Overpopulation: how to control it?

How about starvation.. Genocide... AIDS... Wars...


Oh wait.

We need to become more effective at living with nature, then over population wouldn't be a problem.

There is one method proved to work wherever it's used:
educate the women past grade 4 level.

The more educated the women of a country are, the fewer babies they have.

Back this up with good healthcare so you can expect your children to live, (good healthcare is cheap in countries where it's not taken over by the health insurance industry.)
Make sure this includes easily accessible contraceptives, sterilization and abortion.

Throw in aged pensions so the oldies don't have to rely on their children to support them in their old age, and a major motivation for having large numbers of children has gone.

Doing this for all 3rd world countries would most likely have been cheaper than the pointless war waged on Iraq, and virtually eliminated terrorism against America.


[edit on 4/12/09 by Kailassa]

As some on here have suggested, there is no such thing as "overpopulation." The earth will support people in a dynamic equilibrium and the population will be regulated by drought, famine, war, plague, natural disasters, and other such limiters. This regulation may be measured or catastrophic.
Modern science has had a great deal to do with the population boom of the last century. The fixation of nitrogen by the Haber ammonia synthesis process has allowed the earth to support almost twice as many people as it could without it.
What was unintended at the time is that the same process that feeds extra billions also allows production of munitions, uninhibited by limitations of natural nitrate deposits. War and its consequences effectively reduce populations. This same concept of unintended consequences may be at play in the genetic engineering of food crops outside of what would evolve from traditional breeding techniques.
The human race is self-limiting.

reply to post by pteridine


i agree with you most of the way, but don't you mean currently self limiting?

i believe that if we could get passed the hate and greed that is holding our species back, we would have unlimited potential for growth; particularly taking into consideration the prospect of colonizing planets comparable to our own.

There is no population problem. The problem is that people are herded into cities and environments that are deliberately constructed poorly and using technology that is long obsolete. Social Engineering solutions is not the answer. Natural and free living following Common Law only, is a much better solution.

The human race is self-limiting as it lives today. The fertility rate of all the industrialized nations has dropped to near or below replacement levels due to xenoestrogens and other pollutants pumped into the food supply and environment by our industries and factory farms. This reduces the fertility of males(sperm counts are down 60% over the past 50 years), creates effeminacy and gayness in men, creates estrogen dominance in women leading to polycystic ovaries and ovarian failure at early age as well as endometriosis. Couple this with the social factors such as the education of women, working outside the home for women, financial independence of women, social security decoupling the elderly from the traditional family and thus no one to rear the child while the parents work...you get what we see now in the west=depopulation. Were it not for the illegal alien and legal immigrant influx, we would have negative population growth in the US. We are exporting all of this to Asia and the rest of the 3rd world which will have the same effect due to the same pollution and environmental toxicity and their adopting out consumer culture. In 100 years, the worry will be about crashing populations, not overpopulation. Of course, AIDS and climate change will take care of Africa.

reply to post by JPhish


I believe that it is more than "current." Crowded cities and international trade helped spread the bubonic plague. Colonization by Europe and the US led to wars. Lack of empire caused Japan to twist the Bushido code into a manifesto for war. Nazi Germany needed 'liebensraum." Stalin made some nasty decisions that eliminated millions. The Irish potato famine was a result of a monoculture crop failure coupled with English landlords. Mayan and Incan civilizations seem to have suffered because of overdevelopment and sudden climatic change. Easter island inhabitants ran out of resources and died off. I am not a historian but there are many such events throughout history that will show that the human population [and the population of other species] is self limiting.

reply to post by LostInAMelody


Who's policy is Overpopulation Control?
Is there a think tank somewhere?

Subject: Responsibility

To all Honorable Humans of sensitivity, compassion, and logic, in truth you all are brothers and sisters. It perhaps comes "too-late" to issue this as a warning, for these events have already begun to unfold. WE have begun to Kill the Oceans of the Earth.

WE have caused the Extinction of so many Species in the Seas, in the Air, on the Land - Species we shall never see on this Earth again. WE have caused the Air, the Lands, and the Seas to become filled with so many different Toxins that more will die, the babies will die, people will die from horrible ways by numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

WE are responsible for all of this. So many among us have demanded the 'Material Happiness' at 'Any-Cost'. Now see what has resulted from the demands for more and more. Do WE kill the Earth for "just one more toy, new car" "for just one more thing?"

This Earth is our only Home, alone here in the vast Space. If Earth Dies, WE die with it, when life can no longer be sustained - WE become extinct. Prepare your GrandChildren, for most of them may be the last of the Human Beings.

The only hope in this, is to recognize that WE are self-responsible for the damage, and that WE are self-responsible for fixing the Damage. No one is going to come to our aid. The Galactic Federation will not seal that deep well belching toxic Hydrocarbons. The Extraterrestrials will not regulate our runaway Overpopulation. No Spacecraft will drop down with loads of trees to replant the forests. It's up to us. It's our Responsibility. WE have to fix the problems here ourselves.

