Maybe It's the Population After All!

There’s a running joke in my family that when I die, my obituary is going to start off something like this:

Keith Edward Gatling, of Syracuse, NY, has died, and no longer has to deal with the people who wouldn’t listen to him the first time...when he was right to begin with.

Actually, that’s not a joke. I’m going to write my own obituary, and it’s gonna start off just like that. You know why? Because it’s true. There’ve been way too many times when I’ve said something which has been either ignored or discounted, until...well...it actually turns out that I was right, and that other people were stubborn.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s post.

Many years ago...like about 40 or more of them...I was very concerned about increasing population. I knew enough about Malthus to be dangerous, and was concerned that sooner or later...maybe sooner...we’d end up with more people than we could feed; in which case the whole population thing would take care of itself because half of us would starve.

This idea was pooh-poohed by some friends of mine, who optimistically said that we’ll figure this out. And that one of those “too many people” born in the future will figure out how to feed us all.

But it wasn’t just that. I had friends who believed that having children was a moral imperative. We should all have children, whether we wanted to or not, because children are an intrinsic good, and people who didn’t want to have children were just plain selfish. And even the reasons they gave for not wanting children (like concerns about the population) were just masks to hide their selfishness behind.

Me...I figure that these people wanted children so badly that they had to justify it by saying that everyone should have them. They couldn’t let there be “different strokes for different folks.”

Then there are those who worry that if we don’t have enough children, two very bad things will happen. The first is that the Ponzi scheme called the economy will collapse. The other is that there won’t be enough young people to take care of people to take care of an increasingly aging population. I believe that both of these concerns, however, are very short-sighted and selfish.

And so where are we forty years after I first voiced my concerns about increased population? In a situation which may well have been caused by too much population growth over the past four decades. Human-induced climate change and new diseases that spread much more quickly are but a few of the possible results of having reached a certain population threshold.

I can’t recall where I read it, but I saw somewhere that if the world population was around what it was in 1915, we’d probably be doing just fine. But now there are too many people wanting and needing too much stuff; and while there’s enough food (for now), we’re strangling ourselves in other ways.

But what about the economy? What about taking care of the elderly among us? Do we really need to keep pumping out more and more of us in order to deal with those issues?

Maybe not. Maybe we can be more creative. Maybe our economy can be based on something other than increased consumerism, and become something more sustainable. Maybe there are ways to take care of an increasingly aging population without having to pump out more babies to do it.

Maybe we need to take a look at how other cultures did this in the past.

And maybe we should take seriously the idea that maybe we should slow down...and even reverse...this population growth.

Because...maybe I was right in the first place.