The theme of this year’s World Population Day, which was recognized on July 11, was Everyone Counts.
And apart from some quibbling over the life-value of rapists, child pornographers, sex traffickers and those on murder row destined for state-sponsored capital punishment for abhorrent crimes, I think most people would agree.
The gift of life — lungs breathing in air rhythmically, blood coursing through veins, heart beating inside our chest — is a precious thing.
It’s good to be alive.
However, there is often an unspoken diabolical distaste for those unlike us when it comes sharing this planet.
We may look down the end of our noses at the uneducated in third-world countries that have too many kids, immigrants that steal jobs from born-and-bred Canadians, or minorities for whose rights we bend over backwards to accommodate.
We may not prescribe to the hate fueled notions of a perfect race that have historically led to horrors of unimaginable proportions.
Yet we are anxious about sharing more of our personal space.
There are now 6.8 billion humans on the planet, a number that has grown exponentially from 2 billion in 1930 and will reach an estimated 8-10 billion by 2050.
Not surprisingly, there are concerns about the future sustainability of the human race.
Debates about the uncomfortable topic of overpopulation throw around numbers of the earth’s population capacity, which some experts say has already surpassed desirable levels by billions.
Even though birth rates have tailed off dramatically in many countries around the world, and some nations such as China (the world’s most populated at 1.3 billion and counting) have imposed one-child limits, the global population trend remains on the up tick.
According to the US Census Bureau, 4.2 people are born every second, compared to the 1.8 people that die.
Population control has already been embraced by many around the world in the form of birth control education, without the need for hard-and-fast rules on how many children a family can have. Smaller family units may be the new norm in the developed world, a self-congratulatory practice we often would like to impose on third-world nations that aren’t birth control savvy.
It is perhaps ironic that nations that could “afford” to have more children (if disposable income was directed toward child rearing — not big screen TVs, SUVs and cottages), but have fewer children on average, in a world where wealth is distributed in dramatic disproportion.
We must remember that the poorest 40 per cent in the world account for a mere five per cent of global wealth, while the wealthiest 20 per cent account for 75 per cent.
One blogger took exception to part of World Population Day’s thrust to provide contraceptive birth control to women in the developing world.
“The provision of birth control in the developing world strikes me as another exercise in hegemony: the reproductive choices of those in the ‘underdeveloped’ South are policed under the guise of humanitarian aid,” wrote a blogger on Defying History: Christian and Womanist Perspectives.
Besides, overpopulation can’t be entirely to blame for the planet’s problems.
“Rising consumption today is a far bigger threat to the environment than a rising head count,” said Fred Pearce in Grist Magazine. “And most of that extra consumption is still happening in rich countries that have long since given up growing their populations.”
Too many people using too many resources is a trend that’s bound to not only continue but create both greater growth and demand.
It would be un-Christian of anyone to suggest that countries outside of the Western World should not stampede after the “good life,” ala the out-of-control unsustainable consumption that we’ve built our modern way of life upon.
That truly is the dilemma the global population faces going forward.
With more mouths to feed and consumer-based lifestyles to support, we can only expect scarcity to persist, especially among those things that are necessary for survival.
That is unless we make a dramatic shift away from our current approach to consumption, which places extreme value on production and profit at the expense of equitable and sustainable life in which everyone truly counts.