way too many people

Isn’t it obvious? Look around you. Isn’t it obvious there are way too many people in your neighborhood, your town, your region, your country, and on your planet?

Or perhaps you just need a little more convincing. If you live in a large city, have you noticed that, at certain times of day, the auto traffic becomes simply intolerable—and there really is no way to fix it? You can’t add enough new lanes or divert enough traffic to public transportation, or anything, really. There are simply too many people moving around in too small a space.

Or perhaps you’re a farmer in a developing country. Have you noticed that if you divide the family plot among the children, none of them will have enough land to feed themselves? So perhaps some of them move to cities where there is not enough work but too much overcrowding, filth, and crime. People’s lives become ever more desperate.

Some of these desperate people move on even farther, to other countries, where they may be met with chilly reactions, to say the least. These countries may try to prevent the intrusion of economic migrants through various means, including physical barriers and even walls. The people of these host countries may feel they already have enough people and in any case don’t want to let in people who are so different in appearance, custom, religion, and mental outlook. And why should they? These economic migrants are merely trying to transfer the problem of overpopulation from their home countries to their new host countries. This movement of economic migrants from more overpopulated areas to less overpopulated areas is like a cancer metastasizing. The problem is not going away, it’s simply spreading.

In addition, there’s the problem of a population expanding outward to take up more adjoining land. This is the phenomenon of suburbanization in the United States. When this happens, the new form of the land use—human habitation—takes over from the old form. In the U.S., that may mean gobbling up valuable farmland. In a place like Africa, it can mean encroaching on the habitat of some of that continent’s most iconic wildlife. Thus, it’s estimated that giraffes may go extinct because so much of their habitat is being used for human habitation and other activities. For the same reasons, elephants increasingly come into contact with human beings and are seen as nuisances and predators. In previous times they could go about their business unimpeded, avoiding human contact altogether. This is no longer possible.

One other thing you may have noticed is a general decline in civility. Rudeness is becoming almost the standard way of dealing with other people, and the use of profanity has become much more prevalent in daily discourse. Why is this?

I think at least some of this is caused by the subconscious realization that, as a result of overpopulation, we’re fighting over ever scarcer resources. We seem to be moving into an ‘every-man-for-himself’ situation. I’ve even heard it suggested that such a horrendous event as the Rwanda genocide may have had its genesis in overpopulation. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries on this planet. In a country whose economy is based on subsistence agriculture, you can plot on a graph how many people it can support per hectare. If the population gets above that number—and in Rwanda it undoubtedly was—something’s got to give. This is the point at which simmering ethnic tensions can boil over into war and genocide.

Then there’s the question of scarcity. It should bother people, for instance, that we are so obsessed with providing oil for our teeming billions that we’re drilling for it in some of the most inhospitable places on earth—above the Arctic Circle and thousands of feet beneath the sea.

Food is another example. Even now this planet is not providing enough food to provide an adequate diet for all seven billion of us. As arable land gets gobbled up by residential development, the situation only gets worse. At the same time, various fisheries are being exploited almost to the point of extinction. Minerals needed for our high tech society—iron, copper, rare earth minerals for our smartphones—become ever scarcer and more expensive. The list goes on.