Overpopulation Essay Example For Students

Overpopulation Essay During the first 2 million or so years of its history the human population was a minor element in the world ecosystem, with at most 10 million members. In the New Stone Age, less than 10,000 years ago, the number of humans began to increase more rapidly. The rough equilibrium maintained before Neolithic times gave way when the human population developed agriculture and animal husbandry and no longer had to spread out in search of game. With the abandonment of a hunting-gathering way of life and the rise of permanent settlements and eventually cities, the human population underwent dramatic growth. By the beginning of the Christian era it had reached 250 million, and by 1650, half a billion. We must take action to save our planet. One crisis the earth and its inhabitants fear today is lack of resources due to the increasing number of people. Justifications for our path of destruction are; destroy trees for more farmland; excessive consumption of food sources by over harvesting and overgrazing causing barren wastelands; continued use of fossil fuels and chemicals needed for transportation, creation of electricity, and heating our homes; and more people means more homes will be built again forests and natural habitats of animals. By 1997 the worlds forests were for the first time, loosing more carbon than they were absorbing (202). Public awareness and concern for environmental issues need to be integrated into everyday living so, the remaining numbers of plants and animal species continue to exist. Its crucial we act now as continued extinction of species is a loss no future can cure. When trying to correct the imbalance created by man, science, and technology, we who have inherited the earth must be adamant about developing cleaner ways of improving productivity, and developing better methods for prevention of births, the root of overpopulation. On average family size has decreased almost by half from approximately six children per woman in the late 1960s to three per woman in the late 1990s (216). Contraceptive technologies are becoming more accessible, affordable, and more widely accepted. Unavailability or access to family planning services and education, continue to exist in many parts of the world. Presently, throughout the developing world, women are having smaller families than their mothers, due to access of birth control pills, condoms, and diaphragms along with methods of sterilization consisting of tubal lingation for women or vasectomy for men. Even under the low-growth conditions, human numbers will continue to climb for many years, at a slowing rate. An early halt to human population growth will not end human-caused extinctions. If, we continue to over-exploit resources and pollute our environment the world will be an uninhabitable planet for future generations. The purpose of this paper is to help promote awareness, and focus on the circle of problems contributing to the destruction of the planet (571). Bibliography: .