Orange R

Population Boom

Jessica Roady, Staff Writer
March 20, 2012
Filed under Opinion

Seven billion. Seven billion lives, seven billion souls, seven billion minds, seven billion hearts. Seven billion views on right and wrong. Seven billion people inhabit our earth right now, and the world population is not showing any signs of stopping. We have experienced continuous growth since the Black Death, Great Famine, the Spanish Influenza, and both World Wars, whose combined death tolls are an estimated total of over 170 million. Pandemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic explosions, floods, and hurricanes do not seem to be able to faze us – and the next few centuries do not look any different.

In 1999, the world population surpassed six billion. Barely over a decade later, it passed seven billion. This alarming growth rate has demographers around the globe in a state of panic. With modern medicine making diseases and illnesses easier to cure by the day, the world population is only going to continue increasing exponentially. The most recent widespread disease, the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, barely even scraped a few thousand lives off the earth, hardly left the continent, and lasted less than a year. Smallpox, the Black Death, the Spanish Influenza of 1918, measles, and the Plague of the Justinian, the five deadliest pandemics in history, managed to wipe out 650 million lives in a joint effort, some only taking a couple of years to reach maximum effect. In comparison, the five deadliest natural disasters in history, the India Cyclone, the Shaanxi Earthquake, the Bhola Cyclone, and both of the Yellow River floods totaled at about 5.3 million deaths.

Clearly, tiny little viruses and bacteria seem to be more effective at mass destroying human life than cyclones, earthquakes, and floods. Maybe what we need is a good ol’ pandemic to weed out the weak and the elderly from our population. As morbid as that sounds, it is not too far from population control of animals – hunting season, rat killers, traps, you name it. Viruses have been the most effective methods of “population control” since the Peloponnesian War Pestilence in 430 BC that wiped out two thirds of all Athenians. Of course, it would have been more useful if it had wiped out the slightly less intelligent and more barbaric Spartans only a hop and a swim away, but on a purely demographic viewpoint it did the job.

Based on a cycle of roughly thirty years, epidemiologists (yes, they are actually people) and virologists (them too) say that we are overdue for our next pandemic. Like wildfires in the forest, contagious diseases thin out the woods of our populace in a destructive yet efficient matter. Forests will get too overgrown and prevent new life from budding without brushfires, and people are the same way. If our resources are constantly expended on old life, we will not have enough for the next generation, and even less for the next, and the next, and so on and so on.

To add on to this massive population issue, several countries are now trying to ban contraceptives, or at least place very heavy taxes on them. Many people have expressed the theory that countries ruled by governments with heavy religious influence are usually the ones that move to ban contraceptives, and this does seem to be true. Many Catholic and Protestant churches strongly condemn both contraception and abortion; however, there are hardly any administrations globally that govern with a heavy Catholic or Protestant influence. Even our own country is planning on placing more control over contraceptive use. Although there should be a direct relationship between the number of people worldwide and availability of contraceptives, there seems to be an inverse one – the more we populate, the less countries wish to make contraception easy to access and afford.