But is anyone listening? Does anyone care?
None of this alters the fact that the richest very large city remains New York, and this is significant. Size does not necessarily mean wealth. In fact, the very large cities in the non-industrial countries tend to contain square mile upon square mile of hovels, shacks, and shanties deprived of any of the amenities that an average dweller in a large city in an industrialized nation takes for granted.
And this will only get worse. Fast though the world's population is growing as a whole, and still faster though the world's underdeveloped population is growing, the fastest growth rate is in the cities of the underdeveloped nations. By 2000, even though the population will begin to move into its stabilizing period, the cities of the underdeveloped nations may still be expanding and may collapse into rotting nightmares.
Consider, too, that the terrible need for agricultural land forced by the population increase, together with the need for firewood (which is the most important fuel in many underdeveloped areas), is already resulting in the slaughter of the forests, particularly the rain forests, which are being hacked down at a fearful rate. Almost 15 million acres are being cleared each year, and, by the year 2000, half Earth's present forests may be gone.
Remember that forests aren't just pretty trees taking up land that might better be used by human beings. Forests have root systems that conserve the soil and prevent the violent runoff of excess water. The trees give off water into the air, instead, cooling and moistening it. Forests also produce oxygen at a rate higher than will any form of vegetation replacing them.
The soil in which rain forests grow is not very good and will be soon leached of nutrients by crops planted in them, while rain runoff will gully and destroy the soil altogether. Far from supplying us with agricultural land, the vanishing rain forests will yield to deserts.
The deserts are indeed expanding as a result of forest destruction, overfarming, and general human mishandling, and, by the year 2000, the area of new desert will be perhaps 1 1/2 times the area of the United States. And the fact that there will be less and less good land to cultivate will send more and more people into the overcrowded, festering, fetid cities.
The forests, too, are the habitat of myriad species of plants and animals, a couple million of which (mostly insects, to be sure) have not yet even been classified. Destroying the forests destroys habitats, and about a fifth of the animal and plant species now living will be extinct by the year 2000.
This is not something to be dismissed lightly. Such extinctions will upset the ecological balance and wreak havoc far beyond the extinctions themselves. There is also the question of what compounds of important medicinal and industrial value might exist in the plants and animals we have not yet investigated, and which will vanish forever together with whatever good they might have done us.
Then, too, the more people there are, the greater the rate at which we must consume the Earth's finite resources. Worse yet is the fact that the more people there are, the greater the rate at which we must produce waste products, many of them toxic.
Usable fresh water supplies will decrease, since larger and larger portions of them will be polluted to the point where they will be undrinkable without costly treatment that many regions will not be able to afford. Nor will life be able to thrive in polluted water. Acid rain will grow worse and kill more lakes and more fish.
Even the ocean rim, the richest portion of the sea, is being increasingly polluted (and remember that microscopic forms of plant life in the uppermost layers of the ocean produce 80 percent of the oxygen that we cannot do without).
The atmosphere, too, is being increasingly polluted, and cities are becoming more and more smog-bound.
Even carbon dioxide, which is itself a rather benign and relatively nontoxic substance, is a deadly danger. The fuels we burn for energy at an ever-increasing rate are producing carbon dioxide at a rate greater than Earth's vegetation can utilize it and the ocean dissolve it. The result is that the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air (quite likely only .035 percent) is slowly but steadily increasing from year to year.
By 2000 A.D., the carbon dioxide content of the air may have increased by one third beyond today's content. This won't interfere with our breathing noticeably, but it will conserve more of the heat Earth receives from the sun so that Earth's average temperature will go up somewhat. This will change the weather pattern, probably for the worse, and increase the rate at which the polar ice-caps melt, raising the sea-level noticeably and causing coastal areas to suffer more from high tides and storms - in short, the greenhouse effect.
Other forms of pollution are just as slowly and just as surely destroying the ozone layer in Earth's upper atmosphere. This will increase the intensity of ultraviolet light from the sun at Earth's surface. The warning here is that skin cancers will increase, and so they will, but there may be worse. We don't know what the additional ultraviolet will do to the microscopic forms of life living in the soil and in the uppermost layer of the ocean. If these are badly damaged, the very viability of Earth as a planet may be decreased markedly.
To be sure, Earth's resources may be made more efficient use of and wastes may be more rationally disposed of, if we make the social and technological effort, but there is a limit to what can be done if we continue to pour tens of millions of new human beings onto Earth's surface each year.
And as the population increases, as people crowd together more closely, as people find they can only get a smaller and smaller part of a pie that does not increase as the numbers do (but decreases in many ways), there will be increasing alienation, increasing refuge in drugs, increasing crime, increasing chance of war. In short, the world will become ever more violent.
Every one of these changes, which come about more or less directly because of the ever-increasing population, will serve to raise the death rate. There will be increasing starvation, and bodies weakened by undernourishment will be more prone to disease. There will be more deaths by violence. In short, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death) will ride the Earth.
This might seem a natural way to make overpopulation self- limiting. It will seem an automatic cure -- but what a horrible cure it will be. Surely, the alternative of a deliberate effort to lower the birthrate is far preferable. |
