Title: Overpopulation
General Purpose: Give the facts about overpopulation.
Specific Purpose: Present factual and current information on overpopulation and ways that can help fix the problem and how we really shouldn’t worry too much about it.
Thesis Statement: In my more recent Geography courses, we’ve discussed overpopulation and the many issues that surround it. In my own research I have learned that although it is a very negative thing and needs to be regulated, it is not something that I believe needs to be number one on the list of problems to tackle.
Introduction: The United Nations estimates 1 week, the Census Bureau puts it in March sometime, but either way the world is hitting a milestone of 7 billion people. The first billion was slow to happen and took until the early 1800s. The second billion took another 120 or so years, we reached three billion in 1959, four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, and six billion in 1998. Now it’s 2011 and we’ve reached 7 billion and by the end of the 21st century we are expected to add another three billion. This is all happening during our life time as well. We will be in out mid to late 50’s by the time the world population is expected to reach 10 billion.
Body: Let’s back track a little…
- Thomas Malthus, was an English Clergy man and one of the first advocators for population control.
- He published is Theory in 1798 in a pamphlet called “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” In it he stated that “population would inevitably exhaust food supplies.” To fix this problem he wanted to limit human reproduction among the poor.
- People today who share Malthus’s perspectives are called Neo-Malthusians and predict a population doomsday. Basically, growing human populations with their potential to exhaust Earth’s resources pose the most dangerous threat to the environment.
- These beliefs do have some truths behind them. We humans are depleting natural resources like water, forests, and extinction of plant and animal species. We are polluting the air, water, and soil, which effects the food that we eat. If we continue to destroy these resources that we need to survive it could be very possible that there will be another plague or wars over the resources, which would have major affects on the world population.
Coming back to the here and now…
- The average number of children in 1950 was 5, it’s now 2.5. It’s good that this number has gone down, but the population is still rising because those 2.5 adults are having 2.5 children each.
- The world’s growth rate has dropped from 2.2% in the 1960’s to 1.1%.
- There are more than 800million people worldwide that live in slums, so it comes as no surprise that in 2008 there were 33 million unplanned pregnancies, most likely from a lack of education and family-planning recourses in these poor people’s lives.
- Having both men and women educated on birth control and the choices to use them or not has been successful in many countries, especially to those living on the island of Mauritius which in 24 years (1962-1986) has lowered their total fertility rate from 5.8-1.9.
- Although contraceptives give men and women choice, in some countries they still choose to have more children. Niger has had free contraceptives since 2002. In 2006 women, who marry at age 15, wanted 10 children. In 2010 women wanted 7 children. This goes to show that to decrease population more needs to be done then just handing out contraceptives.
- Some countries create laws to regulate family size, like China, and this works for them but in America there would be another revolutionary war if our government started to tell us how many children to have.
- A more drastic approach to population control is compulsory sterilization, which countries like Sweden, Puerto Rico, Germany, and India have tried, but it doesn’t seem to work too well.
- Education seems to be the best route in lowering population. Countries like Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Cuba have lowered their birth rates through increasing access to social resources such as health care and education, particularly for women.
- Globally, women who have access to education and employment tend to have fewer children because they have less of a need for the economic security and social recognition that children are thought to have, especially in poor countries. For instance, women from Senegal with no education have an average of 7 children. A woman with 10 years of education have an average of 3.6 children.
Industrialization of countries:
- The Demographic Transition Theory
- Graphs
Conclusion: According to the United Nations current data, the world populations will peak in 25 years (2036), but after it peaks it will start to go down and by the end of the century we’ll be losing 1 billion people every 20 years. This year we hit 7 billion and in 75 more years we’ll hit it again.
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