Final Blog Entry
This will be my final entry in the Loire Valley Almanac regarding the overpopulation of our world and its effects on the environment. I have been discussing my travels in Canada, Hawaii, Ireland, Scotland, England, Italy, Germany, Spain, and finally France up to this point, but now I will narrow my focus to talk more directly about overpopulation. I will begin by comparing my experience in France overall with my experiences of living in the United States of America for 19 years. France and the US can be at times hard to compare because of how different they are. For example France has a much smaller population than the US does, but the US is much bigger than France is. The entire country of France could fit inside Texas and there would still be some wiggle room. In fact France is 247,368 square miles and has a population of 66 million people. Texas is 268,820 square miles and has a population of only 26 million people, and the US is 3.8 million square miles and has a population of 319 million people. According to mapfight.appspot.com Texas is 1.26 times bigger than France is. The other difficulty that lies within comparing these two countries is that the US has such a great variety of climate due to the fact that it is so large. Weather and climate have a massive effect on how many people live in a certain area. In comparison France, all of Europe in general really, has a much better system of public transportation than we have in the US. I have traveled more by public transport in the 4 months that I have spent in Europe than I have in the 19 years that I have lived in the US. In my nearly two decades of living in several different states within the US I have never taken a public bus to get around. I had ridden the metro system in both New York City and in the District of Columbia a few times but it was never a normal means of transportation for me to get around. My small use of public transportation is likely due to the fact that I have always had a car or someone with a car that could drive me to where I needed to go, but also the places in which I have lived either did not have, or had a very small or inefficient system of public transportation. With such a large population you would think that cities the US would implement better public transportation systems, but this is not the case. While large cities do have metro systems and bus systems that are utilized people in smaller cities usually have to have their own car if they want to get around. On the topic of large cities I have usually criticized them claiming that such a large amount of people living in one place is harmful to the environment, there were some things I neglected to consider. Public transport, which is better for the environment than everyone driving their own cars is, has a greater presence in large cities than in smaller cities, suburban housing, and rural areas. The other aspect of large cities that is beneficial for the environment is the fact that things are much closer together in large cities than other areas. This minimal distance allows people to walk or ride a bike to many of the places that they need to get to. Walking and biking cause almost no harm to the environment, but when walking or biking ones heart rate and breathing rate likely increase which causes an increase in the amount of oxygen one inhales and how much carbon dioxide they exhale. I am not claiming that people need to stop breathing I am just pointing out something I had never really thought about before. I have survived three months in France without ever riding in a car. I have ridden buses and have made use of the tram system, but mostly I walk to get where I want to go. As discussed in a previous blog the angers tram system is powered by electricity and therefore does not damage the environment as much as other forms of transportation do. In addition to the fact that I had never used public transportation or walked to get around as much as I have in France, I had never traveled by train in my life before I came to Europe. Trains are a much better means of getting around in terms of the environment than planes, my usual source of transportation, are. Trains use electricity and the average 747 “uses approximately 1 gallon of fuel (about 4 liters) every second” according to science.howstuffworks.com. In my defense, being that Europe is much smaller than the US is it is a lot harder to travel by train, and on top of that trains are not as prevalent within the US as they are in Europe. With such large number of people getting around these forms of transportation that harm the environment, such as cars and planes, are utilized much more frequently. Planes and cars consume a large amount of natural resources. According to eia.gov “about 136.78 billion gallons1 (or 3.26 billion barrels) of gasoline were consumed2 in the United States”. Thus overpopulation logically leads to overconsumption which is harmful to the environment. I will now begin to discuss our aspects of the entire planet and expand my focus from the relatively small amount of countries that I have lived in, visited, or traveled through. Globally we produce 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide. This is mainly due to the large number of vehicles we as a species make use of that consume natural resources and produce air pollution. Livescience.com claims that many scientists have estimated that our planet can only hold about 10 billion people. We have been rapidly accelerating toward this number in the last hundred years. It only took 12 years for us to gain the last 2 billion people as we now have over 7 billion people living on the planet. Population grows at an exponential rate. This makes sense because the average person will have kids who will then have kids of their own causing the population to continuously increase exponentially. The birth rate is estimated by UNICEF to be around 130 million babies born per year. According to WHO 56 million people died in 2012. This means that more people are being born than are dying. This relatively low death rate is likely due to the fact that modern medicine is