OVERPOPULATION IS A MYTH!

[Johnny Meadows]

OVERPOPULATION IS A LIE the Bilderberg Group / CFR and UN are perpetuating in order to justify their Population Reduction and Eugenics plans, like NSSM-200 and the upcoming Swine Flu Pandemic. Please read.

Original Article:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/overpopulation-the-perennial-m yth/

Following Excerpts from discussion forum quoting above article:
http://www.selectsmart.com/DISCUSS/read.php?33,718601

Overpopulation: The Perennial Myth

“What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the worM, which can hardly support us... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race.”

[...]

[This is the] opening quotation [that] was penned by Tertullian, a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century, when the population of the world was about 190 million, or only three to four percent of what it is today. And the fear of overpopulation did not begin with Tertullian. One finds similar concerns expressed in the writings of Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., as well as in the teachings of Confucius as early as the sixth century B.C.

[...]

The catastrophists have been predicting doom and gloom for centuries. Perhaps the single most amazing thing about this perennial exercise is that the catastrophists seem never to have stopped quite long enough to notice that their predictions have never materialized. This probably says more about the catastrophists themselves than anything else. Catastrophism is characterized by intellectual arrogance. It’s been said of Thomas Malthus, for example, that he underestimated everyone’s intelligence but his own. Whenever catastrophists confront a problem for which they cannot imagine a solution, the catastrophists conclude that no one else in the world will be able to think of one either. For example, in Beyond the Limits the Meadows tell us that crop yields, at least in the Western world, have reached their peak. Since the history of agriculture is largely a history of increasing yields per acre, one would be interested in knowing how they arrived at such a significant and counter-historical conclusion. Unfortunately, such information is not forthcoming.

Overpopulation

But isn’t the world overpopulated? Aren’t we headed toward catastrophe? Don’t more people mean less food, fewer resources, a lower standard of living, and less living space for everyone? Let’s look at the data.

As any population graph clearly shows, the world has and is experiencing a population explosion that began in the eighteenth century. Population rose sixfold in the next 200 years. But this explosion was accompanied, and in large part made possible, by a productivity explosion, a resource explosion, a food explosion, an information explosion, a communications explosion, a science explosion, and a medical explosion.

The result was that the sixfold increase in world population was dwarfed by the eighty-fold increase in world output. As real incomes rose, people were able to live healthier lives. Infant mortality rates plummeted and life expectancies soared. According to anthropologists, average life expectancy could never have been less than 20 years or the human race would not have survived. In 1900 the average world life expectancy was about 30 years. In 1993 it is just over 65 years. Nearly 80 percent of the increase in world life expectancy has taken place in just the last 90 years! That is arguably one of the single most astonishing accomplishments in the history of humanity. It is also one of the least noted.

But doesn’t this amazing accomplishment create precisely the overpopulation problem about which the catastrophists have been warning us? The data clearly show that this is not the case. “Overpopulation” cannot stand on its own. It is a relative term. Overpopulation must be overpopulation relative to something, usually food, resources, and living space. The data show that all three variables are, and have been, increasing more rapidly than population.

Food. Food production has outpaced population growth by, on average, one percent per year ever since global food data began being collected in the late 1940s. There is currently enough food to feed everyone in the world. And there is a consensus among experts that global food production could be increased dramatically if needed. The major problem for the developed countries of the world is food surpluses. In the United States, for example, millions of acres of good cropland lie unused each year. Many experts believe that even with no advances in science or technology we currently have the capacity to feed adequately, on a sustainable basis, 40 to 50 billion people, or about eight to ten times the current world population. And we are currently at the dawn of a new agricultural revolution, biotechnology, which has the potential to increase agricultural productivity dramatically.

[...]

Resources. Like food, resources have become more abundant over time. Practically all resources, including energy, are cheaper now than ever before. Relative to wages, natural resource prices in the United States in 1990 were only one-half what they were in 1950, and just one-fifth their price in 1900. Prices outside the United States show similar trends.

But how can resources be getting more abundant? Resources are not things that we find in nature. It is ideas that make things resources. If we don’t know how to use something, it is not a resource. Oil is a perfect example. Prior to the 1840s oil was a liability rather than a resource. There was little use for it and it would often seep to the surface and get into the water supply. It was only with the dawn of the machine age that a use was discovered for this “slimy ooze.”

Our knowledge is even more important than the physical substance itself, and this has significant ramifications: More people mean more ideas. There is no reason, therefore, that a growing population must mean declining resource availability. Historically, the opposite has been true. Rapidly growing populations have been accompanied by rapidly declining resource prices as people have discovered new ways to use existing resources as well as uses for previously unused materials.

[...]

Living Space. But even if food and resources are becoming more abundant, certainly this can’t be true for living space. After all, the world is a finite place and the more people in it, the less space there is for everyone. In a statistical sense this is true, of course. But it is also irrelevant. For example, if the entire population of the world were placed in the state of Alaska, every individual would receive nearly 3,500 square feet of space, or about one-half the size of the average American family homestead with front and back yards. Alaska is a big state, but it is a mere one percent of the earth’s land mass. Less than one-half of one percent of the world’s ice-free land area is used for human settlements.

But perhaps “living space” can be measured more meaningfully by looking at such things as the number of houses, the amount of floor space, or the number of rooms per person. There are more houses, more floor space, and more rooms per person than ever before. In short, like both food and resources, living space is, by any meaningful measure, becoming more abundant.

[...]

In short, although there are now more people in the world than ever before, by any meaningful measure the world is actually becoming relatively less populated.