Why do people worry about overpopulation?

Over the next several weeks and months, I want to consider a few things about which people spend too much time worrying. In this first installment of an occasional series, I want to consider (briefly) overpopulation and resource exhaustion. read more

Ignoring the troubling ethos in the details, the answer to your question is that we ALL grapple with some ratio of self-interest ("I don't want to have to compete for food/water/resources") and empathy ("I don't want other people to starve/dehydrate/have to live in intolerable conditions") that tells us overpopulation is a problem. read more

Overpopulation is measured by the resources we have and how quickly those resources are used. If there are more people than resources can cope with then we would, at that point, become overpopulated. The measure of how many people our planet and it’s resources can support is called its ‘carrying capacity’. read more

When the English scholar Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the number of people around the world was nearing 1 billion for the first time. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote then. read more

Nature will do it for us," and I'm not quite sure I can parse the morality of that either. read more

Due to a decreasing natural resources, it is likely that overpopulation will create more conflict in the world. According to The Population Institute, there is strong evidence of this trend. According to Everything Connects, it is likely that governments will impose new laws to maintain control over the diminishing resources. read more