The Population Bomb was not on my list, but it was suggested to my last week and I read it while at the airport. The book discusses the serious need for humanity to regulate its population, otherwise we will destroy ourselves. The author, Paul Ehrlich, traces the root of humanities problems to population. There is a particularly powerful passage towards the beginning of the book that I would like to share.
"It has been estimated that the human population of 6000 B.C was about five million people, taking perhaps one million years to get there from two and a half million. The population did not reach 500 million until almost 8,000 years later- about 1650 A.D. This means it doubled roughly once every thousand years or so. It reached a billion people around 1850, doubling in some 200 years. it took only 80 years for the next doubling, as the population reached two billion people around 1930... the doubling time at present seems to be about 37 years."
The doubling of the population means we must make twice as much food, provide twice as many people education, etc. There is a large body of sociologist and other social science researchers that are looking for quantitative fixes to these types of problems. They are looking for a standardized method to feed, teach, clothe, and raise hundreds of thousands of children. Nowhere is this more apparent then in China and India. Where populations that are closing in on 1.5 billion people stretch the limits of national and local resources. Perhaps it is because I have a Confucian ideology, but I cannot see how this is an "Indian problem", or a "Chinese problem." It is a human problem.
China right now has a middle class of about 300,000 people (the size of America), this number will surely increase drastically in the next several decades. The world is struggling to support the insatiable appetites of Western consumers, and it is failing. Yet despite this, in America, India, and China, we are raising children to desire even more than what is available now. What I fear most is a future where Chinese and Indian consumers begin to ask aloud WHY can't we have the things americans have. And America will no longer be able to talk about money, wealth, or economies, because these nations will have worn down their people and resources so much that they have the money. Without this excuse the only thing America will have left to say is this " These things are ours, we do not want to give them to you." And China and India will realize that what they had been told a century earlier about the economic game was a lie. It was not about fairness, but about greed, and they will be enraged, and there will be war.
And before you begin to label or judge what i have just said, please seriously consider what I am about to say. Please think of the luxuries you delight in. Things from as obvious as I-phones to transparent as the ability to take baths or multiple showers in one day. There is a limit of these things, even water. It is hard to see it, because for so long the ability to purchase these high luxuries has been solely ours. Now, if you lived in a world where you could not have these things because you could not out buy the competition would you accept that? Would your parents be ok with giving up their standard of living? Mine would not. I have asked them.
The other day I was at the airport. I saw a family traveling with 3 sons, many of my friends want to have 2 or 3 children, simply because that was how they grew up. We do things out of habit or because of symbolic meaning we have created, but I think we should do more because of necessity. I am not saying people should not be parents, but why can we not extend the definition of a parent. Make the parent not just the biological father and mother, but the community as well. Why do my children need siblings to bond with instead of neighbors. I would love to have several children, but I also want them to love the world they grow up in.
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