By Amelia Alexander
Recently, a lovely person who reads my work on the Icon sent me a thoughtful article. While the article was written over a decade ago, it is still relevant. It tackles open discourse about overpopulation.
I decided to relay my main takeaways and add some of my own thoughts and some other resources. I made sure to find more current statistics than those used in the article. The article is long and covers many more points than I will right now, so it may be worthwhile to check it out. Click here to read it.
The Problem: Overpopulation
We are using resources about twice as fast as they are able to be replenished in nature.
Our resources are dwindling, and other nations like India are facing the effects of this. The current population of India is 1.3 billion, while America’s population is about 331 million. Keep in mind that the United States is about three times bigger than India. This further puts into perspective the crowdedness of India.
India is also considered a developing, third world country, which explains why starvation is a major issue there. Although their economy has been improving in recent years, the problem still demands attention. In the report ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition’ conducted in 2020, it is estimated that 189.2 million people are undernourished in India.
I’d like to note that countries with a high fertility rate are not the only culprits of this dilemma.
Western cultures consume much more than developing countries. Obviously, consuming more resources also hurts the disproportionate ratio of people to resources.
This article explains in detail the comparison of India’s consumption compared to the consumption of the United States. (Click here)
Overpopulation and climate change
If you read the article linked above, you will see how the problem of overpopulation is closely related to climate change.
I’ve previously addressed what climate change is, and how quickly we are running out of our carbon budget. (Click here)
Climate change is a result of burning fossil fuels. Overconsumption perpetuates burning fossil fuels and harming our planet.
Many people are not worried about climate change because the damage it causes isn’t always associated with climate change itself. For instance, the Australian wildfires that we all painfully remember from last year are attributed to climate change. The ice and snow in Texas is another event that is likely attributed to climate change.
Many people do not understand that these extreme weather events are a manifestation of climate change, let alone how these extreme weather events relate to overconsumption and overpopulation.
A controversial history
It is clear that overpopulation causes many serious problems, yet it is not an issue that we talk about often. Overpopulation is a controversial issue to talk about because of the racist and sexist history of forced sterilizations and eugenics. Thomas Malthous and other philosophers/ economists blamed the poor for overpopulation, and instead of offering them resources, they let their children starve. This way, the population would control itself naturally.
A viable solution: empowering women
Letting innocent children starve is obviously not the most viable answer, so how can we solve this humanely? It turns out, offering women comprehensive sex-ed, contraceptives and education in general works. This way, women will have less children voluntarily.
Education and literacy in general empowers women to make their own decisions about when and if they are going to have children. In India in 2021, the literacy rate for men is 84.7%, and the literacy rate for women is 70.3%. This means that 1 in 4 women in India are illiterate. In places with a higher literacy rate, the birth rate is lower, and in places with a lower literacy rate, there are higher birth rates. Higher literacy rates also correlate to higher infancy survival rates.
In Kerala, only .7% of women are illiterate, and the birth rate is about 1.7 children/woman. In Bihar, where 26.8% are illiterate, the fertility rate is 3.2 children/woman. Click here. The correlation is obvious and provides a solution to lowering the fertility rate.
What can you do to help?
• Be an advocate for comprehensive sex-ed, birth control, and contraceptives.
• Be an advocate for women’s education.
• Make yourself aware of these issues, especially when the effects of the problem are more severe in other countries, especially as we are disproportionately responsible for the problem.
• Buy what you need and avoid wasting resources.