The Earth’s population is plagued by famines, energy shortages, epidemics, environmental pollution, degeneration, terrorism, dictatorship, anarchism, slavery, excessive increase of waste materials, racial hatred, food shortages, destruction of rain forests, the “greenhouse effect”, pollution of lakes, streams and oceans, hatred towards asylum-seekers; radioactive emissions, chemical pollution of water, air, plants, food, human beings and animals.

Crime, murder, mass murders, manslaughter; alcoholism, hatred of strangers, oppression, hatred of one’s fellowman, extremism, sectarianism, drug addiction, overpopulation, annihilation of animal species, war, violence, torture and capital punishment, general mismanagement, water contamination, eradication of plant species; hatred, vice, jealousy, lovelessness, lack of logic, false humanitarianism, lack of housing, increased traffic, destruction of arable land, unemployment, the collapse of health care, the collapse of care for the elderly, destruction of nature, the collapse of solid waste removal, and the lack of living space, among others.

In spite of the many efforts, mankind’s problems are not decreasing but, instead, continue to rise steadily in direct proportion to population increases.

Mankind’s horrendous ills originate from and exist through overpopulation with its unrelenting, irresponsibly continuing escalation. The situation dictates that any ill can only be fought and remedied by grasping it by its roots, ripping it out and destroying it: The numbers of terrestrial humankind must be drastically reduced.

The only humane method by which this reduction goal can be achieved, is through stringent birth control regulations that permit married couples, of a predetermined age, to have only a strictly specified number of children.

You people who think that the Earth can support an endless number of people have to be stark raving mad.
You are asking the already living to change their life style to make room for more people. What's in it for us that we should make this sacrifice?

All of you have the fallacious argument that there are vast areas where they can live. Horizon to horizon housing development??

You are forgetting some things. You are not thinking your ideas thru.
The Earth's resources of Finite.
One of them is OXYGEN! We already have a problem in this area. Avialable Oxygen is down from 21% to about 19% in about 100 years. In Cities it may only be 18%.

Now then how do you plant to dispose of ordinary household gabage?
We cannot do it to day. Rotting garbage and all the chemical that people put in the garbage is polluting ground water.

WE are presently Unable to adequately dispose of human feces.
Sewage systems are running their gray water into nearby waterways.

ALL Earth's water is polluted with human feces and many harmful bacteria that humans excrete. Also there is a plethora of Prescription Drugs turning up in drinking water because water sources are drawn from areas polluted with human feces.

What's in YOUR drinking water? Ever have it analyzed?
Do any of you have a quick solution to this problem. You don't have much time. In another 10 years there may be 14 billion people on Earth, all pooping your drinking water.

Originally posted by muzzleflash
if im not mistaken ,
you can give an acre of land to half of the population of the USA and still probably have a little bit left over; thats how big texas is and how small our population is , respectivly

That is the most ignorant, thoughless, fallacious argument that you "poplation growth forever" folk keep parotting. No serious thought is ever put into it.

Why don't you take a few minutes and put yourself into that picture. See the landscape around you. What is the elevation? Is it hilly, is it swampy, is is flat. What kind of soil is there? Is it sandy, is it mucky, is it rocky? See your house, your yard, your work place, your shopping place, your power source, your water source, your garbage disposal sites, your sewage plants and their full operations. Where is the school, how many of them? Hospitals? Where will your food be grown?
Spend a day in your fanciful scene.

It's going to naturally peak at around 9 or 12 billion (can't remember, and too lazy to look for links) and then begin to naturally decrease - the main reason being that parents are have the privilege of knowing that they don't need to have 5-8 kids to know that 1 or 2 of their children will survive into adulthood and economic reasons of course (women are setting up carreers first) therefor parents are older and only have time to make 1 or 2 children.

There is just a lag.

We just have to wait for the older generations to die out.

VIDEO: Fred Pearce - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Fred Pearce, the author of the new book "The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet's Surprising Future," talked to Jon Stewart last night about his surprisingly optimistic view of the Earth's future. He explained that there has been a huge population decrease in the past generation: women today have half as many children as they did a generation ago. This phenomenon is happening all over the world, Pearce said, not just in developing countries. And this self-made population control is very good for our planet and for our species.

In the book, Pearce looks at the history of environmentalism and population control, and shows that while in the past countries like China have enforced state-run population control, now people are doing it on their own. Why is this good for our society? "If we have an older society, we'll have a wiser society," Pearce suggested. The 20th century, he said, was a "teenage century," but the 21st will be much more mature. "By 2040, we should have a stable population," he said.
VIDEO: Fred Pearce - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

[edit on 12/6/10 by ghostsoldier]