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As today is the 50th year of "Earth Day" activities, I put together a little animation of the pace of population growth on this finite planet... along with some charts to suggest where we're headed.

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What do you think we should do to address population growth and its resulting impact on resource use to reach the year 2200 and beyond with limited civilizational pain?

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Admin 9 Apr 22
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37 comments

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15

Provide free birth control, abortion and sex education in all countries.

That is my dream for family planning but unfortunately not all women around the world have access to birth control, abortion clinics or sex education. It's sad to hear in the News that abortion is a non-essential. So I wonder why women have to deal with the family planning package? It's time to push for male vasectomy. This will be a fair share for the family planning responsibility of women and men.

14

Vasectomy is a much better choice for birth control. Most female birth control have serious side effects.

Education, education, education is the key. Let's culturally get away from the idea that having children is a good thing. But educate, rather than enforce.

Female birth control is optional, available, and reversible -- I had "the big V", it's not.

Male birth control 'pill' would be better

@FearlessFly In most cases, vasectomy is reversible. It is the least invasive of the birth control methods other than things like condoms and rhythm (and we all know how well those work).

The male pill, like the female ones involve hormones. They can have long term effects. I know one young woman who had a stroke because of the pill.

Female birth control is voluntary in theory. In practice it has been almost entirely the responsibility of women to prevent births.

@itsmedammit . . . reverse not covered by insurance or NHS, depends on elapsed time . . .

@FearlessFly Actually I personally know men who did have the big v but had it reversed and it worked.

@FearlessFly Well, ok then, let's just let our girls get strokes, because it is cheaper.

Things may change in any case. I think whatever birth control is used, it should be covered and young people should have access to education and information they need.

@itsmedammit Giving birth is not risk-free.

@FearlessFly All the more need for accessible birth control.

I totally, absolutely, vociferously agree. I once read that world wide some 3/4 of sterilizations were done by women. It pissed me off but then I realized I was guilty. Made a beeline to the doctor and got snipped.

It should be compulsory that for each vasectomy /sterilisation mandatory storage of ova or sperm occurs to create 10,000 new children.
This is now done with plant seed banks.

9

I don't think we need anything draconian yet. At this time we need to promote education, particularly sex education and readily available contraception.

I agree. Education, women's empowerment, insured access to health care and anti-poverty measures all have the side effect of decreased average family size.

I can't agree with this more!

7

The most humane way would be to improve the standard of living in third world countries. As a country's wealth increases (so long as it is equally distributed) the birth rate falls.
This is happening gradually. A smaller number of people are impoverished now than say twenty years ago.
Obviously giving women control of their fertility and secularisation of countries would help as well.

7

Free vasectomy for human male at age 15 years old.

Younger in some cases. Problem is that most kids are not mature enough to fully get it. I would not advocate enforcing.

@itsmedammit Some girls between 12 yrs old or 13 years old are taking the birth control pills. I think they are not mature enough but the messages around their environment are telling these girls that they are responsible for family planning.

@Cecilia2018 I recall that the youngest known mother occurred from incest on a five year old.

6

Male birth control.
Two children max. Exceptions for loosing a child before the age of 26.
Affordable and balanced nutrition for all. Reduce meat consumption. Replace with plant protein and fish.
No fossil fuels.
Recycle everything.
Death penalty for politicians that violate the public trust.
Better secular education.

5

These are mostly horrible suggestions. I’ll do my part by consuming less and limiting my reproduction, but I’m not telling others what to do.

4

Pandemics are good for the earth. Possibly the best earth day yet.

Yes!!!

Hell yes!!!

4

None will work. Birth control is the responsibility of both men and women. Enforcing a 1 child policy is virtually impossible. Not everyone can afford a license to have children.

I agree. Even though the license idea is the one I echose in the poll (I decided I needed to choose something) the concept would not work. Pregnancies occur without a license so long as men and women have sex, and they are going to have sex. So, do we enforce abortions? Do we kill children born to parents without a license? The options for enforcement are not terribly palatable.

4

I’m not sure if humans have the foresight or emotional maturity to make such a momentous decision. Even though a Big Crunch appears to be on the horizon, I feel that nature is the best final arbiter. We might suffer a population crash but total extinction seems very unlikely.

From a cosmic perspective even total extinction would be no big deal. What nature made can be remade, remembering that time is an illusion. A trillion years without conscious awareness would flit by in zero seconds.

The trouble with birth control is that by reducing the number of new possible genetic improvements you slow the pace of evolution almost to a standstill and risk winding up with a weak and dull-witted population.There is genetic modification, but no one truly knows what the future environment will be like. What sort of person should be built? There are still remote primitive tribes that can rekindle the human race. They probably have hidden attributes that no geneticist even dreams of.

