THE THEORY OF AN OVERPOPULATED EARTH

By Matthew Eloyi

For so long, overpopulation has been blamed for almost everything including poverty, unemployment, scarce resources, birth control, abortion, and even the one-child policy that was once implemented in China. But is the earth really overpopulated? To answer this question, we probably need to remind ourselves of what overpopulation really means.

If my elementary school teachers didn’t lie to me, then overpopulation is an unpleasant situation in which the existing human population exceeds the Earth’s carrying capacity. Also, in our high schools and colleges, we were/are taught in Economics that overpopulation is when a country’s population is higher than its available resources. However, according to research, the world population as of April 2022 stands at 7.9 billion while the earth can actually accommodate over 10 billion people given its spatial and resource base. If this is the case, then the claim that the earth is overpopulated is nothing but a mental conception.

For a very long time, the so-called international community has been bombarding us with incessant propaganda that “there are too many people” in the world. They claim that overpopulation is to blame for everything ranging from poverty to climate change to the extinction of rain forests.

Only a few have thought of the danger that population reduction can pose. Population decline is likely to contribute to international instability as nations struggle to acquire people to perform some jobs, operate infrastructure, and take care of the elderly. The Russian invasion of Ukraine may be the most recent example of this problem.

Russia is in desperate need of people. It has a population of only 146 million people, compared to 332 million in the US. Despite having a population slightly lower than Bangladesh, Russia has the biggest land mass of any country on the planet (6.3 million square miles). It’s also losing folks. It has a total fertility rate of 1.58, compared to 2.1 for replacement-level fertility. Its population is dwindling at a rate of roughly 100,000 people per year. According to United Nations figures, Russia had the world’s highest rate of abortions per woman of reproductive age in 2010. Russia’s population would have grown by about 30% if it had succeeded in absorbing Ukraine’s 43 million inhabitants (before the invasion). What makes it more appealing is that, according to Putin, the Ukrainians cannot racially be differentiated from Russians.

China, in addition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is another example. Its one-child policy, which lasted till 2016, severely harmed the country’s fertility rate, which is now at an anemic 1.3. In 2021, only 10.6 million babies were born in a country of 1.4 billion people, a record low and down from 12.2 million in 2019. The number of working-age people is likely to fall to half of the population by 2050 while the percentage of those above the retirement age is projected to reach 39% of the population, according to demographers. As a result, China’s working-age population will be proportionally smaller, with the burden of caring for both the young and the elderly. There is already a labour shortage in China. Consider what the country would be like if there were less and fewer employees to maintain an aging population.

There had been a lot of conspiracy theories of deliberate population reduction. Top on the list is Malthusianism. This theory, which was named after the early nineteenth-century scholar Thomas Malthus, proposed that having too many people in the world causes a slew of problems, including hunger, malnutrition, disease, and conflict. According to the hypothesis, the world’s population rises exponentially while food supply does not, resulting in global hunger. Malthusianism has given the philosophical underpinnings of all later versions of population theory, and was not entirely refuted until the advent of modern farming techniques in the twentieth century.

Eugenics – the belief that not all races are equal and that the “bad” races must die out to make place for the “good,” was another conspiracy theory of deliberate population reduction. The “bad” races usually corresponded to those who were poorer and darker than eugenics proponents. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who openly espoused racist sentiments and was loved by the Nazi leadership was an early proponent of this notion. Of course, the Nazi government gave eugenics a terrible name, so population theory faded into obscurity, resurfaced in the 1950s with the approval of the American political and intellectual establishment. It was given a new term, the population explosion, which alluded to Malthus’ ideas but still targeted darker-skinned people in emerging countries. Rather than just stating that the world would run out of food, it was now proposed that the globe would run out of practically everything, including food, natural resources, and eventually space to roam around in. The movement was propelled by the “population bomb” notion from the 1960s to the early 1990s and beyond.

The so-called “Population Bomb” was never detonated. Now we must cope with the issues of aging populations and worldwide instability brought on by the decline in birthrates. These issues will become apparent to everyone, even the most adamant secularists, sooner or later, and it will be clear that only people of religion had the foresight to perceive the problem – and the fortitude to address it. This is because religious people, such as traditional Catholics, evangelical Christians, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews, are the only set of people that have kept the very first mandate from God in the Book of Genesis that we should be fruitful and multiply. And the truth is, whether you believe in God or not, people still believe that God holds all the Aces and He decides everything. So, it is high time we accepted the fact that there is little we can do to change the world or play God.