There’s tons of room. I’ve never lived anywhere in Tucson that was more than a mile from a park. Fishing might be a bit tough to find this being the desert and all, hunting and camping aren’t tough at all. Lots of room to breath.
Most of the folks who think there’s no room to breath in this country are stuck in the corridors. If you travel from Tucson to any other city except Marana or ail (which are suburbs of ours) you’ll find yourself quite literally in the middle of no where in short order. The hundred miles from Tucson to Phoenix is about 80 miles of pure dull empty desert.
I’m from Texas, live in Southern California now, own a house in New Mexico where much of half my family lives, my dad lived in Arizona off and on as an older man and as a young ranch hand, my mother and father met when they lived in New Mexico where they spent much of their youth, my uncles owned ranches and businesses in New Mexico, I have lived in Arizona, and New Mexico, I have spent much of 55 years living, working, and travelling in the region, I even used to cut timber close to 4 corners, I know the Southwest, I remember the Southwest and the Indians of the 1950s, something that most Americans never got to see. I know about open spaces, how many times do I need to post that?
The post I replied to made it sound like you don’t think there is any open space. if you don’t want people thinking that then don’t say it.
Following up on this, and to clear up some things.
Texas has 261,797 square miles of land area
1 square mile = 27,878,400 square feet, so
Texas has 7,298,481,484,800 square feet of land area.
Divide this by 3000 ft lots,
This gives us:
2,432,827,161 1500 sqft homes on 3000 sqft lots with 756,078,873 houses still empty
The world population is 6,775,235,700 / 4 = 1,693,808,925 households of 4 people each
So this gives us:
2,432,827,161
1500 sqft homes on 3000 sqft lots with 756,078,873 houses still empty
or 81,361 sq miles of open land for streets
So we can put the entire world’s population in the state of Texas with 4 people in a 1500 sqft home on a 3000 sqft lot.
And that leaves over 81,000 sq miles still open.
And of course, the entire rest of the world is free to grow food, have industries, etc.
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