Population Growth In Our Country example essay topic

Population, the total number of people living in a country or a region, influences many things. Government, for instance, depends on how many people there are to be served. Other examples are: business prospects; job opportunities; crime rates, etc. Births, deaths, and movements of people in or out of a country changes the population. When people talk about population growth in our country, they consider it as a completely positive and necessary thing.

Our society's most cherished economic indicators are all based on this basic idea that continuing growth is good for the health and preservation of our economy and country. In fact, growth is pretty much the only thing they measure. However, scientists know that this assumption is false. In order for growth to continue forever, we would need an infinite amount of space, energy, and other resources to keep the growth going and those resources are not infinite. Therefore if society is to prosper, then we must use up as little resources as we can and find alternative resources and in doing so we will find that our society will prosper without the need for major amounts of resources.

On Oct. 12, 1999, it was announced that global population had reached the 6 billion mark, just 12 years after passing 5 billion. According to the United Nations Population Division's most recent projections, world's population will reach 7 billion as early as 2011 or as late as 2015. Every minute, our population is increasing by over 144 people. With 6.2 billion people on Earth right now, we are driving over 50 species of plants and animals to extinction per day, destroying rain forests, consuming stored solar energy and fresh water faster than they can be renewed, polluting our environment, causing soil erosion and over-fishing our oceans. These problems continue to worsen as our numbers increase. Solving these problems will be much less difficult if we stop increasing the number of people affected by them.

The sooner we can stop growing, the better chance we have of avoiding worldwide hungers and other disasters. Nowadays, there are more people suffering in misery and starvation in the world than ever before in history. In many developing countries, couples are still having 5 to 7 children. Nearly half of them would like to have fewer children, but they lack access to family planning.

While populations of some industrialized countries have stabilized, over three billion people live in countries where population is still growing rapidly. In 1999, the Worldwatch Institute reported that rising death rates are slowing world population growth for the first time since starvation killed 30 million people in China in 1959 to 1961. Because of this, the estimate for world population in 2025 was adjusted from 9.4 to 8.9 billion. Three factors are pushing the death rates up, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian sub-continent: the HIV epidemic, the depletion of aquifers and shrinking crop land area.

Crowding helps spread disease, and lack of education in reproductive health is a factor in the recent increase of contagious disease. Over time, humans have discovered ways to increase the average human life span and reduce infant mortality rates. With these discoveries, we have multiplied our numbers faster than ever before. The balance of nature has been drastically upset and the environment is already paying the price. The good news is that we also made another discovery, modern contraceptives. Abstinence, delaying of marriage, education, empowerment of women, funding of family planning and reproductive health also helped to reduce our population growth.

In the early 1950's, contraceptive pills were used in many developed countries. Birth rates took a sharp turn downward several years after the introduction of this effective technique. Since this was expensive, not everybody got to use it. Although this contraceptive is quite safe, there are some rare minor side effects like blood clotting. In Japan, inexpensive abortion has been responsible for cutting the birth rate by more than half. Although it's quite a safe and simple when done under proper medical circumstances, there is a wide spread opinion that abortion is murder.

In China, there is a law that couples can only have one child. This has been in effect since 1979. This policy includes rewards for having only one child and the children of these couples are also given preferential treatment in education, housing, and employment. The policy allows couples to have a second child only under rare circumstances, and does not allow more than two children.

After the child is born, the mother has to wear an intrauterine device, and removing it was considered a crime. Couples that refused to abort unapproved pregnancies were punished. The penalties included fines; loss of land grants, starvation, higher taxes, loss of benefits, job cuts and discharge from the Communist Party. In some provinces the fines can be up to 50% of a couple's annual salary.

The policy was strictly enforced during the early 1980's when 14.4 million abortions were performed out of 19 million births in that year. In 2001, a new law was passed to reinforce the one-child policy over the entire country. It includes encouragements for obedience but no longer requires fines for couples who have a second child. China's population policy has brought the average number of children per woman down from 5.01 in 1970 to 1.84 in 1995.

But the Chinese population is still growing because the children born during the previous period of high fertility are having children of their own. The policy's goal is to limit the nation's population to 1.2 billion by the year 2000 but China did not achieve that. Instead, it grew to 1.3 billion in 2000 and is expected to increase to about 1.5 billion by 2025. The human race has a massive impact on this planet.

We control and modify the Earth more than any other species. How we meet the needs of human beings and preserve Earth's limited resources, bio diversity, and natural beauty is the main question of our time. The challenge is becoming more problematic as we add more people. Once it was necessary for the people to multiply but now, it is necessary for us to stop in order to survive. The future is not yet certain and it is in our power to balance the population and solve the problems that growth has created. In 1300 years at a one percent growth rate, there will be one person per square foot on the earth.

That will only occur if the human race does not starve to death before we reach that era. If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but also the number of consumers.