Population Debate (Sumblog 11)

Weight of humans on the world.
Source: http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/world-problems/
world-human-population-mass-287-million-tonnes-432432/

 

                I find it interesting that there are two very contrasting views of how population should be in our society. On one hand, there are people who strongly believe that we need to make big changes to decrease the population so that we can control how much resources are being used around the world. While on the other, there’s the belief that we need to have more young babies because there isn’t enough young people who can take care of the elderly people in our society. I find this very disconcerting because there are really two ways of looking at this, and it worries me that we aren’t looking at all the angles and how these two very polar opposite views can affect each other- and others’ views of the sides.

                Now, I’m more on the side of we should be looking at ways to decrease the population, I’m going to let everyone aware of my biases right now. I really do think that the amount of resources we are using up is not helpful to our environment and it’s not environmentally safe for everyone involved. However, I do understand the other side of the argument. We really don’t have the finances to keep the elderly benefits for the people we have now and still have the same amount of money to give the same benefits to the young people now when they are the age of our current elderly.

Margaret Thatcher Punch magazine cover from 1977
Source: http://punch.photoshelter.com/image
/I0000DiLfXmlTCbI

                The aspects that I think really need to be looked at when looking at these two debates are two really big things. Firstly, we should look at what has happened to life expectancy over the years. Obviously, life expectantly has increased a lot over the past 100 years, and that has a huge impact on how we view population and resource use. The second aspect that we really need to look into when discussing this debate is what is the birth rate and death rate in the “global north” and “global south” and how can we make them more equal overall so that the effect can be better on the resources used in both areas of the world.