Environmental Science – the Future for Human being

World Population Effects and Causes on the Environment

The world population is roughly about 7.6 billion people and growing. It has its own date, July 11th is World Population Day! The population has slowed but the number is still great but not in a good way because that is, according to science, way too many people to be living on the earth and I would have to agree. I feel there are way too many people in the world but it is kind of hard fixing the problem without just killing people because it is wrongful and just not humane to kill other people for one cause. It is estimated that by September 19th, 2018 the world population will grow to 8 billion but that marker was supposed to be reached in 2025. It clearly means it's growing way too fast. You can find the world meter of the population on the website at the end.

There are many ways to keep the population growth and rate controlled and many of these ways work for the common working person or higher class people due to being able to live in an area where contraception is allowed but not forced. In other places, like third world countries, it is nearly impossible to obtain these things to prevent pregnancy due to cost and unavailability. I feel it should not be a law to prevent pregnancy but have it to where it is available for anyone who is looking to prevent pregnancy, especially for the young adults/teens that accidentally get pregnant. We should have reproduction regulations but not as strict, only for some places. Another type of this is promoting family planning, teaching and educating men and women about contraception and steps on ways to prevent pregnancy. It worked in Iran back in 1989 and the fertility rate dropped from 5.6 births per woman to 2.6.

Another way to prevent over-population is being in a certain religion that makes most girls wait for marriage to get pregnant but many religions like in the Middle East are weird in a way to where the woman may be married to a man who has many wives and most usually it is a much older guy and many younger girls but I also know its also stereotypical for me to say that. In contrast, certain Christians usually wait for marriage to have a baby. Some even wait for marriage to have sex if they’re that deep in their religion.

In China, it is a law to only have one single child per family. I know when this law came out, many families would abort their own kid if they did not have a boy. It is sad that the law exists but it has to be done to reduce the population, especially in China. Statistically, the fertility rate went from 6 births per woman to 1.5 births per woman in 2014. Also, this policy affects many things like forced abortions and sterilizations. It also hurt their culture by not being able to take of their grandparents or the elderly due to not many kids in the family with money. It also led to an imbalance in gender whereas the men outnumber the women on average 118 boys to 100 girls.

On the other hand, the old folkies or scientifically known as “Baby Boomers” are older men and women from the late 1940’s- mid-1960’s and many are still alive but are retired. There was a pro at the time they were born back then to help with the farm. They needed as many people as they can to help with their family farms and also, they didn’t have birth control at the time. Now it is a con because we have too many unemployed people but I feel it’s not their fault they just lived a good and long life, but then again with the new technology, you can have 2 or 3 heart attacks before someone actually peels over, which is sad but back in the day if you had a heart attack it usually meant you were going to die within the next 24 hours. Now we have medical instruments like stints that help with the heart and you can live to be 80 or 90 years old whereas back in the day it was usually about 60 or 70 years old.

The numbers from the top 10 countries are astounding! Of course, we have in front is China with roughly 1.4 billion people. Second is India with 1.3 billion, which is similar to China with having an imbalance in men and women. Then comes us in third, the United States of America. We have less than half a billion living here, which kind of blows my mind because China and India are so much smaller than us but yet we are way behind them in the numbers. I won’t go into details about the rest but we have Indonesia in 4th with about 100 million less than us. Then we have Brazil, Pakistan, and Nigeria close behind them. At the end is Bangladesh, Russia, and Mexico with around 150 million in population.

Here in our country we have pros and cons to the population we have. One of the pros is that if there is more people, there will be more voters and more power for the government. Another is growth in population which will bring in more money for local/state government. Which is estimated to be $3 trillion over the next 10 years which is $300 billion per year. This goes along with another pro. The state/local governments uses censuses to see and help fund for new structures, buildings, roads, and polices all depending on the amount of people. They even help with police and fire departments. Here is where I disagree with this last one. You would think they would put their time and money into smaller less populated communities to give them a sort of boost. Now don’t get me wrong, bigger communities need money too simply because of all the people but just think if we had half of what a government would give to a city if they gave it to smaller community. That would be amazing for that little community and help boost it up. Another con is it tells the government where they should place social service projects.

Here is the cons to population in our country. If the city increases population faster than planned, there might or will be a strain on the community services, which is basically saying the city will slow down in in community where there might be a need for more police officers or another store to open up that the city doesn’t have money for. Which leads into the next con, budget. They might add laws and rules if the population gets too high which will affect the budget. Depending where you live and where you are from, the more the people, the more land you will need for agricultural use. Another is low per capita income which means the more the people the less jobs they’ll found and less money they will make. Also, with rapid growth population, people can only produce so much food which means if the population gets too high, the amount of food giving to each family will decrease. It is also said in statistics that many unproductive consumers are consuming too much like little kids under the age of 15 and the elderly that retire or are unemployed. That is the last con left, unemployment. Too many people are getting or being unemployed which increases the numbers drastically.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, there are many ups and downs about the population, good and bad on each side but one thing is for sure… the number is way too high and we need to find a solution and fix it. Personally, I feel it is way too high but now that it is way too high, it’s hard for us as humans to figure out what to do with all these people. With some of the countries having laws forced upon families to have a certain amount of kids like in some of the Asian countries, I feel that will work due to the fact that their population has sky-rocketed and is now the leading country in the world. Also, many countries have religions where having kids is affected by that religion. So, I feel we are going in the right direction but the amount of humans on earth is so high that it will take some time but as long as we have time and you know, keep pollution down, we might be able to do something and change the fate of our future. Hopefully, in the good directions, because we need humans to work and to design things and come up with ideas for the future, so technically everything ties together somehow and someway. 

Cite this page