Talk:Population explosion

I snipped:

"In terms of the large annual increases in aggregate world population identifiable from the 1950s onward, the population explosion is still with us, though numbers added per year have fallen from a peak of 86 million in the late 1980s to an estimated 77 million today, while the annual rate of world population growth has fallen from 2.1% in the mid-1960s to only 1.25%.

As birth rates around the world have tended to follow death rates down, fear of runaway population growth has largely given way to concern about the environmental implications of general human expectations of increased material prosperity, the consequences of population aging among the developed regions, and the uneven demographic impact of AIDS."

And why was this removed? --maveric149

:deleted material reintegrated. --maveric149

I think this article has a Point of View title. Fred Bauder 20:32 19 May 2003 (UTC)

I agree, I don't think "explosion" is a neutral term to decribe "high population growth", sounds more like a newspaper title --Rotem Dan

Maybe there should be an article named Population growth, that includes the phrase "population explosion" somewhere? --Rotem Dan 20:55 19 May 2003 (UTC)

I'd say the article is POV, period. The idea that the populations of "less developed countries" are some sort of "bomb" that is going to destroy the world is frankly racist, and feeds into all sorts of terrible stereotypes. There's many arguments against the idea that India, China, Indonesia, et al. are dangerously overpopulated: fertility rates are not much higher in these countries than they are in the "first world", and in terms of resource usage (probably in absolute terms, for most of the countries, never mind per capita) the first world continues to use a disproportionate amount of the resources and represent the most significant burden on the earth and the environment.

In other words, the "population explosion" idea is pseudoscientific racist crap that needs to be eradicated from people's consciousnesses, and we might well start here. This is what results in nonsense like forced sterilization programs (which, yes, happen to this day) and regressive population control policies based on the idea that "Oh my god, we have to stop these rats from breeding!" rather than land reform, anti-poverty measures and other programs to stop population displacement, which would do much better at stabilizing populations and would solve other problems to boot.

Instead of "population explosions" we should be talking about "rampant overconsumption" in the first world, but that would definitely not be P.C. Too pinko/whacko to diss the American lifestyle, nay?

Enough ranting, so I'll stop. Some good reading on this subject might be done at the Institute for Food and Development (Food First) website. Graft 21:16 19 May 2003 (UTC)