Overpopulation Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Overpopulation is a situation in which the resource demands of a population exceed the resources available in a given area. The concept of overpopulation may be used in conjunction with the concept of carrying capacity, which originated in the field of ecology and refers to the number of individuals and species that a particular habitat may support. When used in reference to humans, overpopulation is often identified as a causal factor of poverty and a driver of environmental degradation, particularly in the developing world. However, since Thomas Malthus professed his views on the grim consequences of unchecked population growth more than two centuries ago, the concept of overpopulation has not only eluded refinement, it has also proven deeply controversial.

In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus maintained that population, due to people’s natural desire to reproduce, will expand at a geometric rate, while the means of subsistence (i.e., food production) will increase at an arithmetic rate. The product of this fundamental tension between population and resources was poverty and misery for much of humanity. According to Malthus, humans had not yet multiplied to fill the earth because of what he termed “preventative” checks (e.g., abortion and postponing marriage) and “positive” checks (e.g., war, disease, and, most importantly, hunger). Positive checks tended to fall most heavily upon the poor, whom Malthus held in particularly low esteem owing to their supposed sexual profligacy.

Malthus’s principle of population has been critiqued from a number of angles, including for its obvious conflation of moralist and scientific approaches. An early critic of Malthus was Marx, who argued that capitalism, not overpopulation, was the cause of poverty and that capitalistic laws of accumulation, rather than universal laws of population growth, pushed society to the limits of its natural resource base. Marx further contended that under capitalism, “surplus” population performed a vital function as a readily exploitable industrial reserve army of laborers.

Nonetheless, theories of overpopulation and physical resource scarcity crises remained influential. In the context of the rise of environmentalism and concern about rapid population growth in developing countries, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a reemergence of Malthusian thought in the North that extended Malthus’s underlying premise to include environmental degradation as a consequence of overpopulation.

Influential neo-Malthusians included biologist Garrett Hardin (renowned for his Tragedy of the Commons thesis) and fellow biologist Paul Ehrlich, who in The Population Bomb (1968) predicted that the earth would soon experience dire famines due to population outstripping food supply. Also, in 1972 the Club of Rome issued its report The Limits to Growth, which concluded that exponential population growth and resource development would eventually lead to resource exhaustion and worldwide economic collapse.

Response to neo-Malthusian models came from several camps. Free-market proponents such as Julian Simon argued that rather than inescapably leading to misery and hunger, growth in human population-considered by Simon the “ultimate resource”-actually stimulated innovation and economic development. Also influential was the work of Danish economic historian Esther Boserup, who concluded that population pressure in agrarian societies promoted agricultural intensification through the mobilization of labor and the application of other inputs. Countering Malthus, Boserup thus argued against the inelasticity of food production, a position buttressed by the substantial per-acre yield increases achieved after World War II with the aid of Green Revolution technologies.

In addition, contemporary Marxist critiques maintain that poverty does not result from Malthusian global resource scarcity crises, but rather from the highly unequal distribution of resources and power inherent to capitalism. Critics from developing countries have, in a similar vein, attempted to shift the debate away from population patterns in the south to consumption patterns in the north. Identifying “overpopulation” in developing countries as a driver of environmental degradation amounts to blaming the poor, these critics argue, while residents of developed countries, in fact, consume the vast majority of the world’s resources.

Thus, given the multitude of cultural, political-economic, and technological variables that influence the population-resources dynamic as well as highly uneven geographic patterns of resource production and consumption globally, the concept of overpopulation has proven exceedingly difficult to define. Commentators, notably David Harvey, have nevertheless highlighted the political implications of theories of overpopulation themselves-in particular, the degree to which they may be used as ideological levers to justify class or ethnic oppression domestically or neo-imperialist policies abroad.

Bibliography:

David Harvey, “Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science,” Economic Geography (v.50/3, 1974);
Robert W. Kates, “Population and Consumption: What We Know, What We Need to Know,” Environment (v.42/3, 2000);
Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Donald Winch, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Mario Petrucci, “Population: Time-Bomb or Smoke-Screen?” Environmental Values (v.9, 2000);
John Weeks, Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, 8th ed. (Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 2002).