Over the years, parabolic population growth has become an imminent global issue. From the early dawn of men all the way to 1800 A.D, we reached the number of 1 billion people.
Then, astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population in 1920s. Even more terrifying, the population was again doubled to four billion in the 1970s. Soon enough, we’ll reach 8 billion. A study said the ideal number of population is 4 billion people. Supported by the facts such as global warming and world hunger, it is clear that the world can’t keep up with our current situation. In other word, overpopulation may cause war, plague, drought, and famine.
The first destruction that overpopulation will cause is war. When all the resources have gone, when there’s no more space for everyone to live in a house, and most importantly, when everybody realizes that it is too late, the world will plunge into a state of total panic. And if the fathers are desperate, they would do absolutely anything to feed their children. Imagine that we go back to Stone Age when only the fittest can survive, What makes us differ from them is that we don’t fight with sticks and stones but rather with guns and grenades, or even with nuclear. The rich won’t have any safe place to hide, for their safe houses have already been ransacked. The weak won’t be able to hide behind their human rights because everyone is fighting for their human rights, which is to live. To start, we already have gone through some wars to fight for resources, for instances the war for tea, for cotton, for oil, for land, and even the WWII was for commodities. While the Earth’s resources are declining, we keep adding more people to drain it.
The second destruction is spreading diseases. It’s well known that new kinds of diseases have sprung up recently. For example, the HIV and Ebola virus. Both are incurable yet and have a relatively high death rate. National Geographic said that if one day the Ebola Virus were to be spread worldwide, it might be doomsday. Apparently, these diseases may as well be caused by nature’s tendency to balance itself. The Black Death in Europe is a great example. It reduced world population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in the 14th century, devastating one-third of European and two-third of Chinese who traveled there. Despite the dreadful event, the Renaissance era was born. True to its name –new life- The European had a lot better time than in the Dark Age.
In the 18th century, Thomas Robert Malthus said, “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man”. Furthermore, in Dan Brown’s Inferno, Dan Brown released this chart.
The third is worldwide famine. In 2010, The UNFAO estimates that 239 million people in sub-Saharan Africa were hungry or undernourished, second only to Asia, principally due to the much larger population of Asia when compared to sub-Saharan Africa. In the last 50 years, African populations have skyrocketed from 221 million people to 1 billion people.
In short, overpopulation will cause severe global issue from war, plague, drought, famine, and maybe even things beyond our imagination. Now that our time is running short, all is lost unless we take drastic measures soon.
By : Erson Rasyadan
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