I support family planning and birth control on a world-wide level. The study found below indicates what might happen should we allow births to continue to happen without planning and the picture is not pretty…
“Environmental scientists generally agree that the growth rate of the world’s human population and its current rate of consumption are unsustainable. For that reason, many researchers and policy-makers have called for family planning and birth control to slow growth in various countries.”
I saw that, interesting that the big killers of the 20th century hardly made a dent in population growth. OTOH, seems like if you educate women and give them access to birth control that more or less takes care of the having too many kids problem, but there’s a lot of “momentum” built up at the moment.
So when they say “unsustainable” doesn’t really just mean a sort of natural population control?
That’s what I’d assume, i.e. starvation to one degree or another on a much wider scale than today.
Starvation today has nothing to do with lack of food.
Exactly. We could feed the entire world easily enough if we cared BUT that would only encourage people to go out and have more kids, use more resources, go to war over water… It’s a vicious cycle that needs to end on a global scale. That would require some 21st century thinking from many of our older institutions and of course our politicians so expect nothing to happen.
Interesting graph. As far as i can tell the dip around 1960 was due to the Chinese Five Year Plan. anyhow the article accounted for those numbers and the expected change in birth rate
I’m sure if you go back 40, 50, 60 + years there were scientist that had us living in a Mad Max, Soylent Green world by now… this article worries me just about as little as “climate change”.
