Guest column: A popular problem

As I read Derby Cox's April 26 article, "Officials struggle to keep enrollment down," I couldn't help but see some close parallels to a notoriously touchy global issue: overpopulation.

In the article, university President Dan Mote is quoted as saying, "As you admit more students, you're going to end up reducing the quality of your program by spending less money per student." Replace the word "student" with "person," "program" with "life" and "money" with "resources," you arrive at a statement that fully characterizes the state of our world today. It is simply a statement of truth — when you live in a world of finite resources, the more people they must be shared among, the less there is to be given to each person.

Healthy food, clean water and medical care all rely on the availability of our world's finite resources. If our population continues on a course of rampant growth, we may find that these basic necessities for a quality life will be simply unavailable. And, in many parts of the world, they already are. Anyone looking to see a Malthusian catastrophe already in progress needs look no further than Haiti, where mothers are routinely forced to choose which of their children they will feed and which they must allow to perish from hunger. And that was before the earthquake.

Overpopulation is just as much a problem in developed nations. The only difference is we manage to temporarily avert catastrophe through clever technology and a massive industrial system that we fuel with resources we reap from both our own land and the exploitation of developing nations. It may only be a matter of time before we run out of resources and nations to exploit. Already, the Colorado River, which supplies water to the exploding populations of Arizona, Nevada and California, is starting to dry up.

It is possible to "get more" out of our finite resources through clever technology. But relative to population growth, these technologies are growing at a snail's pace. Additionally, they each carry their own price, one we can't afford to pay.

But the issue of overpopulation is as touchy as it is complex. When one mentions that our global population growth rate is unsustainable and that something should be done, people jump to horrifying conclusions of genocide and forced sterilization. But the reality is, aside from the massively unethical nature of such an approach, these things wouldn't work anyway. In nations where genocide is a reality, population growth rates are highest.

A more sensible and ethical approach comes not from an iron gauntlet but a beam of enlightenment. Improving access to education and birth control and safeguarding women's rights are all variables that have been shown to simultaneously decrease birth rates and improve quality of life. Go figure! In developed nations such as our own, a social and economic system that encourages smaller, well-cared-for families instead of larger, neglected families could help us to gradually reduce the population over decades to truly sustainable levels.

If we want to make "sustainability" more than just a buzzword, we need to start taking overpopulation seriously. We should continue to build wind farms, develop fuel cell cars, improve water quality, escalate recycling technology and policy, and jump-start the organic farming revolution. But on the other side of the coin, we need to gradually decrease our demand on the underlying, basic resources of food, water and energy. Perhaps one day, our species will achieve such a sufficient mastery of the natural world that we can support an arbitrarily large population, colonize other worlds and mine asteroids. But that day will not come for eons.

Until then, we must make a simple choice: Quality or quantity?

Alexander Weissman is a mechanical engineering graduate student. He can be reached at alex.weissman at gmail dot com.