The problem is way too much for me so my response is to keep quiet. I am not hoping for any particular outcome, having faith that whatever happens will be correct from the perspective of the whole.

Getting rid of religions and their indoctrinations could be a starting point?

4

THANK YOU. As a former, long time board member for the Seattle chapter of ZPG I applaud you. As I remember this site had population information as one of it's goals. Too many see it as doom and gloom of which the corollary is Smile and Denial. My late partner and I came up with a more reasoned and less emotional reflection which is Know and Grow.

Unfortunately, often it is the messenger more than the message that people hear (or want to) and the message is lost. You depiction comes to 2 new people net per second. It has been said if we don't voluntarily deal with this issue nature will do it for us and guess what's going on right now???

ZPG became one of the very first environmental groups and it was respected and we did a lot including a kiosk at our local zoo. Part of the display were 2 counters one showing the population growth and the other an estimate of land lost. We had videos with contributors as Bill Nye and Walter Cronkite and there were interactive games for people to try and understand numbers (it is often a numbers game). In 2000 the national group got a new director and he made it his mission to spread the word. He courted some wealthy people one being Ted Turner. A PBS show titled "To the Contrary" showed some one (or group) offered $100 million to ZPG and the Sierra Club to remove any inference of immigration to the equation (Population = births - deaths but in some countries as the US Population = births + immigration - deaths). All of a sudden ZPG crashed as the new formula made matters worse. Industry wants a cheap and pliable form of servitude and what is really exploitation was promoted as being help and care for the poor.

This morning on NPR there was a story on how the pandemic is affecting Africa. They have no health care system and people are poor. Africa has the worlds largest population growth rate and the country's environment has been crashing for a long time. This will not be pretty for that continent.

If you and your organisation is truly concerned about population it should be a global solution & not as appears a concern for USA alone. No man or country is an island. You & those you decry aresimply not intelligent in terms of Professor Cippola's laws of human stupidity.
The world has beenable to ed its populatin since 1950 and that capacit ha icreaed substantially since then in those countries adopting enlightenment.
[qz.com]

@FrayedBear We WERE concerned but ZPG no longer exists as it was. Now it is watered down and known as the population connection.
It had to start in the US and if successful could expand. The US was and still is the country with the largest carbon footprint. It was shown one US person had the same footprint as an average of 10 non-US. I get a lot of nasty comments when I ask how we can ever manage to reign in or greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint when we actively try to get millions of people to come here for the sole purpose of increasing those things? We cannot.

@JackPedigo China first introduced populationgrowth limitation in 1969. Did your organisation give recognition to the move or simply decry it as a Communist plot?
What has your organition done to work against the teachings of the Catholic Church and its desire for numerical supremacy through unrestricted child birth?
For 90 years or more Americans have robbed the world of petroleum and wasted it on its unnecessary war machines. I could go on about how it has destroyed other nations agriculture in order to promote it own greed by creating dependency, unfair trading advantage for its goods & services.

@FrayedBear ZPG, as far as I remember, was supportive of the policy but saw the issue of selective births.

It was ZPG that got me away from religion and no member of the board during my time was supportive of religion. religion was not a model for our advocacy. We supported abortion under any circumstances and family planning something the Catholic church is against. Our philosophy was all children should be a planned child, they should be loved and have enough resources to be successful in their lives.

When studying European history I leaarned that during the last days of Rome the government tried to get people to have more children (sort of like Japan today). The people were having problems surviving themselves so the fertility rate dropped.

Scroll ahead several years and I was visiting Viet Nam with my partner and brother's family (Vietnamese wife). We were introduced to a young couple that were fairly well off and the wife had moved in with my sister-in-laws brother. They had 1 daughter and the wife was very pregnant. The husband worked for the government and as such they were allowed only 2 children. The next day my sister-in-law (Kim) tole us after we left the wife started to have pains and was rushed to the hospital. It turnes out many people with 1 child especially of that child is female go to fertility clinics to get inseminated in order to have a multiple birth. This small Vietnamese woman was carrying triplets!. Her body rejected 2 of the fetuses hence the trip to the hospital. e did not hear about what happened to the third. This is what people do. Try to find loopholes to give themselves more children especially in developing countries. When the countiues can no longer manage the populaton (VietNam is roughly the size of Calif. but with 90 million people) people leave and go to other countries. This is normal behavior for most humans!!!

4

For those optimistic of our population future, humble and enthusiastically suggest checking out this free movie released last night... so much of the belief of plentiful resources is based on wishful thinking. I'll post this link another day too. It's interesting to see Michael Moore presenting a film that roasts liberals including Al Gore.

Admin Level 9 Apr 22, 2020

Again, thank you. I have sent the link to myself and try to view it on my YouTube streaming.

The vast majority of those we think and feel are altruistic are basically self serving and selfish!!!

They are always gaining from what they pose as selfless!!!

