Causes Of Overpopulation

Submitted By lonniestaten
Words: 662
Pages: 3

Mankind has always relied on nature, and used it's seemingly plentiful resources to satisfy one's needs. But with the growing number in population world wide, it has put an exponential amount of stress on the resources needed to survive. This is due to the simple mathematics of the population worldwide, seen by a prominent English mathematican and demographist named Thomas Malthus, who predicted a population equation that stated with the growth of population would come the loss and underproduction of necessary resources. If continued, mankind would not be able to grow and progress more without destroying nature. From 2-5 million years ago there was considerably less than one billion people on this earth, and with that small number of people, remained the vast number of resources used to breed more people, as seen in the pond fly example. Flies are attracted to certain ponds because of the ideal conditions, and because of those conditions, comes an inevitable boom in population. The overpopulation causes the flies to cover the entire pond, effectively blocking out the sun needed to grow the nutrients the flies thrive off of. When the nutrients slowly disappear because of subpar conditions, the flies too then begin to slow in grow and disappear because they are no longer adequately being served for survival. With the imbalance of people to resources, mankind as sprung into a population boom that has the numbers grow increasingly more per year. On a graph, this would appear to be a steep curve for the population line, almost at a ninety degree angle for it's growth. At the rate predicted by Malthus, the world should hold around nine billion people by the year 2050 AD. To put that in perspective, if one lived to be eighty years old, the population of the world would triple in one's lifetime, all while nature stayed the same and nonrenewable resources dwindled. Over the last century, a swell of negative indicators of global health has been on the rise. Of this lists includes topics such as demand for clean water, global surface temperature, ozone depletion, consumption of oceans resources, species extinction, carbon dioxide concentration, deforestation, and global sea levels. These indicators have been on the rise for the last hundred years, but recently have begun to accelerate at increasingly faster rates in sync with the rise in population. The fastest raising of these issues is the rise in ozone depletion which directly correlates to the rise of surface temperature seen on Earth. With the increase in the