I do feel that we should be more responsible in controlling our population. But, it won’t
happen. Since the population would grow at the current rate for the next 50-100 years, the
world will soon be unable to provide food for the total population. Not to mention the
other problems which occur due to overpopulation of an area. We can conclude (hopefully)
that soon, some population control will probably be needed to lessen these problems.
In an era of changing climate and sinking economies, Malthusian limits to growth are back
and squeezing us painfully. Whereas more people once meant more ingenuity, more talent
and more innovation, today it just seems to mean less for each. Less water for every cattle
herder in the Horn of Africa. (The United Nations projects there will be more than four
billion people living in nations defined as water-scarce or water-stressed by 2050, up from
half a billion in 1995.) Less land for every farmer already tilling slopes so steep they risk
killing themselves by falling off their fields. (At a bit less than six tenths of an acre, global
per capita cropland today is little more than half of what it was in 1961, and more than 900
million people are hungry.) Less capacity in the atmosphere to accept the heat-trapping
gases that could fry the planet for centuries to come. Scarcer and higher-priced energy and
food. And if the world’s economy does not bounce back to its glory days, less credit and
fewer jobs.