Overpopulation Follow Up

I recently did a blog post on overpopulation and dystopias. When I saw a chapter on it in the book, I decided to do a follow up. There’s over seven billion people living on the planet and a net gain of 180 people per minute. This exemplifies the large positive growth rate. The two main causes of a country’s increase in population are an increased birth rate and immigration. Because immigration is the migration of people to a country, from another country, this doesn’t actually affect the world’s population like the increased birth rate. An increasing world population affects resources which harms both people and the environment. As our population grows, we take up more land, use more water, and our country becomes more industrialized which causes pollution. However, During the Deering Debate team practice, they talked about the Kuznet’s curve which shows that as developing countries progress, their population goes up. However they reach a point where it levels out and eventually goes down. So although industrialization causes pollution, modern technology is working to make things more environmentally friendly. However, I think we need to do more of this. Also, although the human population is increasing, many species are becoming extinct because of our unsustainable ways.

“Others argue that population growth does not necessarily undermine sustainability if we are able to limit our individual impacts on the planet and carefully manage our natural resources (119).” I chose this quote because it shows that although overpopulation is a major issue, especially in the sustainability issue, but we can still manage it. It just worries me that people aren’t working hard enough to do so.