Perpetuating the Overpopulation Myth

Did you know that the myth of overpopulation originated in England in 1798? A vicar by the name of Thomas Robert Malthus thought that food production was growing incrementally while the human population was growing exponentially, leading him to predict that food would run out by 1890.

Malthus recommended killing off the poor lest the better off starve to death in his An Essay on the Principle of Population: “All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons… To act consistently therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.” (Book IV, Chap. V)

In 1968 Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. In this work he wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” And the following year, 1969, The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was founded.

UNFPA has been involved in programs with governments around the world who deny their people the ability of deciding the number and spacing of their children. They were complicit in the creation of the Chinese government’s infamous “one-child policy” mandate, leading the American government to pull its funding after a 2001 investigation by the U.S. State Department.

According to the U.N. Population Database, the Earth’s population will be peaking around 8.02 billion people in the year 2040 before declining. Also reviewing the numbers from the U.N. Population Database, one could draw the conclusion that the entire world population could fit in the 268,820 sq mi of Texas in a house with a yard. Taking a current population of 7.146 billion people and putting them in the 268,820 square miles of Texas would yield a population density of 26,583 people per square mile. Dense, sure, but Macau and Monaco manage even higher densities.

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/