Current mood:
hopeful
I first started thinking about population growth as a problem when I was on Semester at Sea in college. We went to India and some other very crowded countries and I was struck by how it seemed like they just couldn't get ahead of the population growth. They couldn't create enough jobs, build enough houses, or grow enough food to satisfy demand. It seemed out of control.
Then I moved to the Washington DC area four years ago. I have witnessed countless developments built on previously wild land, horrendous traffic problems due to too many cars on highways not wide enough to accommodate them, and housing prices that are just ridiculous.
I can envision a world where population growth skids to a stop and finally reverses and it is very appealing. People are wonderful and children are great, but the fact is that the natural world and the people that live in it would benefit from far fewer people on Earth.
Thoughts?
Additionally, my thoughts are, as difficult as it is to 'keep up with the demands of growth' in India, etc, look at the midwest and the problems they have with population loss. Some towns there are considering tearing housing down and starting over. I'd love to hear from anyone who thinks they have a handle on the problem. PD James wrote a book (fiction) concerning the effects of population decrease. Just to for the record, I'm all for ZPG and have been since I was about 7.
I've approached ZPG about the fact (yup, prety much stone cold fact) that the world's economic model is pretty much built on organic population growth. Of course, the world can't go on indefinitely this way. Projections show a population 'bottleneck' somewhere around the year 2050. I don't know the number off hand, but 12 million or so rings a bell. After 12 mil the population's supposed to decline. I haven't been able to ascertain what causes the deflation in population increase and what the economic and social models are for such an occurrence. I'll be long gone by then, but my child won't, and she's what concerns me. Those are my thoughts.