helping people to live longer and to better fight off the diseases and illnesses that they are stricken with. This medicine is actually causing viruses and diseases to become stronger as they evolve to become immune to our modern medicine, but that is another issue for a different discussion at another time. I am not saying that I am displeased with the fact that the death rate is so low, nor am I claiming we should stop using modern medicine, nor begin killing people to reduce the population, but I am claiming that there are too many people on the planet right now for us as a species to safely coexist with our environment. Overpopulation is a difficult issue to tackle because it is most commonly assumed to be associated with a desire for genocide or a pessimistic view of humanity. There are ways to lower the population without killing people or letting them die of diseases that could be treated or cured. Lowering the birth rate, as opposed to increasing the death rate, is an equally viable means of decreasing our population, and is much more ethical than attempting to increase the death rate. Birth control is one way of controlling the number of births as the name suggests. Some people do have issues with things like birth control and abortion, which are in no way the same thing, but that is another topic that I will not be able to discuss within this blog. However, I do want to mention that politics, red tape, bureaucracy, and even religion have often times hindered efforts to help the environment. I am not trying to claim that religion is bad, nor am I saying that people should not have a right to behave as they wish and express their views if they desire to. Overpopulation is such a large issue that encompasses many others as it is the root of many problems that it has caused me to digress into discussing other issues that need to be addressed on their own. I feel as though this “blog entry” may I have transformed into more of an informal argumentative paper meant to convince the reader of the fact that overpopulation is a problem, but hey, this is my blog and ill post an argumentative paper if that is what I want to write about so I am just going to embrace it. Overpopulation has a negative effect on the environment through overconsumption and pollution. Logically too many people would mean that too many resources are being consumed. It also makes sense that with more and more people living on the planet the number of people that use forms of transportation that pollute the environment would also increase. Overpopulation also leads to an increase in deforestation due to the fact that more people need timber for shelters and products that are made either partially or entirely out of wood. While there are other ways of addressing overconsumption, pollution, and deforestation I feel as though it is necessary to understand the possible root cause of these issues. If the rudiments of the problem are addressed then the problem would essentially disappear. At the risk of sounding like someone on an old episode of Star Trek trying to explain some complex scientific process in an overly simplified manner. I will compare the concept of addressing the root problems of our environment with a doctor treating a patient. Let us say that a patient comes in with a skin rash, headache, and fever. The doctor could give the patient a skin cream or lotion for the rash, some kind of pain medication for the headache, and put the patient in an ice bath to bring down their fever which would then essentially remove all the symptoms, or the doctor could look at what is causing these three symptoms and treat for that. In essence I am saying that is more important to treat the disease than it is to treat the symptoms as the symptoms will go away once the disease is gone. The same line of reasoning could be applied to fixing the environmental problems that we currently are facing. We could attempt to pass laws that would essentially limit overconsumption, pollution, and deforestation, that may not even get passed, would take a long time to get approved and may not even be followed by every single person if they were passed due to the fact that they would be difficult to enforce, or we could look to the root cause of these problems. The root cause being that there are way too many people on our planet right now and that number is only increasing at an exponential rate. Now we can either treat the symptoms or we can treat the disease. My preference would be to focus on the rudimentary causes of these issues to try to solve them rather than trying to address each issue individually. As previously discussed there are many ways to lower the population that are both moral and effective. The easiest way would simply be to teach people the problems that are caused by overpopulation which would hopefully lead them to make a decisions to have fewer children. We could also make forms of birth control more easily accessible to the general public. Or if we wanted to go at the problem like an insane dictator we could just go around killing people, but I am not advocating for that and I would not support it. In conclusion my observations have led me to believe that overpopulation is a big problem in terms of the environment that needs to be addressed in order to ensure that we live in a safe, clean, and stable environment. After all, this planet is our only home and we as the dominant species of life living on it that have caused many of its problems have a moral obligation as well as reasons of self-interest to take care of our planet.
References
http://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-support.html
http://mapfight.appspot.com/texas-vs-fr/texas-us-france-size-comparison
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/question192.htm
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=23&t=10
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/08/20/atmospheric_co2_humans_put_40_billion_tons_into_the_air_annually.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/22/health/worldwide-baby-facts/
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index2.html