Population Issues

With the reading and classes, population growth issues have come up the strongest for me. Probably because of my previous history studying the issue (Check out https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nizmrBp_O7FcvXszRHFAr53Znf-n1KoUqDLM48chQQ4/edit?hl=en_US for my previous work on it). Indeed there is a population growth issue in much of the modernizing world, and it's creating a completely unsustainable growth of people. At almost 7 billion people (over two of which come from just two nations, India and China) we have pushed the practical carrying capacity of the Earth pretty hard, if not beyond it's limits. Yet a part of this conversation is missing.

CNN's 1992 documentary, The People Bomb, reported on an interesting post-modern trend: population decline. The example that CNN primarily works with is in Japan. Small villages are slowly becoming extinct due to the low birth rates in Japan. The sustainability question comes up here as well, but from another direction. Instead of pushing the earth's carrying capacity, we are now looking at cultural extinction. If this low birth trend continues we will see small villages vanishing, taking with them their cultural history and legacy. Over the long haul, larger cities, and/or nations, could suffer this problem, and (in contrast to high birth rate nations) the government may need to institute laws to increase population levels to reach a point of cultural sustainability.

Food for thought.

- Jason