Population Pressures?

[Marian]

On another forum I frequent this topic came up, in regards to developments in medicine that allow people to choose the gender of their children (it is possible now to screen before implantation for gender, as well as other genetic issues [CF, etc])

And the discussion turned to China (with their one child per couple laws) as well as India (with the desirability of male offspring rather than female and infancticide)...and the issue of population pressures came up.

Some 'truisms' were mentioned, such as the population being wildly out of control and doom and destruction in the near future if controls aren't taken NOW or soon!

And I thought...well geez, I've heard this quite often. I live in Southern California, and while there has been a lot of development (with land) lately, there are still HUGE tracts of land available. I look out my window as I type this at the mountains of the San Angeles National Forest, and see vast areas of undeveloped land.

How true is population pressure? And where? And what causes?

I'm not trying to be lazy in foisting off these questions on to other people, I'm just extremely curious. Also, doesn't 'nature' pretty much resolve those issues? Without sounding horribly callous, if too many people exist in an area, and resources cannot sustain those people, starvation pretty much starts to pick them off. And when people are starving, disease isn't too far away. It seems to be a problem that resolves itself, to a large degree.

I also did a debate (a million years ago...okay actually around 1989) in high school where I looked up some statistics. I went to a Catholic high school and was forced to take the pro-choice side of a debate. (If I wanted to participate). Which was no biggie, since I had argued other issues for debate that I didn't necessarily espouse. Anyway, population control was one of the pro-choice arguments, and I looked up statistics (and I cannot recall the sources, though if anyone really wants them I can try to locate them again) which showed that there was enough food being produced currently (in the 1980s) to feed the world 3 times over on a 'western' based diet (high in meat/protein), and 7 times over on an 'eastern' based diet (lower in meat).

And that the problems of starvation were merely a distribution problem. (Not merely, that was beyond understating it).

Anyway, I'm not sure that a 'population pressure' problem exists. And if so, to what degree and WHERE it exists. And I wonder why this is such a pervasive truism. I plan on reading up more on it on my own, but thought perhaps others had some thoughts on this.

Also if this has been previously discussed, my apologies, I couldn't find a thread that had this issue. (Or if this is the wrong forum, etc.)

 

[Bikewer]

I don't have any recent statistics, but I do listen to the various pundits on NPR all day long and such.
By all accounts, worldwide population growth is slowing, and the major crisis that was predicted only 20 years ago or so does not seem likely.
Massive starvation problems do seem to be much more the case of mismanagement, natural disaster (like drought), and politics.

The problem with increased population growth, and the rising standard of life in populous countries like China and India, is going to be pollution.
Already, the most fertile portions of the oceans are being threatened by industrial and agricultural runoffs in developed nations. The Chinese are rushing hell-bent into an industrial economy. The Indians seem to be making some effort to dodge industrialization and go directly to an information economy.

Despite the cheery attitudes of a rather small group of scientists and researchers, the bulk of people in these fields are painting a rather gloomy picture of the future.

 

[Dancing David]

We are definitly altering the planet, some parts of the planet have reached a population that can not be sustained, but there is so much arable land in the US, we can way past a billion. Not a quality of life I would want but still feasible.

 

[evilgoldtoesock]

Recently read in a Discover Magazine article that there is new contraceptive being developed that could be administered like a vaccine. Umm, if you'll pardon the analogy, that seems to be a good potential cure for the problem of over-population.

In all seriousness, however, I think that we can succesfully learn to regulate our population. As long as contraceptives continue to improve and become more widely available, I believe we won't have to worry about over-flowing the planet any time soon.

 

[Atlas]

I seem to remember someone, not too long ago saying that it's a question of population density. I think I've got this right... If you look at the population density of someplace likle Manhattan and extrapolate, you could put the world's population on the Italian peninsula.

His point was that if you could disregard the psychological pressures of a densely packed urban city the world had plenty of space to house the population which would free up land for farming to feed them all as well as to keep many areas wild and pristine.

I was feeling lazy but I just decided to look it up to see if the the guy was making sense.
<blockquote>According to the United States Census Bureau, New York County (the Borough of Manhattan) has a total area of 87.5 km² (33.8 mi²). 59.5 km² (23.0 mi²) of it is land and 28.0 km² (10.8 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 32.01% water.

