A long time ago, we lived on a planet with 5 million people. Till 1800 the population growth was very slow, a few hundred thousand every year. At the beginning of the 18th century, approximately 1 billion people already lived on the Earth. Later, with the development of medicine and technologies, with the experience of farming and machinery, our population begins to grow dramatically. Despite two world wars and the Spanish flu, the population grew to 5 billion at the end of 1960. After that, the situation changed exponentially. During the life of one generation, the population grows to twice and a half. These days we can track every born and dead person globally. We can confidently say that in 2021, we have almost 8 billion people in the world, and still growing. By the end of 2050, the world will be over 9,5 billion people by WHO’s prognosis.
The birth rate itself is a fascinating topic. Surveillance of the human population depends on reliability to sustain the birthrate and not grow. As history shows us, the overpopulation of any living organism on the planet has a massive impact on the environment, and at 100% always leads to a self-destruction scenario. It seems that nature has its methods of how to survive. The same rule is valid everywhere in nature and for the human population too. The population continues to grow, with every family having three or more children. Many countries struggle with over-population and are searching for methods to decrease the growing trend of birthrate. Ordering people how many children they can have by a birth control policy is not a solution. History shows that when governments are trying to limit the birth rate by law, it raises negative feedback and conflicts. For example, in 1987, China implemented the one-child policy. Without the application of this policy, China would have today additionally more than 400 million people. The method of one child per family was valid till 2015. Chinese people naturally decided to let male children survive and to interrupt pregnancies with girls. The logic was simple. The girl will get married and leave the family; on the other side, the male will stay with the family, help the parents, and continue their family line. Because of this logic, in China, we can find 35 million “useless” males that cannot find a female. In 2015, for 100 women in age between 15-29 years, there were 280 men because reproduction age growth during the years to people’s higher and natural approach caused non-balanced coverage 3:1. That’s why China, for some time, canceled the one-child policy. Just for some time, because the uncontrolled birth rate will again cause the mass growth of the population – although, who knows, with the education quality, the behavior might change.
In another example, we can mention an experiment performed in 1970 by the government of India. In the beginning, they started with less aggressive politics. They offered voluntary sterilization of people in exchange for money. Indian people were interested in this offer. In those days Indian hospitals made over 80.000 sterilizations every day. Still, the problem was that this sterilization was used mainly by those who already had big families (often 4-5 kids), and they didn’t want more children. The experiment was not attractive to people who grow families with two children, but only three and more. That’s why the experiment didn’t bring the necessary results. Later, in several areas in India, they ran an experiment that crossed human rights. In 1977 with Indira Gandhi’s leading, a unique program was approved when sterilization became a punishment for any type, even of crime, even simple crime cases. In 1977, over 1 million people were sterilized in India. Such rules provoked negative feedback from the population and even led to the fall of the government.
That is a fact. The rapid growth of the world’s population and, as a consequence, the rapid and uncontrolled consumption increase. It will, in turn, undoubtedly contribute to the depletion of our planet’s resources. These processes are interdependent and cannot exist independently from each other. And by damaging the environment and not even thinking about it, a man harms himself in the first place. Meanwhile, environmental protection needs to be given great and constant attention. The concept implies much more than the economic use of natural resources and love for nature. It includes protecting animals and certain species of trees from destruction, reverting to reasonable animal product consumption, or rather to vegetarianism, and a drastic reduction of all kinds of waste, and many other vital aspects.
