Population issues need to be tackled

COMMENT

Environmental campaigners are very terse when confronted with the issue of overpopulation. It is seen as a dangerous area to tackle. Interfering in people’s right to reproduce is seen as somehow tantamount to eugenics but the time is fast drawing near for this issue to come out from the shadows and bask in the glow of public debate.

Environmental campaigners are very terse when confronted with the issue of overpopulation. It is seen as a dangerous area to tackle. Interfering in people’s right to reproduce is seen as somehow tantamount to eugenics but the time is fast drawing near for this issue to come out from the shadows and bask in the glow of public debate.
The braver organisations such as the Optimum Population Trust, mostly through its patron David Attenborough, have advocated a “stop at two” campaign. However, most will run from the subject as though it is particularly virulent form of airborne plague, spread merely by mention.
Stated plainly, there are too many people on planet Earth. Stated more factually, there are more people demanding the kind of life enjoyed by people in the West for the Earth to sustain. Something has got to give and when it does, the results will be awful.
This seems like a terribly sweeping statement but I would prefer not to be able to write here that since I started writing this article the World Population Awareness website informed me that while population had increased by 60 people the number in acres of wild land that had been lost was 34. The ticking clock on their website is an eye-opener. It indicates a net loss of 1.6 acres of wild land per second and a net increase in human beings of 2.8 in the same time. This clock is always ticking. 
I find these figures terrifying and, viewed rationally, I believe most people will. Despite this fact, I do not in any way wish to seem as though I am advocating restrictions on people’s freedom to be follow their natural instinct to procreate, I am merely advocating rationality. Faced with these facts, we cannot continue to reproduce at the levels we are.
At this point in the argument there will usually be vocal dissent from those who say that it is only those in poor countries who have enormous families who sometimes number in double figures.
Certainly, the conception of large families in poor countries is a more common phenomenon now than it is in the West but there are very real socio-economic and practical reasons for this. If you are not guaranteed that your child will live past infancy, then of course you will have as many as possible because, in many cases, bitter experience will have taught you that simply having a child is not a guarantee of have having a son or daughter in 20 years’ time.
Similarly, if you live in a country where the lack of a social welfare system means you will depend entirely on your offspring in your years of inevitable decline, then you will do all you can to have as many as possible. It is not more than a generation or two since this was the reality in Ireland. Another factor we must not forget is the pernicious influence of various church groups, who remain far more influential in poorer countries with less educated populations. As they did in Ireland in years gone by, so they continue to do all over the world today. They condemn those who would use birth control based on blind doctrine and are ignorant of real consequences for real people.
Ironically, the approach of various religious groups to the distribution of condoms in the fight against HIV and AIDS has probably significantly decreased the world population in the last two decades but this is not a rational approach to the issue. We are all human beings. We may have different cultural practices by nature of our global positioning when we are born but this means nothing to us when faced with death. All over the world we grieve when faced with the death of those we love, we are driven to procreate, partially, by the fear of being alone.
As a rational, sentient group of people, should we not recognise that we need to prevent death among our number as a rule but also, by consequence of more easily preventing those deaths, reduce our number so as to best share the resources the planet is capable of providing?
Periodically, as I write this, I flick back and forth between this window and the Internet page which displays the population counter on the website of the Optimum Population Trust. To watch the number climb and climb endlessly is a sobering experience and dreadful when you realise that just as quickly another clock is ticking on some other site which is recording the painful, unnecessary deaths from preventable diseases or simple poverty.    
Every time that clock ticks a human being dies or is born. The joy or sorrow felt in most cases – I do not want to appear overly idealistic and not acknowledge that unwanted children are born or that people die alone and lonely all the time – is enormous. They are the beloved family members of somebody, somewhere.
The grief or joy felt by those who love the newborn or the departed is universally felt. In sharing the Earth we share a deep responsibility to protect it and to protect each other. Modern medicine can save and lengthen lives to an amazing degree and we have all the tools to ensure that population does not need to continue to spiral out of control in the way it is at the moment.
We can achieve this without infringing on anyone’s personal freedom to reproduce. Of course, all these facts make no difference in the face of disparities in the distribution of global wealth. Unless this base injustice and educational deficit is addressed we shall continue to see the global population grow at the incredible rate it is at present, bringing all the suffering it causes with it.
The Earth is a finite resource, it cannot be replenished, so when it does inevitably run out, our current behaviour will mean only there are more human beings here to die in the chaos.