Manhattan is one of the five boroughs that form the City of New York. The borough is coterminous with New York County. As of 2000, the population comprised 1,537,195 persons.</blockquote> About 4000 Manhattans would house 6 billion people. Tha area of Italy is a little over 300,000 km²

Depending if you use just the land mass or the entire area you get do get that 300,000 (give or take 60,000).

Anyway, it seems to suggest that with proper human management the world could sustain alot more than 6 Billion.

 

[Peskanov]

Mariam, it seems to me that you underestimate the consequences of overpopulation.
You suggest that nature deals with those problems with starvation and plague. Well: I don't know why do you think that's less doomy than a scenary of destruction; I have know some people who survived Spain's civil war, and I get the impression that they suffered more in the following famines than they did in the war.
It's important to acknowledge that our production of food is largely dependent on modern technology, the petrochemical industry and mechanization made it possible. This is important because we don't know what would happen if we slip back to previous level of production. OTH we don't know if future production will be even higher than now.
A few decades ago, bad weather and plagues could easily lead to a nation starving (remenber the Irish famines).
Another consequence of overpopulation is the fast consumption of limited resources. Oil is an alarming example, but there are much more. Coal will not last forever, radioactive minerals are also quite limited, etc... The list of limited resources we use is large.
In resume: current population is larger than ever. We don't know how much can it grow, and we don't know if there are resources to allow a good quality of life for all.
In this situation I feel that the only sensible stance is being contrary to population grow.

 

[The Don]

A lot of this was summarised in a P J O'Rourke essay entitled "too many of you, just enough of me" in which he opined that there wasn't an immediate problem of overcrowding from a global perspective but that there are loaclised issues.

The problem appears to be one of comparative wealth. "Rich" countries can sustain high population densities with relative comfort (Of course it may be that the ability to support high population densities has enabled the country/region to become rich).

You could therefore chose to argue (if you wished to and ignored local factors such as weathers, wars and corrupt leaders) that the reason that the world is locally "overpopulated" is that highly populated first world countries are holding other countries hostage and/or retarding their development (to maintain a market for manufactured goods) and as a result lowering their supportable population density.

To put it another way "Whitey, it's up to you how many people the land can support".

 

[pupdog]

It's certainly not a question of how many grapefruit you can pack in a crate. There has to be enough land available for water, food production, mineral extraction, waste disposal, transportation and resource distribution, &c. And that means there must also be enough land available for the biological and geochemical cycles to operate. When you see those "huge tracts of land available"--can you go out there and build a house, cut lumber, dig minerals without someone coming around with a shotgun to chase you off? I wouldn't recommend building a refinery within the contributing area of a municipal well field.

The tough question is what really is the carrying capacity with respect to Homo sapiens.

 

[KAW143]

The tough question is what really is the carrying capacity with respect to Homo sapiens.

Well, at the risk of sounding overly ... well, *something*, isn't the question more "what is really the *caring* capacity with respect to homo sapiens"? Overpopulation concerns are often brought up in reference to *other* peoples, but rarely with respect to our own. "Our three and a half children are just fine, but those poor people just keep breeding and breeding. Why in China its so bad, they cannot have more than two kids, anymore!" Great. Another problem that is "theirs". I hear people talking about overpopulation; yet, they can look around themselves and admit that there isn't a problem within their eyesight. Further, these claims have been put forth for over a hundred years, now, (and I will need to check my reference, on that one. My recollection was that an economist in the late 1800s predicted that the population would grow exponentially while the food supply would not. The effect is actually named after him, as is the resultant theory, but I cannot wrest it from my feeble widdle mind, just now.) and have never come to pass.

I have also heard people point to Lemmings as proof that populations sometimes grossly overgrow their resources; yet, the film upon which that assertion is based, "White Wilderness", I believe, produced by the Walt Disney Studios, was later shown to have been fabricated. . . .

Honestly, the evidence of the past would suggest that the world will be just fine. We aren't all dead, yet. . . . That, at the very least, suggests that there is hope. . . .