Today there are around 6.8 billion people occupying the planet. That's up almost 1 billion people in ten years. Estimates suggest that by 2050 there will be more than 9 billion.
There are a number of concerns about these facts; amongst them the apparent reality that Malthus may well now be right. This planet cannot sustain the current population - let alone another 2.5 billion people. Famine and poverty already mark our world. However, I would suggest that it's not because we don't have the resources, but rather because of selfish greed and inequity in distribution of available resources.
The UK based Optimum Population Trust suggests that the only way to attain sustainability is to 'reduce global population by at least 1.7 billion people.
Often the cause of concern is leveled at the speed at which 'others' - maybe people of other races, religions or social classes - are reproducing, threatening, presumably, the status quo of whatever the dominant group the commentator belongs to.
This was shockingly betrayed in the suggestion of Michael Laws, (Mayor of Wanganui, New Zealand) who proposed that in order to tackle the problems of child abuse and murder, members of the 'appalling underclass' should be paid not to have children. 'If we gave $10,000.00 to certain people and said "we'll voluntarily sterilize you" then all of society would be better off,' he told the Dominion Post newspaper.
Social (and population) engineering is not a new concept. In early 20th Century racial and Darwinian thinking encouraged the idea that the presumed 'superior' and 'fittest' would flourish, but the British upper class notice, and became concerned that the 'unfit' and 'undeserving' lower classes seemed to be 'overbreeding', or reproducing faster than they were. American sociologist Edward Ross, (1907) recommended policies that would encourage 'capable' people to heave children.
In 1938 the British Eugenics Society set up a Committee with the aim to control fertility; rather than accepting random results, they would, 'improve reproductive power of the eugenically good'. (Perhaps the most famous result of this thesis was the Nazi erradication of the 'eugenically bad'.)Today, the fear of overpopulation continues to raise up social and racial engineers, but maybe the most insidious and covert response today is seen in the unwillingness of the minority, 'priveleged' world to share the abundant resources that already exist. Through the complex decisions of market monopolisation, withholding funds that could assist in mitigation responses and lending money at 'unbelievably unfair conditions', we have found a way of wiping out the 1.7 billion people that through lottery of birth apparently do not deserve to.