This is all so overwhelming. I fear humanity is not going to be here in a short amount of time if we don't change our ways. "Less must be the new more" should be our new way of looking at life.

Well, nice to see that we are doing something to save the planet. I think I will just go shoot myself, what difference does it make, Really!

4

Tax people for each child they have.

At the very least, stop giving people tax breaks for having children.

For a while that was a policy in Iran. 1st child a tax deduction, 2nd not and 3rd one had to pay a tax.

I agree, at least quit offering incentive to have children with the earned income credit. Maybe for the first child and then tax additional children big time

4

All these options are ridiculous

Some of them more ridiculous than others?

@yvilletom all are ridiculous

And your suggestions?? Should we just keep heading in the direction we are going? What will life be like for your children? Right now it is the young people screaming that we are stealing their future. We are and have and seem hell bent on continuing.

3

I think the pandemic is kind of enforcing population control. 😕

Yes!!!

3

Terraform and colonize Mars.
Let pandemics run wild? End mass vaccination programs?

So we become unable to manage ourselves on a planet with everything we need without any advanced technology or special extraordinary support we will be able to do that on another planet??

Bezos thinks we can have a trillion people and envisions the Earth being circled by lots of space craft each with it's own human community. Still my basic question is WHY? Are we really so unable, with all our sense of reason and intelligence, to manage what is a clear problem?

@motrubl4u You are right and, unfortunately, emotions play an out-sized role in peoples lives. However, some basic instincts can be tamed. I once say an experiment where people of all income levels were asked what % would they need to be happy. Strangely, it turned out that the higher one was on the income level the higher the % they thought needed to be happy. Some countries understand the problem of too many having too much wealth but in our capitalistic society we refuse to see the connection.

2

The better educated a person is, the less likely they are to have a large brood of children; and they are more likely they are to have at least a modicum of understanding of science and are less likely to be religious extremists. Let's start with that.

As far as pandemics and war: these are simply increasingly more likely to occur as we push the environment to the extent that it makes it more difficult for life, as we know it, to continue. Who knows, perhaps we will bring about our own Thanos level extinction event?

2

The idea of 'Zero Population Growth' was openly discussed in the '70's. But no politicians have had the political will to actually do anything. Likely the 'Religous Right' evangelical keep us from progressing. This is an interesting document. [archive.org]

BDair Level 8 Apr 22, 2020

China introduced the 2 child policy in 1969 and the one child policy in 1979. They led the world.

2

Birth control might help but it is a 2 way street. Where are you in that picture?

I’m 89 and don’t need bc.

INteresting thought. Maybe when a male gets of a certain age they will need to get a vasectomy or else wear a sign saying they are dangerous and women need to beware.

@JackPedigo Yeah, like age ten. And shut down the religions that that require their slaves to make babies.

@yvilletom One big problem is that certain tribes want to become a majority through numbers. It's not just the religious but other groups as well.

Years ago a study was done that showed the people who lived in developing countries near developed ones as the idea that one of the offspring could make it to the developed country and send money home actually had a higher fertility rate. It like farmers who have more kids in order to increase the number of workers for the farm. They forget there are more mouths to feed and, when the parents die the farm often gets divided up among the kids. In some countries without a primogeniture policy the land becomes so divided it becomes unworkable. Sorry, I see this as another example of emotion/instinct over reason.

1

This planet we as a human species share is not in anyway in need of us and other species rather the other way round so the need for moderation is our responsibility for our own sake knowing that this planet was here many millions of years before us and will still be here many millions of years after we vanish as a species.

1

Capitalism has a worse effect. Look at how the planet has improved since Covid laid capitalism low. Moreover, without a good social safety net, people have kids as economic security for the future. Social welfare, like public health education and provision for birth control, helps reduce population. The low birth rate in the West did not emerge until such measures were in place.
This problem does not exist in a vacuum. It is a consequence of social and economic policies. It's quite elitist to isolate the problem apart from it's social and historical context. Some of the measures above may be necessary but not before the social and economic causes of overpopulation are addressed.

Lol. From the late 1800's when the rule of large families supporting their parents old age was common comes this harrowing tale:

Listen to Ending Extract of Will Carleton's Over the Hill to the Poorhouse by GypsyJackBoggleShow #np on #SoundCloud
[soundcloud.com]

1

We are destined to have a serious over population problem very soon. I think it would help if we were all vegans.

1

Close the borders, let evolution happen.

1

Not too far back I wrote a little bit on this topic, overpopulation. It was a topic I hadn't thought back to in quite a long time as I remember reading briefly about it years before. And then a pandemic hits. I don't even want to think about this topic right now because there is going to be a reduction in people, but in a horrible way.

1

Increase birth control, destroy religion and expand into space (we need to find new planets to exploit and destroy right?).

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