We saw the movie ‘Contagion’ this week. It seemed pretty realistic although probably understated some aspects (breakdown of supply of food electricity petrol water computer networks).
Viruses are one way populations collapse when they are in plague proportions.
Another is the rise of predator species. I don’t usually worry much about aphid outbreaks on my roses because they are soon followed by a rise in predator species that bring their numbers right down again.
Destruction of the resources essential to produce food and water are an obvious way that populations can end their days. Using up the arable soil turning it into desert or simply denuding it so that it is vulnerable to blowing away all mean that our food supply is going to be harder and harder to grow.
Using up our sources of readily available energy is another way to make it much harder for us to sustain our lives or many people. We can cut down all the trees use up all the easily accessible oil and in quite a short time also use up all the coal and uranium too.
But none of this makes it any easier to decide at a personal level what to do about it.
We are designed at the very deepest level to want to mate and reproduce. It is the most fundamental of drives the boy meets girl romance.
A large proportion of our consumption when young is to impress a potential mate or to provide a home for and raise a family.
We neither want to be involved in aborting large numbers of our unborn children nor denying to young people the hope of eventually becoming parents.
Children are and have always been the hope of the future. They are the reinvigorators of the species the ones whose work will literally create the future world. They have only the present world to work with and it is in a sorry state.
People who limit the number of children they have can be quickly outnumbered by those who have large families.
Even as a nation if we aren’t overpopulated people from countries which are overpopulated and which have high birth rates will attempt to come here one way or another. They aren’t very receptive to the argument that this is our country and we don’t want it over-populated.
How do you limit the number of people? Birth control to be effective needs to keep being done. Even in the face of doomsday global population scenarios some people are encouraging families to have more children. In Australia we even pay them to do so!
The children who are born today are very unlikely to have access to enough food and resources to survive what we now think of as a full life term and they may face extremely harsh conditions including wars for resources and genocides and starvation and poverty and contagious diseases.
Overpopulation is as much about not dying as it is about babies being born. The success of public health and food supply and medicine are also the seeds of our problem. Our longer lives are healthy and happy but we are part of the world population explosion simply because we live rather than die.
There is a very real sense that if we don’t control the world’s population voluntarily it will be done involuntarily.
Another possibility is that self-interested elites will attempt (and may be doing so) to engineer the demise of a large proportion of the global population while avoiding the same fate themselves. A modern-day eugenics that would make Hitler horrified.
I suspect there is only one answer and that is what nature will finally deliver with absolute ruthlessness.
Population is the elephant in the room the ultimate root of all the problems we are facing together. Today as we count down to 7 billion people on the planet let us reflect on what it means.