OPINION

Population growth: A dangerous game of double jeopardy

Delaware Voice David C. Martin

After 150,000 years, human population reached 1 billion in 1804. Paralleling the rise of industrialization, population doubled by 1927, increasing by 50 percent to 3 billion in 1960. Six years ago, the 7 billion mark was reached, an increase of 133 percent in only 50 years.

Estimates place the population at 15 billion by mid-century. The explosion in population has strained our planet’s ability to sustain life, and it’s the main contributor to global warming. Every day 250,000 people are born, as world life expectancy increases. The problem may seem insurmountable, but the solution can be found in the one aspect that separates us from most other life: intelligence. The obvious intelligent solution is for limiting themselves to one or no children.

If we are to get a handle on population growth, free access to birth control must be offered to women in the developing world. However, the measures would prove meaningless without the eradication of poverty in at least 44 of the world’s poorest countries. Reducing and eliminating poverty can only be accomplished through universal access to education.

In addition, basic comprehensive healthcare, including reproductive health and family planning, and adult literacy programs must be initiated. Primary and secondary education, especially for girls, must be mandated along with the promise of breakfast and lunch during the school day. These programs will not come on the cheap, as an additional 100 billion dollars annually would be needed to what’s already being spent. But, if properly administered and funded, world population would peak by mid-century and decline to 1960’s levels by century’s end. This, along with international efforts combatting global warming, would lead to a renewed planet.

In 2006, the U.S. population passed 300 million, a 63 percent increase in less than 50 years. The news was cause for celebration within media outlets across the country, but the celebration will be seen as short-sighted. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders ran similar, yet disparate campaigns last year. Trump rallied against globalization and perceived unfair trade agreements, while Sanders rallied against the upper percentile of society which benefits from globalization. But one pined for the past while the other looked toward the future. The term “globalization” invokes negativity as it concerns American workers, but it’s an integral component in how American corporations conduct business and, despite Trump, it’ll remain integral. However, future American job losses will not be at an expense of foreign workers but due to the flowering Information Age.

Currently, we are only witnessing the tip of the iceberg as it concerns the uncertain future of the Information Age. Driverless motor vehicles will be a reality, robots will take the place of human workers in fast food restaurants, and they’ll be commonplace in the construction, landscaping and manufacturing sectors. White collar positions will also not be immune, office workers will find their jobs supplanted by computers.

Future implications: There may well be too many people seeking employment for the too little employment opportunities offered.

Our contemporary world consists of two co-existing yet contradicting realities – political reality, based on emotion, and physical reality, based on reason. The former consists of, quite naturally, politics but also economics, religion, and sociology, while the latter consists of philosophy and science. However, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, political reality has held sway – conventional wisdom dictating that population growth was synonymous with economic growth. One questioning said wisdom was not to be taken seriously, but we no longer live in the Industrial Age.

The prevalence of information technology in the developed world will not depend on economic growth. In the developing world, if population growth and its corollary global warming are not properly addressed, sea levels will continue to rise, desertification will expand, rivers and lake beds will dry up and grasslands will disappear, leading to the deaths of tens of millions annually from starvation and thirst.

There may come a time when having children for the sake of having children will be considered immoral.

David C. Martin is the founder of the Delaware Association for Humanism, and a member of the Delaware Coalition of Reason.